April 19, 2009 | Until this year, I have never watched "American Idol." Not one episode, not one song, not one hemisemidemiquaver. How did I manage to miss the No. 1 rated show on TV for seven years? It was easy. Pretty much the only things I watch on TV are sports, old movies and the occasional episode of "SpongeBob Squarepants." Moreover, I am ignorant of and have almost zero interest in most contemporary pop music, certainly pop music of the Britney Spears/Mariah Carey/Kelly Clarkson variety. And finally, I suspected that "American Idol" was the biggest, slickest, most-sold-out, most vulgar, most sentimental, most prepackaged chunk of American cheesiness in our great cultural Costco. And I tend to avoid that aisle.
This year, however, I found myself dragged before the set in mid-season by my 12-year-old daughter, who discovered "American Idol" and got hooked. I figured I would never have a better person to watch it with: Celeste not only loves pop music, she's a trained singer who has been performing since she was 7 with the San Francisco Girls Chorus, a nationally recognized chorus whose top level performed at Obama's inauguration. It's more fun screaming "he was flat!" at someone who has an ear.
The family that watches "American Idol" together may stay together, but that doesn't mean that the show isn't a big, fat portent of cultural doom. (NBC Universal head Jeff Zucker said it might be "the most impactful show in the history of television," and whenever studio execs say things like that, it is wise to prepare for the End of Days.) The show may have a chewy, heartwarming center, but it's unbelievably creepy around the edges. You want the most blatant, unapologetic product placement of all time? The recent Ford "Magic Show" video shoot segment (complete with "arty" Hollywood director) made me feel like I was watching a YouTube video of the Visigoths approaching the walls of Rome. The show prostitutes itself before anything that will sell, from Ford to Coca-Cola and iTunes. "AI" stands for both "American Idol" and "artificial intelligence," and there couldn't be anything more artificial -- or, from a capitalist standpoint, intelligent -- than the way the show manufactures cultural widgets. The show's producers carefully select a group of contestants who drive the show's insanely large (25 million people) viewership, which allows the show to sell 30-second ads for $623,000, the highest rate on TV. It then throws bones back to the sponsors with product placement, and turns the winners, whose contracts "AI" owns, into yet another herd of cash cows. If vertical integration went any further, we'd be in David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest," where the months are named after products.
But as with all reality TV, all this marketing and moneymaking is driven by an irreducible and addictive kernel: real people competing. And that's the part that pulled me, and 24,999,999 other people, in. It's weird, finding yourself passionately arguing about who is best at a genre you don't even like. It's a little bit like comparing different models of Hummers. But the secret of reality TV's success is that just about any human competition can be made interesting: Get the right group of people and shoot them in the right way, and you can turn a game of tiddlywinks into the second coming of World War II. The truth is that TV has been working this vein since the medium was born.
more . . .
http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/feature/2009/04/19/american_idol/?source=newsletter
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