Why old people are suddenly watchable on TV

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 9:25 AM - 0 Comments

Photo by Robert Voets/CBS via Getty Images

When Ted Danson was chosen as the new lead on CSI, the surprising thing wasn’t that a comedy actor (Cheers) was going to star in TV’s most famous gory forensic mystery. What stunned people was that a major U.S. show will have a hero who’s over 60. Danson, who was born in 1947 and has been bald since his sitcom days, had been playing character parts on shows like HBO’s Bored to Death. That’s what older actors usually do in television, where advertisers care mostly about reaching young viewers. But Bill Newcott, entertainment editor for the American Association of Retired Persons magazine, told Maclean’s there’s an increased awareness that “the longer the star has been out there, the more comfortable we are with them.” Older people are in.

Mark Harmon, who will turn 60 this year, is the star of the most-watched show on television, NCIS. Larry David is 64 and getting some of his best ratings on Curb Your Enthusiasm. And the recently announced Emmy nominees included 63-year-old Kathy Bates, whose Harry’s Law was one of the few successful new shows last season, and Betty White, who now specializes in jokes about her advanced age.

What’s causing this influx of people who are 60 and up? It may help that reality TV, which always seems to influence its scripted cousin, has been proving that you don’t need youth to get young people watching. American Idol has almost matched the success of the Simon Cowell years thanks to Steven Tyler, a man in his 60s who gets flirty with young contestants; he has completely overshadowed Jennifer Lopez, who is 20 years younger but much less popular with her own age cohort.

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The re-southification of American Idol

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 11:18 AM - 1 Comment

When it came to the demographics of this year’s American Idol contestants, much of the attention went to the fact that women were getting eliminated at an even higher rate than usual. And sure enough, the winner was a man yet again; we’re a long way from the Kelly Clarkson days. But in another way, things have circled back to the beginning of the series: after a couple of years where Southerners didn’t dominate the show as much as in the past, both finalists were from the U.S. South, and the producers seem to have wanted it that way:

Yes, it’s a country music year for “Idol” — just what producer Nigel Lythgoe wanted when he tagged Alaina early on as this season’s Chosen One. (The show’s producers have also pushed McCreery, who is now likely to win, since the beginning; he’s had a signature song — Josh Turner’s “Your Man” — ever since his audition.) With Carrie Underwood now the official top-earning “Idol” alum and Nashville holding up better than any other corner of the conventional recording industry, no one can be surprised that “Idol” has found new life, in part, by assertively reconnecting with this heartland.

Singers like Alaina and McCreery have certain advantages on a show like this, apart from the obvious (these shows are very popular in the Heartland). Ever since rock n’ roll exploded in the ’50s, shattering the music industry into fragments and giving every generation its own particular brand of music, television has had to cope with the problem that there isn’t much pop music that has enormous mass appeal. That’s why most talk shows leave the musical acts for the end of the show, because some segment of the audience is going to hate the type of music. Successful Idol performers avoid this by cultivating a sort of all-purpose eclecticism, with a hint of a basic baseline style but not enough of a specific style to turn off large portions of the audience. This is what Elvis Presley often did, and Elvis is the patron saint of many Idol contestants, particularly his fellow Southerners.

Why does 'American Idol' hate women?

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, April 26, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 8 Comments

Michael Becker/FOX

When Pia Toscano was eliminated by the voters on the April 7 episode of American Idol, all the judges looked and sounded shocked. But why? The last few years of Idol should have shown that a female singer won’t get far. While the early years produced such winners as Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood, the last three champs were men. Only one woman, Crystal Bowersox, made it to the final round in those three years. And this season’s finals eliminated five women in a row before finally voting out the first man. After Toscano departed, Jennifer Lopez admitted that she was afraid to criticize the two remaining females: “I feel like all of the girls are getting voted off, and I don’t like that.”

There have always been arguments about bias on Idol; until Lee DeWyze won last year, there were rumours that the show was biased toward southerners. But this season has turned the voters’ alleged anti-woman bias into a major issue. Deadline.com TV reporter Nellie Andreeva, who rarely expresses personal opinions, made an exception and asked, “Why are Idol female singers vanishing?” arguing that “the voting is so heavily skewed in the male singers’ favour that the voting results can’t possibly be random.” A report by The Today Show put it more bluntly: “Sorry, ladies. Idol’s just not that into you.”

