And then something like this started happening on my screen.
Maybe that answers the question.
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I watched the first American Idol. A lot of it anyway. I was part of that crowd who assimilated Kelly, Justin, and William Hung into their daily cultural lexicon. At 12 or 13, I had nothing better to do. Over the years, the series lost its interest along with Survivor, Big Brother, and whatever other crap I used to heap onto my cable box. But the rest of the country apparently didn't stop watching. Other networks started to ape it.
Which brings us to the third season of America's Got Talent.
The premise is Idol with talents other than singing and tryouts in front of a giant audience in conjunction with the three washed-up celebrity judges. You've got Piers Morgan who plays the wholly original role of the snarky British critic, Sharon Osbourne in an attempt to restore family dignity, and David Hasselhoff, itching to belt out Du at a moment's notice. The show pulls a classy move in casting Jerry Springer as Ryan Seacrest (Which reminds me, wasn't it a PAIR of hosts in the first season of Idol? What happened to that other dude?). What follows is the familiar guilty pleasure of watching wave after wave of delusional psychos get torn apart, with the occasional eyebrow-raising act.
I guess there was a name for this sort of thing before the turn of the century. It was called Star Search.
Trash TV has a spot in my life, particularly when it airs on NBC. American Gladiators is a nice, brainless punctuation mark at the end of dreary Mondays. Of course, Gladiators has the indisputable boon of hot women in skintight gladiator outfits, so there's actually very little reason NOT to see it. In the words of my friend, "It has more Crush, therefore it is Win."
I acknowledge that there are more insulting things on television than a glorified talent show, but it is concerning to see how the Idol formula of manipulative narrative, sappy music and caricature judges has found its way into every showcase show. I guess the closest thing Talent comes to Ed McMahon is Jerry Springer, but I don't think Ed got as emotionally involved.
But I don't know. Something about America's Got Talent kept me watching. It wasn't Piers Morgan's Simon Cowell impression, or the Carmina Burana send-ups in the soundtracks...Terrible as it is, NBC pulled the right heartstrings and got me to care about the contestants. Those bastards. I hate it when I fall for this shit.
But fall for it, I did and some of the characters stuck with me:
- The baller trombonist who came off as unassuming and meek in his interview, but a showstopping badass during his performance. Kudos, one of my favorites.
- The Romanian twin act, Indigo, with a suitably entertaining attitude that you know won't make up for their God-awful singing when they go to the next step in Vegas.
- The 80-year-old who, humanely, was denied the chance to break her hip tap-dancing at the next level.
- The four year old who induced some of the most patronizing lines this side of the Special Olympics. "Does singing make you happy?" Give me a break. The kid was cute and all, but a four year old cannot compete on this level. I mean, did you see the parents' faces? Did they seem ecstatic? No, they probably didn't expect the girl to get past this part. Tell me, is it ethical to expose this child to seedy Las Vegas? Well...maybe, but that doesn't give her the right to belt out a song from An American Tail in a saccharine-ly revolting manner. Face it, I'm a horrible person for saying this, but the main reason Mrs. Osbourne was tearing up was the fact that she was probably remembering her own daughter before she became a fat, ugly guttermouth.
This is where Simon Cowell would have had his uses. He wouldn't have cared if the studio audience swooped down on him and tore out his gonads. He would have buzzed that little sneak and made her cry. That would've been quality television.
- The burlesque dancers with the laughable claim that they were going to show people that burlesque could be classy and then proceed to strip off their skirts.
- The cool double-headed guitar dude who got booed off by a crowd of impatient cretins.
- BATON-GIRL! Er...I mean, the extremely heart wrenching story of a boy who got picked on for following his drea....
Excuse me, I just threw up a little.
Baton Girl did a cool act, though. I'm rooting for him.
- The dance team with the eyesore costumes. Morgan had it right when he said their look was enough to bring them down, but I'll be interested to see if they top their little Riverdance impression.
- And finally, Big Opera Dude, who is far from Andrea Bocelli. He was one of the many examples of the pity vote. But that's a fact of stardom, right? No charisma, no ticket? (But wait then, how do you explain Courtney Love?)
Basically, I was kept mildly amused. Now there's a part of me that wants to boycott all reality TV out there, but then there's the part of me that knows that it's a closed-minded approach, as well as futile if I'm ever going to use a television regularly in my adult years. Besides, these shows have been around since the dawn of television, back to the days when Elvis shocked and appalled with his shaking Pelvis of Doom. In its own, Idol-tainted way, it hearkens back to traditional family TV time, when mom, dad, brother, sister, and grandma could sit down and rot their brains as a unit, as opposed to letting adults do it separately through Fox News and kids do it fifty times as quickly on Myspace.
So it's manipulative and its sappy and it's far from thought-provoking. But it made me root for someone in a television contest again. I think that makes it potentially worthy of a second, third, or fourth look, until I get tired of the contenders. Still, it doesn't get me any closer to the definitive proof of God's existence.
Though, if Indigo ends up winning the thing, I think it'd be safe to assume that He's out there and that He's Romanian.
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