Not to make this a TV show blog, but my American Idol experiment has ended, and I have to say, I’m not impressed. People tell me I should have seen earlier seasons, but I didn’t, so yeah. Let’s start at the beginning.

In the beginning, there are months and months (maybe not) of audition episodes, where a few good singers, a lot of mediocre singers, and several horrible singers parade themselves in front of the judges in order to get a golden ticket. This is fun for about two episodes before everyone starts sounding the same. The bad singers stop being funny, mostly because you know they just showed up to get on TV. They can’t possibly think they can sing, and their badly acted tantrums when told they can’t sing aren’t funny after about the third one you see. Because we only get back stories for a few people a show, it’s hard to care about most of the people who show up, especially since many of them look and sound the same. Also, it’s impossible for the judges to look at hundreds of thousands of contestants, simply because there’s not enough time in the day, so the ones we see in these “audition” rounds have already auditioned for various groups of producers, and those who don’t have an interesting enough story or good enough looks are sent packing because they wouldn’t make good TV. Sure, it’s supposed to be a talent show, but who wants to watch a boring, unattractive person with an amazing voice when we could see hideously ugly people or continue to enforce the rules that in order to be a pop star in this country, you have to be pretty?

So after what seems like an eternity, we’ve shuffled through all the audition episodes and we go to Hollywood, which is where we’re bombarded with episode after episode of subpar singers taking the stage for a few seconds. Again, we don’t get to know anyone, because there are still hundreds of contestants here. There’s a karaoke bar right by my house I could go to to have a better time if I wanted to watch people with fine voices sing. We’re shown a few heartbreaking clips of the girl whose grandma has Alzheimer’s or the guy who was in a car accident and hurt his leg a little (yeah, the stories are always played up with dramatic music but they’re not always really interesting), and sometimes they’re sent home because they can’t sing. Then there’s this thing called “group sing” which is where like five people get on stage together and do a bad New Kids on the Block routine. Anyway, somehow the judges cut down this group to like 24 or something, and then we go to the next round.

Amazingly, the top 24 are still bad. You’d think that if you seriously held hundreds of thousands of auditions, you might be able to come up with 24 people who can do a pretty damn good job singing. You’d be wrong! Anyway, now they get to sing some more bad songs and they get booted off. It’s hard to watch pretty, delusional people cry because they thought they could sing. The judges are still making decisions as to who goes home at this point, so there’s really no reason to watch still, because you have no control over anything that’s going on. So if you liked that dude with the fucking huge ass giant ridiculous chin who thought he was Jim Morrison, I’m sure your heart felt crushed when he went home and you were powerless to do anything but scream and fling things at the TV. The contestants are divided by genders here, and one man and one woman goes home each week so they can ensure that there are six men and six women in the final 12, just in time for the little girls who watch this show to vote off all the girls, I assume in order to eliminate dating competition.

Then we’re down to the final 12, and now we can start voting the prettiest girls and the ugliest guys off. The final 12 is where the show goes from a singing competition to a beauty pageant. Now I know that in seasons past some guys have won like Ruben Studdard and the gray haired fellow who weren’t particularly attractive, and maybe back in those days actual music fans watched the show. But this season you could almost see the tween girls voting over and over to keep the pretty girls away from the pretty boys by eliminating the girls right off the bat. This left Crystal Bowersox, who was by FAR the best singer this season, as the only girl throughout most of the competition. Then we had to sit through weeks of her beating the singing shit out of everyone else as we were forced to say goodbye to the cute little 16 year old, the doe eyed mop haired guy, the muscular black guy, and the cougar bait with the long blond hair, none of whom could really sing particularly well, but all of whom could have been on the cover of Tiger Beat. Now we’re left with Crystal, the living embodiment of a cross between Janis Joplin and Alanis Morissette, and Lee DeWyze, a guy blessed with a cockeyed smile and a natural rocker’s voice. Unfortunately, Lee decided he would sing pussy songs like Fireflies by that guy who sounds exactly like The Postal Service, and a bunch of other “rock” songs that barely have a pulse.

Crystal Bowersox’s song in the finale or whatever, the last singing show, “Up to the Mountain” was amazingly good, by far the best performance of the year, and cemented her as the clear winner in the eyes and ears of music fans all over the country. Unfortunately, not many music fans watch AI, so Lee won because… he… has a goatee, I guess. I guess that’s coming back around. Or it’s because the American public has no taste, as evidenced by the state of music right now. If Lady Gaga is hailed as an innovator because she wears weird outfits, that’s not a good sign for any innovation coming soon, because her music is indistinguishable from anything else that’s been on the radio for the past 20 years. Anyway, now we’ll soon have another Jack Johnson kind of guy on the radio soon in Lee DeWyze, which is a shame because Jack Johnson is SO fucking boring, and Lee really could have a great voice if he had ever been introduced to real rock and roll music growing up. Fortunately, winning this show doesn’t really guarantee you’ll be a bigger star than anyone else on the show, so Crystal will probably put something out too. I’m actually tempted to buy it, I liked her so much. Hopefully losing this show won’t convince her that she needs to drop the folk rock thing and go pop star on us.

Overall, American Idol is a waste of time. The judges say the same thing every week (“Dog,” “It didn’t work for me,” “Sound younger,” “Make it more current,” “It was pitchy,” etc). The audition shows are boring after the first one. The Hollywood Week shows are boring after the first minute, the top 24 is pointless because the public has no say in who stays or goes, and then when the public does vote in the top 12, they pretty consistently vote off the wrong people. It also doesn’t help that there are only three or four people in this group that legitimately have a shot at winning, so that automatically means there are going to be eight weeks of painfully obvious cuts, and they’re not even going to be the first eight cuts, so really the show’s not worth watching until the final episode, when the two best people are left, and even then it’s not worth watching because whichever guy is cuter to the most girls wins. On the plus side, Simon Cowell is gone now so this show will probably be off the air in a couple of years.