Democracy is rarely pretty, so the first step in the anti-Idol backlash was to blame the people. More women than men watch American Idol—the show is especially popular with young women—and now that online voting is available on the show, they’re free to flood the system with votes in support of the boys they love most. Thia Megla, one of the women who was eliminated early on, said in a press conference that, “We sort of figured since there were more females watching this show the votes were going to be more for the guys.” Another eliminated woman, Naima Adedapo, accused her fellow females of voting for sex appeal instead of talent. “When it comes down to it,” she told the Hollywood Reporter, “the reality is that more than 50 per cent of the audience is little teenage girls, and once they get a crush, we’re done.”

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American Idol: The Untold Story

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 9:31 PM - 0 Comments

For the contestants and the viewers, American Idol is all about fame. For creator Simon Fuller, it’s all about control. As Rushfield explains, the British pop entrepreneur came up with the Idol franchise in frustration after his biggest discoveries, the Spice Girls, dumped him as their manager. He wanted to create a star-making machine that “wouldn’t be based on the unpredictable talents and personalities of a group of performers.” Though Idol became the ultimate expression of the belief that anyone can be a star, it’s really a show that’s bigger than any of the so-called stars it creates.

Drawing on his years of experience covering Idol for publications like the Los Angeles Times, Rushfield recounts many of the famous stories about the show, like the time it had to re-tape a scene because Simon Cowell called Randy Jackson a “monkey.” Sometimes it can seem like the book’s getting bogged down in a sea of anecdotes; it’s fun to be reminded that Paula Abdul “felt like American Idol‘s poor step-cousin,” but readers may get tired of the play-by-play recaps.

Still, the recaps put the emphasis where it really belongs in Idol: not on the hosts and judges who get a lot of the press, but the contestants, who come off so charmingly on the screen and whose lives are so completely controlled by the producers. Ace Young complains to Rushfield that he and another contestant “were grown-ass men and we had an 11 o’clock curfew, and we couldn’t have family in the room with us. It was weird.” When Rushfield tells us, near the end, that Fuller’s ambitious Internet star-making projects are intended to put “power back in the hands of the people,” we can be forgiven for wondering if that’s true; it may mostly put power in the hands of Simon Fuller.

Simon who? It's all about Steven Tyler now.

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, March 3, 2011 at 11:23 AM - 8 Comments

Michael Becker/FOX; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Where do aging rock stars go to redeem themselves? Not on tour—to American Idol. Steven Tyler, the 63-year-old Aerosmith rocker, is in his first season as an American Idol judge, and getting the kind of praise he hasn’t received since his records were selling. The New York Times called him an “unalloyed genius,” while Pop Eater‘s Rob Shuter wrote, “Steven has saved the show,” crediting him for the fact that Idol‘s ratings haven’t collapsed without Simon Cowell. Tyler also provided the signature moment of the first batch of new episodes, when he hugged, kissed and complimented a contestant’s wheelchair-bound fiancée. Richard Rushfield, author of the new book American Idol: The Untold Story, says that Tyler is everything the producers could have hoped for: they’ve “erased the question” of what they will do without Cowell, because Tyler is such a “singular figure” no one can focus on anything but him.

Most of the news about the post-Cowell Idol centred around the other new judge, Jennifer Lopez; despite his long career, Tyler was almost an afterthought. But Lopez has been fairly placid: “She seems sort of engaged and constructive,” Rushfield says, “but hasn’t really broken out yet and made a big impression.” It’s Tyler who’s been getting the attention, first with his weird hair, stretched skin, and scratchy voice, and then with the equally bizarre things he says. Unlike failed judges like Ellen DeGeneres and Kara DioGuardi, he occasionally says something interesting; his use of phrases like “slap that baby on the ass and call me Christmas!” gives him a style of dialogue almost as quirky as the girl in True Grit. Linda Stasi of the New York Post called him the “saviour” of the show because, like ex-judge Paula Abdul, “he’s always one second away from crashing, going nuts, saying something completely inappropriate and falling off the wagon.”

Tyler may also be helped by what seemed a drawback: his age. He’s the oldest regular judge, the exact opposite of Idol‘s attempt to court youth with the thirtysomething DioGuardi. But instead of driving away younger viewers, Tyler is the 18-49 demographic’s favourite cranky old man. His weary, weather-beaten look is reminiscent of the old showbiz troupers who were panellists on game shows like Hollywood Squares, and when he seems to flirt with contestants (“You have just the right amount of leg showing,” he told a teenage girl), he brings back memories of Richard Dawson kissing young women on Family Feud. Rushfield also sees a comparison to the old rock ‘n’ roller who helped create the reality TV craze in the first place: “This is a rock legend,” he explains, “and seeing him in this informal environment is the same thrill you got from The Osbournes and seeing Ozzy knocking around the house.”

