Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [52]
I had not meant for it to go this way. My wife and I had stumbled onto the Idol train as casual viewers in season five, tuning in from time to time to watch in horror the unstoppable rise of Idol’s kitschiest champion—buffoonish soul crooner Taylor Hicks. In early 2007 (season six in Idol time), I signed on to write an occasional review of an occasional episode. I was still quite capable of talking about all sorts of subjects beyond why Jordin Sparks’s song choice in Barry Manilow week was secretly the most ingenious maneuver in television history. I had interests, hobbies, and opinions on the affairs of the world that had nothing to do with a singing contest.
Covering the show for the paper, I began in a bemused, offhand tone, handicapping the chances of this or that singer as a weekend visitor to the racetrack might discuss his ten-dollar bets. At the invitation of the Fox network, I began to attend the show’s tapings and glibly offered my readers some tidbits from behind the scenes—whether or not the judges seemed to actually like one another, what the contestants did during the breaks. Nice pieces written in a breezy, tongue-in-cheek style that led few to question my grasp on sanity.
But then something changed. And this is what I think it was: I sat in the studio and watched time and again as, thirty feet away, a parade of young people dangled in tension more harrowing than anything produced by a presidential election or horror movie. Inches before me, adolescents and twentysomethings taken from absolutely nothing stood on the very brink of being handed the greatest treasure American society could give—true, lasting (so long as they played their cards right), durable fame. Or, on the other hand, they’d be flung back into the dank swamp of anonymity from whence they came. Each week, I watched them stand alone on a cold empty stage and, in ninety seconds of singing, attempt to convince a pitiless nation that they deserved its love forever. I watched them stand alone, utterly unprotected after having poured themselves into a Faith Hill ballad, hanging by a thread as the judges systematically ripped apart their song choice, arrangement, delivery, eye contact, energy level, hair, makeup, leggings, and hair clips. And then, the following night, they would stand once again alone as the angel of death in the shape of Ryan Seacrest descended on them and revealed whether oblivion forever would be their lot, or they would come a step close to achieving the kingdom.
And witnessing the magnitude of that sheer unadulterated anxiety, seeing the brave souls as they faced this moment before a nation, stripped my ironic smirk away, my soul harrowed to its core as I had to ask myself: What is drama if not this?
When I speak of the awe-inducing spectacle of watching these young warriors sing their hearts out while teetering on the precipice of destiny—well, that’s usually around the point when others at the dinner table start giving my wife looks of pity and one another glances of “Is he okay?” You can anguish about the fate of the Boston Red Sox in the American League pennant race, pull the hair out of your head over the outcome of a presidential campaign, and moan like a dying animal over the cliffhanger on Lost, but if you suggest that the fate of the world hangs on whether the seventeen-year-old balladeer or the twenty-six-year-old bar rocker is chosen as the next American Idol, you are, apparently, no longer fit for decent company.
And yet, the outcome of American Idol is of far more consequence