Idol Warship
Okay, I’m sorry, this is it. For those of you who weren’t watching, and even for those who were, we have just witnessed the countdown clock begin to tick. That sound you hear is the imminent end of American Idol’s fifteen minutes of fame.
At the end of a great show tonight (we’re voting for Blake and Melinda), the Idol producers absolutely blew their franchise by allowing the Bushes to come onscreen and congratulate the show for raising money to help children in poverty. Yes, that’s right. The president, who let New Orleans drown, who has cut aid and services to the nation’s children his whole term, was thanking a TV show for raising money to help them.
The show has teetered on the brink of self-parody all season with the weird Ryan Seacrest unable to play it straight but uneasy about playing it for laughs. (Or maybe he’s just uneasy about not being straight.) But now Idol has stepped right into the script of the film American Dreamz, itself a parody of both American Idol and the Bush presidency. The film posits an incompetent, unpopular president making a personal appearance on a popular TV talent show in an effort to boost his own ratings. Mayhem ensues.
Sadly, not even a completely lame scripted video moment will keep Bush afloat, not on the anniversary of his “Mission Accomplished” moment and with a 28% approval rating. But now we know that he will be dragging the country’s most popular reality TV show down with him. The show, such a corporate icon and music industry hype machine, has always been able to overcome pure crappiness because some of the singers are genuinely great. It’s a feel-good moment for the rest of us to watch these kids harness their talent, work hard at what they love, and get out of dead-end jobs at K-Mart or the bank.
I just don’t think anyone is going to take the show seriously at all after tonight, and that’s a shame. For American Idol to endure the sneering of cynics and survive another season or two, it had to not sleep with everyone who needed a little career boost. But now, by sharing its bed with the worst president in American history, it has proved that it will sleep with anyone. It may take a while for the numbers to really reflect it, but I predict that the show is on its way to being a national laughingstock. This year’s contestants may survive unscathed, but if I were a talented young singer looking for a break, I would think twice about hitching a ride on the Idol machine after tonight.