Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [51]
Now if I could just make the time to get that orange wrap dress hemmed.
14
IDOLATRY
Richard Rushfield
“I’M PROBABLY THE ONLY PERSON who has ever told you this, but I have never seen an episode of American Idol.” Once I became the official American Idol critic for the Los Angeles Times two years ago, I was told this approximately every time I stepped out of the house. At a typical party, five to ten people will seek me out to tell me they are the only person I’ve ever met who has never watched American Idol. In the cafeteria at work, a line often stretched for blocks with people there to break this news to me.
These confessions were all made with the same looks of smug but tearful bravery, the person nobly fighting to keep his or her chin held high in the face of horrendous persecution. It’s the kind of thing one more typically finds on someone who believed that they were the only one in America who dared to call George Bush a liar and who thought that, after having uttered these words, they’d be instantly spirited off to Guantánamo, where they would die a tragic, lonely hero’s death in a rat-infested, moss-lined, airless hole deep beneath the earth. These brave souls thrusted their chins forward, their quaking upper lips fighting back tears, certain in the knowledge that I, as a representative of cultural imperialism, would respond to this heretical declaration by reaching for my cell phone to alert the authorities that the man we’d been looking for was standing right in front of me, slice of pita bread dipped in artichoke spread in hand, ready to face a nation’s perverted justice.
I have never insisted that my friends and acquaintances toss roses at my feet to celebrate the various jobs and careers I’ve sailed through in my days. But in liberal-minded Los Angeles, people can show up at dinner parties and announce that they’re heroin dealers or that they whip men for money or that they specialize in piercing obscure body parts, giving legal counsel to notorious murderers, or procuring transsexual prostitutes for celebrities, and nobody bats an eye. So it was with no small amount of shock that I realized I had apparently stumbled upon the one profession—American Idol critic—that had the ability to make you a complete pariah in society.
Among the common responses when people hear my secret:
Aren’t you ashamed to even watch that?
American Idol critic? With all the illegal wars we’re involved in, the criminals that have run our country—all the things that the LA Times ignores—they hire an f-ing American Idol critic?
It just shows you what a sorry state our country is in that people would take that show seriously.
The last comment was generally followed by a rant about how American culture is destroying the world. By the time I got out my protests that the show is not particularly American (it’s an imported reworking of a UK hit, jointly owned by a German media conglomerate and a British management firm, overseen by French and British producers, built around a British star), I was usually sputtering to myself as my accuser walked away shaking his head in disbelief that someone would dare defend such drivel in his presence.
And all I had set out to do was write an occasional review of a little TV singing contest.
In truth, however, since I donned the sparkly mantle of American Idol critic, my emotional involvement in the show traveled beyond that of a normal person. In my three years on the beat, I went deep down a very long, dark rabbit hole with America’s leading entertainment provider. The scorn of my peers was all the more stinging for the fact that, despite my blasé demeanor, during the five months of the year that the show was on the air, I was no longer capable