The End of (Idle) Tards?

John Doyle from the Globe and Mail had an interesting column a couple of weeks ago. (Sadly, it is now on Pay-Per-View.)

It's not unusual for U.S. television to reflect aspects of the presidency. Network television offers U.S. society a mirror. TV programs, aired within weeks or days of being written, reflect the mood and contemporary myths with an intuitive accuracy.

It's been said that popular culture mirrors us more than it molds us. Which is a good thing, because I'd be completely warped by the few episodes of South Park that I watched. (I don't mind being warped by the Simpsons.) Anyways, since Stoopid George is going to be vacating the White House soon (thank God), does that mean that American Idol is on its way out, too? American Idol, in many ways, is a metaphor of Stoopid George's America of sneaks and sore winners. And people who mock the poor, the handicapped, and the generally unfortunate. And let's not talk about the manipulation and the rigged voting - does anyone actually think that Jorbacca got the title legitimately?

I wrote the original post about a week ago, but found a news piece that might spell the beginning of the end of "Idol." Paula Goodspeed, a fan of Paula Abdul, was found dead in her car near Paula Abdul's house. The police speculate that she committed suicide. Goodspeed auditioned for the sixth season of "American Idol," but didn't make it past RandyPaulaSimon.

Goodspeed's audition was aired during the season that began in January 2006. She told the show's host, Ryan Seacrest, how she was a huge fan of Abdul and created life-size paintings of the singer and former Laker Girl; she also called Abdul "beautiful" after Cowell said he noticed a resemblance between Goodspeed and Abdul.

But Cowell also made light of Goodspeed's braces and bloggers trashed her appearance, which she noted in a MySpace posting months after the show aired.

The German version of "Idol" had an incident where someone auditioned, was trashed by the Teutonic RandyPaulaSimon, and literally had a breakdown on camera. Naturally, this was broadcast. Since the guy's name and hometown were given during his audition, he was harassed and ridiculed. I wonder if this happened to Paula Goodspeed too. (I don't remember her audition, so I don't know whether she was good, bad, or indifferent.) Thanks to YouTube, her audition is easily accessable and so it might be less easy for something like that to just blow over.

Most of the articles I read on the subject didn't hold American Idol or RandyPaulaSimon culpable. Paula Goodspeed was already troubled, those writers said, and she should have known what she was getting into when she signed the waiver. Of course, these articles are from the American mainstream media; if they dared to say anything bad about the show, they'd be cut off from reporting about it, or from interviewing anyone associated with it. Don't scoff: it happened to Rosie O'Donnell. So I was a bit surprised to run across this (from Lynn Crosbie from the Globe and Mail; read it fast before it goes to PPV.)

Goodspeed's MySpace site tells the story of her arduous day-long Idol auditions toward finally meeting with the jury. Yet nowhere does she indicate an awareness of the producers' or the on-site screeners' machinations.

...She was so obviously chosen to amuse the audience, and to give the judges an opportunity to mock yet another William Hung. But this was different. Hung, it turned out, had the strength and savvy to parlay his absurd attempts at getting onto Idol into a short-lived career as a camp idol of another kind.

Goodspeed did not. As with her drawings, she believed she could sing. Worse, she believed that American Idol is some sort of democratic event, in which garnering an audience in front of the judges ensures a measure of belief in one's skills.

This last paragraph sums the show up nicely. I never thought of "Idol" as being like a televised "Pig Party," but Crosbie may just be right.

In this case, and so many others, Idol – now, along with other reality-TV fare, being hotly scrutinized by psychologists and other analysts as capable of inflicting grievous psychic pain on its participants – is less like The Gong Show, where alternative performance was the order of the day, than like a frat house's dog fight or pig dance, where heartless jocks clamour to find the ugliest woman to bring to the party in the hope of winning a prize.

The show is culpable, and should exercise more caution before it allows fools like Randy Jackson to doubt anyone's worth in the world. More critically, we should all wise up: American Idol's contestants are rarely chosen for their talent but for their ability to cause cringing and amused nausea. Many of them try this gambit as a means of being on TV. Some do not, and are set up in this game of emotional roulette.

Every time someone tells me how funny the auditions are, I tell them that I think that the auditions are sick and exploitative. If they were simply about bad singing, I wouldn't have that much of a problem with them. (In fact, I like both William Hung and Renaldo Lapuz, because they both rose above "Idol's" negativity.) Unfortunately, the show's producers seem to go out of their way to find the biggest losers in the country, and to rub their noses in their loserdom. Stoopid George's America was polarized between the winners and the losers, and did the same thing.

"Canadian Idol" has bad singers that are funny, but they aren't humiliated to the extent that that the "American Idol" rejects are.  The worst thing that I recall from Canadian Idol was one of the auditioners farting in front of the judges. (And she was sent to Toronto.) And then there was the time that Zach Warner threw a garbage can at someone, but that says more about Zach and the producers than it does about the auditioner.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the Big Thing in television was trashy daytime talk shows -- like "Idol," they featured losers as guests. The Dictionary of Teleliteracy described them as "part therapy session and part geek show." In 1995, The Jenny Jones Show taped an episode about secret crushes. A guy named Scott Amedure confessed his love for his friend Jonathan Schmitz on the show. This revelation came as a surprise for Schmitz, who was so disturbed by it that he killed Amedure three days after the taping. Amedure's family sued the show. Schmitz claimed that the show's producers told him that his "secret admirer" was female, and Jenny Jones admitted under oath that the show didn't want him to know that the "secret admirer" was a man.

While the incident didn't kill the trash talk show (Jenny Jones' show didn't end until 2003), I don't recall hearing about them as much afterwards. They certainly aren't as ubiquitous as they used to be. Hopefully, that will be "Idol's" fate. (I'm just hoping that "Dancing With The Stars" catches up to it in the ratings.)

Uh, let's just watch the Russian cartoon "Worker and Parasite:"