Like game-show panellists and reality stars, Tyler’s experience has given him a talent for insults that he can use when he needs to. The Idol producers promised that with Cowell gone, the show would not ask any of its judges to play the “villain.” Sure enough, there hasn’t been anyone as brutally honest as Cowell usually was. But Tyler has taken up some of the slack, occasionally surprising the audience by showing that there are some bad performances he won’t tolerate. On one episode he castigated a bad singer for being “so far off the melody it was like you were on another planet,” causing the other two judges to profess shock. People eventually stopped being outraged when Cowell told someone he couldn’t sing; by being likeable most of the time, Tyler has made it possible for an Idol insult to get into the news again.

That leaves Lopez in a bit of an awkward spot; instead of filling Cowell’s role or Abdul’s, she’s sitting beside Tyler while he’s both the wit and the weirdo.That might be why there have already been reports that Lopez is resentful of Tyler’s success; a source told Shuter that Tyler ruined Lopez’s “big comeback” and that “she’s mystified at how this happened.” Just as Ellen DeGeneres was too nice to compete with Simon, even Lopez might be too normal to compete with a guy who says things like “you squeezed it so slow it sounded like Vanilla Fudge singing Eleanor Rigby.”

Jaime Weinman on Steven Tyler as an American Idol judge

By macleans.ca - Monday, February 28, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Read Jaime’s article ‘Simon who? It’s all about Steven Tyler now.’ in the March 7 issue of Maclean’s

Going, Going…

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Simon Cowell; Lloyd Robertson; Jaroslav Halák | Byron Purvis/Keystone Press Agency; Adrien Veczan/CP; Len Redkoles/NHL/Getty Images

Quit: Steven Slater
In 2010, no one cheered the hearts of disgruntled workers everywhere more than Jet Blue flight attendant Slater, who left his job—and his aircraft—in spectacular fashion. In August, he told off an annoying passenger, grabbed two bottles of beer, released the emergency exit on his landed plane, and slid away to freedom. And into a world of trouble: in October, he pleaded guilty to criminal mischief and was fined US$10,000. For the rest of us, though, it was worth it.

Evicted: the Niqab
After a pharmacist in a niqab—a face veil that reveals only the wearer’s eyes—refused to remove it during French-language class, the Quebec government announced plans to ban government agencies and public institutions from offering services to veiled women. Bill 94, when it becomes law, will effectively eject the niqab from Quebec’s public square in the name of gender equality and maintaining secular values in public services. Meanwhile, the imposing crucifix in the national assembly remains in place.

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American Idol Will Air Wednesdays and Thursdays

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, November 19, 2010 at 8:44 PM - 5 Comments

Fox’s midseason schedule is, as usual, incomprehensible without a secret decoder ring, but it’s a pretty smart schedule all the same. The big move is American Idol, which moves to Wednesday/Thursday. No one knows how much Idol will drop without Simon Cowell, but if it does drop more than expected, then at least the network won’t have killed Glee‘s momentum by moving it in the middle of its emergence as a breakout hit, just for the sake of giving it a post-Idol slot that it no longer needs. And the competition at 8 o’clock on Thursdays isn’t that tough (there’s only one hit show between the other three networks) meaning Idol won’t have as much standing in the way of its continued dominance.

In general, I think Fox’s choices seem like smart ones; like CBS they seem to understand that aggressive scheduling moves can be effective in a psychological sort of way. They’ve shifted the talk from “how much will Idol decline with J-Lo and Steven?” to “how afraid should NBC and ABC and CBS be of Idol on Thursdays?” This movie may not gain Idol so much as a single ratings point, but it makes the network’s midseason position feel stronger, if only because people will be talking about their strengths (Idol, Glee) more than their weaknesses. In other words, if they’d left the show on the same nights, then the only change worth talking about would be the change in judges, and much of the talk would be negative. Now there’s something else to talk about, and it changes nothing about the show or who the judges are, but at least it’s positive (Idol will be a juggernaut that other networks must fear on Thursdays) rather than negative.

