Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Idol: When do we get to Hollywood?

We've come to the first traditional benchmark of the American Idol season--the "Haven't we seen enough auditions?" phase. Over the last two weeks, we saw six hours of lots of bad singers, and a few good ones, but going into tonight, we still had three more hours (and three more evenings) of audition shows. Personally, I'd rather see a couple more shows devoted to the "Going to Hollywood" round and all the interactions between the contestants that result when they're all staying in the same hotel. But other than the finale, the audition rounds do get the best ratings of all the American Idol episodes (I presume there are people who enjoy the bad auditions but don't enjoy hearing good singers later on and stop watching after next week--I think they call them sadists)and Idol is getting its best ratings ever this season, so what do I know?

Unfortunately, tonight's episode suffered from the same malaise that I'm feeling about the audition round. I can barely remember anyone, good or bad, from tonight's show just about 20 minutes after I finished watching the tape. None of the bad auditions were all that memorable, except for the one who thought she was Aretha Franklin and just screeched. She was amusing. And none of the good auditions were particularly remarkable, except for the gray-haired 29-year-old Taylor Hicks at the end. I thought his voice had a lot of soul and he had that Joe Cocker "make your body do weird stuff" style of singing (which I think is kind of scary but at least kind of different). Oh, and there was that girl Mecca, and I hope Fox is doing a background check on her right now to make sure she's not getting funding from Hamas...THAT'S A JOKE. More seriously, she was alright, but I'm not into the star glued to her face or whatever was going on there.

So Las Vegas had just 11 people go to Hollywood, although did we see more than three or four of them sing? No, we had to see a few minutes of auditioners performing a massacre on "I Will Survive." This might have been funny if we hadn't seen the same exact thing TWICE with two other songs the last two weeks. Hey, guys, it's not funny anymore--especially when the reason you got so many people to sing that song so badly is because you asked them to (as was obvious when people we saw audition with other songs show up in the montage) and they weren't prepared. Remember, people watch this show because it shows "reality" to some extent--people really sing, Simon tells them the truth about how they really sound. We don't need obviously fake stuff.

Before I go, some thoughts from the State of the Union: First of all, why was Hillary Clinton applauding during the speech like she was clapping along to a song at a concert, with those slow, relaxed claps? Did anyone else notice that?

Why was Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine selected to give the Democratic response? He's only been governor for what, three weeks? And he's not exactly Mr. Charisma--on election night in Richmond, his predecessor, Mark Warner, outshone him at his own campaign party. But that's a thankless job, and no one pays attention to the opposition's response, so it really doesn't matter.

And finally, I think Bush missed an opportunity tonight. When he got to that point in the speech where he addressed his remarks to Iranians, if he had then spoken those few sentences in fluent-sounding Farsi, everyone would have been talking about it Wednesday morning. Did no one think of that?

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

If you're going to talk about American Idol this season, you have to address the issue of why they're sending people to Cali. that aren't even singing- like that guy that was on crack and dancing like he was being attacked by a swarm of bees. Paula said "for her own personal reasons" she was sending him on to the next round. What are her personal reasons? Simon isn't entertaining her enough in bed?
I think it's funny that when you see the 3 stooges talk about how serious their show is and how stupid people must be for auditioning when they can't sing, but then they go and send people to Hollywood that suck- let's just say this show is getting out of control. Yet...I watch it every night- why?

2/1/06, 4:11 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

that's from me- Lori

2/1/06, 4:11 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

ps- my boyfriend and I played a game last night where we would have to take a drink every time Bush tripped on his words- let's just say that I passed out and he had to go back to the beer store to get another 30 pack- Bush sux

2/1/06, 4:16 PM  
Blogger Eric Fingerhut said...

Lori-

Last night they said that 175 people would be going to Hollywood, which I think is considerably more people than they've sent there in the past. I seem to recall that the Hollywood contingent was somewhere in the 100-120 range, although maybe I am remembering wrong.

So hopefully no one good got shortchanged, and the guy you're talking about, with the eyes falling back in his head, will be quickly eliminated. I am wondering, though, how they got 175 people from the auditions, considering they only sent 23 through from the past two nights. That means there was an average of 30 from all the other cities and I really don't recall any of the other cities getting that many through--so there must have been a lot of talent in Boston.

As for Paula's personal issues--do we really want to know?

2/2/06, 2:13 PM  

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