As for the competition, the big hit shows (like Modern Family and Big Bang Theory and Grey’s Anatomy) are in no danger even if they go down a bit or even a lot. So the real question is what this means for the “bubble” shows, particularly Community. (Also Vampire Diaries, but I never really know what the CW’s ratings expectations are, and I fear that if I tried to find out, I’d start becoming obsessed with demographics and stuff.) NBC was already hurting Community enough by putting it at 8 — it did a bit better the one time it aired at 8:30 — so if they want it to survive they may need to find a new spot for it. But really, they’ve got so many holes to fill that shifting everything around again may not be an option; all six of the comedies on Thursday will have legitimate complaints about their time slots, and I guess that could be a plus for them because no one will know for sure how much of the blame goes to the shows or their time slots. The Office will be fine for now, of course, and the network’s best bet may be to really milk the Carell departure for as much as it’s worth — plug the hell out of not only the departure episode but the big moments leading up to it, and encourage the writers to play up that angle as much as they can. That could at least help Parks and Recreation do well enough to hang on to next season as it deserves.

Over on ABC, this is the big test for their comedy lineup, particularly The Middle at 8, which has become the definition of a solid show that performs solidly every week (and, better still, is actually good; it’s probably my favourite of their four comedies). Obviously the network is hoping — assuming it stays where it is — that it can continue to perform at somewhere near its current level, which would make it clear that they have two really solid comedy tentpoles (Middle and Modern Family) to launch future shows.

Fringe will go to Fridays, which is not a good sign but is also unavoidable: it’s not compatible with Idol‘s audience and it’s not doing well enough to go anywhere else. It’s odd that Fox has had so much trouble launching science-fiction shows — they all seem to wind up on Fridays now, either in the beginning or the end — when The X-Files was one of their biggest successes. But The X-Files, despite the mythology aspect, had self-contained episodes as a major part of its style. Fringe was at its most popular in the first season when it was trying to be like The X-Files, an episodic show with a larger mystery arc, but the creators’ hearts weren’t in it and neither were their biggest fans’. As the show has moved toward being an impenetrable mythology show, it’s gotten better (though sometimes when I hear lines about “the Senator was a shapeshifter” I start to realize how ridiculous it must sound to a new viewer) but it also probably lost its chance to be the new X-Files.

Among the new shows, the only one of particular interest is The Chicago Code, formerly called Ride-along, the new cop show from Shield creator (and Terriers showrunner) Shawn Ryan. Ryan’s work is never less than interesting. This is another show with title issues, as the network changed the title to emphasize the location. Some have argued that the new title sounds too generic; I personally thought the old title made it sound like a Western. But since I’ve argued before that the choice of title doesn’t make or break a show, I’m not going to worry about it. Seeing a show filmed in Chicago is always something to look forward to (like Detroit 1-8-7, a slightly unfamiliar location can give a jolt to what might otherwise be a standard cop show — and if the show isn’t a standard show, then taking it outside of New York or L.A. can produce really spectacular results, as with Homicide and The Wire).

The other show that might deserve some comment is Bob’s Burgers, the latest attempt to add an animated show that isn’t from the Seth MacFarlane family. This time they’ve turned to Jim Dauterive, one of the most prolific writers for King of the Hill (they had two “camps” of writers, Harvard guys and Texans, and Dauterive was one of the original Texans on the staff). It looks to be a little closer to King of the Hill in terms of style, though it takes place in the East. One thing that I think it has working against it is precisely that it was created by a writer, who didn’t design the show himself. I don’t think animation and scriptwriters don’t mix, the way John Kricfalusi does. But it is true that the most successful prime-time animated shows have been from people who could create and draw the characters, making the drawing style a genuine extension of the writing style. This is what Matt Groening, Mike Judge and Seth MacFarlane — not to mention Hanna-Barbera — have done. When a writer writes a script and then hands it over to someone else to design all the characters, it can wind up feeling as though the quirky or stylized drawing doesn’t have a clear connection to the writing, a reason why the show absolutely has to look that way.

Update/Correction: The above paragraph is rendered inoperative by the fact that the creator of Bob’s Burgers is Loren Bouchard (Home Movies), with Dauterive on board in the traditional way — an experienced network TV writer to help guide the show. The material I was working from indicated Dauterive as the creator; the material was wrong. (Which teaches me this lesson: Double-check on Wikipedia first. They never have inaccurate information.) In any case, the point about the importance of having the look and the writing come from the same mind still stands; it’s just that this is an example of how Fox still understands the importance of it, rather than the other way round.

Jennifer Pozner in conversation

By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 at 1:20 PM - 0 Comments

PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE SIMON

Jennifer Pozner is the director of Women In Media & News in New York City and the author of Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV.

Q: Why do you say it’s “bulls–t” that viewer demand has created the deluge of reality TV?
A: Michael Hirschorn, the brain trust behind VH1’s Flavor of Love and Flavor of Love: Charm School and basically the guy who is responsible for bringing the modern minstrel show to television, has said in an interview that – this is the quote, “If women don’t want those shows they wouldn’t get made,” That’s what I call bulls–t, because what reality producers and what the entertainment press sells us is this notion that we, the public, have just demanded via massive ratings that they give us this bottom-feeder low-quality reality TV fare, and this is just a big lie. It’s true that some reality shows—American Idol, The Bachelor—have gotten high ratings, but many others languish with paltry ratings and they get to stay [on air] because these shows are really cheap to produce. It can cost about 50 per cent less—sometimes even 75 per cent less—to make a reality show than to make a quality scripted program.

Q: And they can also get advertisers to pay big money for stealth product placement.
A: People think that product placement is just a Coke can or a Coke cup on the desk at American Idol. But advertisers can pay millions of dollars per episode to integrate their products into the casting choices, the plot development, the dialogue, the scenery, the “challenges” of shows. Take The Apprentice, which has gotten upwards of $2 million per episode from a variety of Fortune 500 type companies to integrate into the challenges, so every episode is basically one long infomercial for Sony and Chrysler and candy bars and cars and sneakers. Some seasons The Apprentice has done very well in the ratings, and other seasons it’s done so poorly that NBC cancelled it. But then they hired a new entertainment division president, Ben Silverman, and he happened to be a former reality TV producer. He was one of the people responsible for producing a show called The Restaurant. NBC paid not one dime to create that show, it was created by a reality TV production company that works with advertisers to create content that advertisers want people to see, and then they gave that show, for free, to NBC. So NBC didn’t invest anything; they were just able to sell commercials. So Ben Silverman gets to NBC, realizes that The Apprentice was a cash cow even though the ratings had plummeted, reversed the decision to cancel The Apprentice, and then turned it into The Celebrity Apprentice, sprinkled D-list fairy dust on it and brought it back. Was it because people, the public, really wanted that show? No, it was plummeting in the ratings every single season since it debuted. Now it’s back because Silverman, a reality TV stealth advertising fan, decided that it was too cheap and too lucrative to let go.

Q: Do most people understand that what they’re watching is completely manufactured?
A: If you ask most people, “Do you think reality TV is real?” they’ll say, “Oh, no, no, I know it’s fake”—but in the next breath they’ll say, “Oh, but that bitch needed to get eliminated,” or, “Oh, but that guy was such a douchebag.” Well, if you think you know anything about any of the people you’ve seen on reality shows, you don’t know that the shows are not real. These shows aren’t any more real than Mad Men, without the cool clothes. But Mad Men, at least, is intentionally scripted to have a running critical commentary about the sexism and racism of the ’50s and early ’60s within the advertising industry.

Q: You argue that we need to readjust our definition of “scripted.”
A: Scripting doesn’t happen in the traditional sense of actors being given a 30-page manifesto to memorize. It starts with casting. Producers find people with addiction problems or anger problems, and think, “This will make great TV.” Women who are Mensa members or high achievers tend not to be cast. Women who are either sincerely “looking for their Prince Charming” or sincerely feeling down on their luck do. After casting, they then edit people into stock characters: the dumb bimbo, the catty bitch, the weepy loser who says, “I’m going to die alone if the bachelor doesn’t choose me!” For women of colour those stock characters are even more extreme. Editing is the predominant way that scripting happens. People don’t understand that for every 45 minutes of The Bachelor they see, more than 100 hours of film have been shot.

Q: You write about “Frankenbites,” the industry term for splicing various conversations together to create a fraudulent new one.
A: One of the most controversial scenes on any reality show was in Joe Millionaire. Viewers watched about five minutes of trees in the dark, nothingness. But what you heard were things like, “Do you think it would go better lying down?” And there were captions like “slurp” and “mmm.” Those bits of conversation were from an entirely different day. I’ll give you another example. One of the only Asian women who’d ever appeared on The Bachelor was a medical student named Tina Wu. She was recruited by the producers because the bachelor that year was a doctor, so they thought, “Oh, it would be good to have one person, at least, who has his medical stuff in common.” She hadn’t seen the show before, she thought, “Oh, maybe it’ll be a chance to have some fun vacation.” Well, she goes on the show, and she blogged about it in great, great detail—but she ripped that show to shreds. She talked about the psychologists they have behind the scenes who do all these intake interviews, so they knew that she had a very troubled relationship with her family, in particular her father. She hated being on the show, she said that it was filthy, there were rats running around the mansion, that there was very little food and constant alcohol. And she didn’t like the guy; she thought he was kind of boring. She would say on camera that she thought he didn’t really have a good since of humour, because at one point they’re out an a date where there’s big, huge yacht and he says something like, “Welcome to my yacht,” and she laughs about it because she knows that he can’t possibly afford that. She’s like, “Oh, you mean this is your yacht?” in this very kind of ha-ha way, calling attention to the product placement. Then they edit that to make her seem like she’s a dumb-ass and she really believes that this is, you know, “This is your yacht!”

She was edited into the girl who was too closed off, who wouldn’t open up, and that became the thing he would always say to her and other women would always say, “Why aren’t you opening up? You’re too cold.” So at one point she says to the producers on camera: “I’m not opening up because I’m not really interested in him, but being on this show, agreeing to do this show, was the thing I regret most in my life.”

Well, eventually, way, way, way longer into the show than she would have preferred, she eventually gets eliminated. When she finally got eliminated it was about 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, she said, and she was grinning ear to ear, she was happy to go home. That didn’t play well with producers, and they kept saying to her, “We need you to cry,” and she wasn’t interested in crying, she wasn’t heart-broken. And they told her: “If you don’t show some real emotion here you’re just going to be edited into being, you know, the cold bitch.” And she was happy; she was going home, she didn’t want to cry. So they poke at her and poke at her and poke at her, and she’s still not giving them the tears that they want, so finally… now, imagine you’ve been up since, like, 7:00 in the morning, you’ve been in this high-pressure environment all day, and the producer is saying to you, “Don’t you think your father would be disappointed in you?” or things about your family. That’s where she cried. She felt betrayed that they would exploit her personal back story that way. And so what we saw as viewers was after she gets eliminated we hear her say, “I didn’t open up to the bachelor. This was the biggest regret of my life,” and then she cries. That’s a frankenbite.

Q: Have any contestants taken producers to task for misappropriating what they’ve said?
A: They sign away their rights to do so. In these very draconian contracts it says: “We can make a fiction out of you and we most likely will.” It says that in legal language but that’s basically the long and short of it. Not only do people sign away their rights to speak to the press negatively about the shows, they sign away their rights to own the intellectual property of things they create on shows like Project Runway or on American Idol, they sign away their rights to sue if they get injured or even killed on these shows. What these contracts do is they cause a chilling effect, because most people who show up on reality TV shows do so because they are hoping for some sort of big pay-day to change their life, right, so they’re not going to be people who have the kinds of resources to go up against Goliath, so they just don’t say all of the things that have seen happen behind the scenes. You know, they’ll maybe critique, “Oh, I didn’t like the way I was edited on the show,” to Entertainment Weekly or TV Guide, but they won’t say, “Here exactly is how they manipulate reality so that what you’re seeing is absolutely not real.”

Q: Reality shows appear to exist in a bubble, completely disconnected from social reality.
A: Absolutely. At the same time you have a housing bubble in America and the highest unemployment rate since the Depression, you’re seeing television shows encouraging us to root for massive profits for real estate speculators and house-flippers on shows like Million Dollar Listing and Flip that House. And at the same time as women are making great strides in politics, in business, and redefining personal relationships within the family, within parenting, within sexual communication and relationships, on television, in the guise of reality, producers have expected us to believe that women have no ambition, they want us to believe that women not only have no real choices, they don’t even want any. So in that way, with shows like Wife Swap in which every woman who works outside the home is pitted against a stay-at-home mom, or pitted against a woman who may work outside the home but doesn’t really want to, only has to, and all the women who actually like their careers are considered bad mothers, and all the women who stay at home are considered doormats. What I want people to understand is that this massive stereotyping, the massive regressive depictions of womanhood, of women being stupid, of women being less competent than men, of women being catty, vindictive and not to be trusted especially by other women, of women being gold diggers, all of these ideas are very much a product of reality TV producers and networks wanting to revive 1950s ideology for the contemporary age. These shows aren’t any more real than Mad Men, without the cool clothes, but Mad Men, at least, is intentionally scripted to have a running critical commentary about the sexism and racism of the ’50s and early ’60s within the advertising industry.

Reality TV is showing us the same kind of misogyny but they’re glorifying it and they’re pretending that it’s real. What we see in reality television is the remarkable success of reality TV producers creating a fictitious world and packaging it to us as if it’s reality, a world that the most ardent fundamentalists have always tried to achieve, one in which women’s rightful place is in the home, and women who have independence are scorned and will die alone, and in which the only role for fathers is financial provision and if they are stay-at-home parents they’re wimps and sissies and not real men, a world in which people of colour exist only as male buffoons, thugs and pimps, and female whores and the Jezebel and Sapphire stereotypes. That world is not real, but through all of this frankenbite editing and pick-and-choose and advertisers’ influence over content, we get to see what networks want us to believe about ourselves at the turn of the century: they want us to believe that the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, never existed. We see no traces of that in reality TV. So just at the same time as women are winning and setting world records in any number of Olympic sports, America’s Next Top Model debuts to tell women that their bodies are specifically here just to be decorative, and the thinner and weaker the better. At the same time as Condoleezza Rice is becoming national security advisor, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire is telling us that the biggest ambition that we can have is to be chosen in a sort of mail-order-bride/Miss America parade to get married to somebody we don’t even know in a network-arranged marriage. And that’s just not what life is like in America anymore. The age of first marriage keeps rising, people are staying single longer, the number of two-parent families where both parents work is rising because of economic conditions. The ideology of this world that we see on television is very specifically political, it’s very regressive, and it’s very intentional.

Q: You give the example of a black woman being axed from Real Housewives of Atlanta because she didn’t fit producers’ stereotypes.
A: What’s interesting with The Real Housewives of Atlanta is when you see how reality producers tweak formulas to reinforce ethnic stereotypes. The original real housewives were of Orange County, and they were depicted as blondes, bimbos, elite wealthy snob elitists. And then it went to New York where they still had a lot of the snobbery but there was a bit more of a sort of east coast flair to it, and then we have Atlanta where all of a sudden the notion is because it’s black women all of a sudden there are physical fist fights, and there’s intimidation, and people are scared of one another, and there’s consent screaming and altercations. The running subtext is “these people” are low class and no amount of money can change their inherent nature.”

That first season, DeShawn Snow, was a divinity student, she was studying for, I believe, a Ph.D., she headed a foundation for girls’ empowerment, But we never saw her studying. The fact that this was a studious, intelligent woman who was a religious person, who wanted to empower young girls, especially girls of colour, the only thing we ever saw about her foundation was as an excuse for her to have problems throwing a party and people being snubbed because they weren’t invited to the party. And the reason we didn’t get to see her cracking open the books and studying is because that would interrupt the narrative they wanted to present about black women, that narrative being that black women are ignorant and illiterate. For example, they didn’t show us DeShawn studying but they did show us NeNe Leakes not being able to help her son with math and having to get her husband to tutor him because she doesn’t know which is bigger, a third of a half . When they dropped her from the series it was because—they specifically told her—“You don’t fly off the handle the way we need you to. Next season we’re going to be amping up the drama even more and we just don’t think you have it in you.” So then the next season she was out, and who did they bring in? A woman who they edited – a hip-hop star – who they edited as basically ‘ghetto,’ and they called her ghetto over and over and over, and then they spent a lot of time on her relationship with her fiancé who had numerous kids from different mothers.

Q: A catfight does generate more interest.
A: By no means am I saying that these shows aren’t compelling. They are. They basically offer all of the sniping and gossip and voyeurism of high school cliques and office gossip without feeling like we’re affecting any real people. And if we’re questioning whether or not we’re being the best parents we can be, well, at least our families aren’t self-destructing like Jon and Kate’s. But [the appeal is] not just schadenfreude—there’s a lot of humour. That’s the biggest draw of Jersey Shore, that people behave ridiculously and it’s funny to watch. The bigger question is why there’s such a huge appetite for this prurient kind of thing. When this genre burst onto the scene with Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, there was the hugest public outcry: “Oh my God, this is so regressive.” Ten years later it’s a very different climate. News outlets basically just repeat the same big lies that reality TV producers sell.

Q: And now Jon and Kate are “news,” the argument being that people are interested.
A: Why do you have pictures of Snooki and Bachelorette Ali Fedotowsky and Kate Gosselin on the covers of all the tabloids? Well, because it’s so much cheaper. I’ve already talked about how much cheaper it is to run an unscripted show versus a scripted show, but think about the tabloid level: If you pay a paparazzi for a photo of Snooki you’re paying only a few bucks. If you pay a paparazzi for a photo of Angelina Jolie—and it’s a good photo—that’s a very pricy picture. It goes back to money. Same reason why CNN can run endless amounts of, “What’s wrong with Lindsay Lohan? Should she get help? Is she ever going to beat her drug addiction?” stories ad nauseam, because you pay some guy to videotape Lindsay walking around or getting in and out of her car, tape Paris Hilton getting in and out of her car and hopefully catching a crotch shot, you pay them a few hundred bucks and you’ve got your story for the entire day, and maybe even repeatedly through the entire week.

That is much cheaper than stationing, for example, a whole foreign bureau in Afghanistan to make sure that you’ve got, every single day, new coverage of civilian deaths or of whatever the new battle is. You don’t have to pay translators, you don’t have to pay videographers, you don’t have to pay numerous reporters, you don’t have to pay security personnel to keep them safe, you don’t have to pay their lodging and their travel, you just have to throw a few hundred bucks to a paparazzi who maybe gets Lindsay looking dazed or Paris without underwear and then you’ve got your CNN or your Fox story for the next half hour or for the next five days. Same thing for the tabloids, right? So again they will say, “This is what we want,” and it’s not that people won’t buy it. That’s key. People are buying it, I’m not saying nobody wants it, I’m saying people would also want quality, funny, interesting programming if we were given that option. A lot of the reason people aren’t watching scripted shows that are quality options is because those shows get yanked off the air before they can develop an audience. A show like Cheers, longest-running sit-com, would not get the chance to develop in today’s market.

There’s often a massively financed campaign to get us to believe in the appearance of spontaneous collective interest. For example, Survivor existed to test the new Infinity-Viacom-CBS merger, to test the power of cross-platform promotion. So for months before that show appeared, shock jocks on FM stations would wake people up with, “There’s going to be this show with cute chicks in bikinis eating bugs. You gotta check it out.” And then you could turn to your news station and find Mark Burnett being interviewed about a new format in which advertisers and networks work together to bring us unscripted content, and then when you get home, 60 Minutes was talking about it. Nobody was talking about that show who wasn’t on CBS’s, Viacom’s and Infinity’s payroll. And then there were embedded sponsors, the Survivor logo on Doritos, so it seemed like if you were not watching Survivor, you were missing out on a massive cultural phenomenon.

Q: You watched a thousand hours of reality TV to do this book and you write that not everything is odious. Shows shows like Project Runway or Amazing Race, for instance you, like.
A: I’m really glad that you asked that. People make the mistake of thinking that what I’m saying is that they should absolutely turn the TV off, that they shouldn’t watch any reality shows if they don’t want to be brainwashed, or that they’re bad people if they watch reality TV, and that’s not at all what I’m saying. The problem with reality TV is not the format. You can do interesting, compelling, and non-bigoted things with the format of unscripted television, but that requires intentionality. There are a few shows here and there that have been actually quite edifying, a show like Project Runway that focuses mostly on talent, that focuses on people creating something out of nothing under tight deadlines with very few limited resources and odd materials. I think I call it in the book “Macgyver meets Milan.” That show tends to celebrate people’s differences as opposed to pitting people against each other based on difference, and that is an intentional part of their narrative. But people were wondering why this season of Project Runway seems to feature so much more back-biting and arguing and—to some degree—stereotyping than we’ve seen on many seasons before.

I was not surprised by this at all because now that it’s on Lifetime it’s a different set of producers: it’s Bunim/Murray Productions who created The Real World. I was worried as soon as I heard that Bunim Murray was going to take over Project Runway that the narrative would shift. And they know they can’t shift it too much because it’s a success based on this talent-over-everything-else mould that has been created by Bravo over the years for that show, but they have built in more stereotyping this season; they have built in more arguing and more contestants yelling at each other, etc. And so again when you see the differences there you realize producers really decide how people are going to behave and what kinds of narratives occur. But in general, the reason so many people love Project Runway is because it’s not based on humiliation, it’s based on validating artistic endeavour.

Q: Explain why you see a link between the [U.S.] Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the shrinking size of actresses.
A: Telecom ’96 happens [and] media companies merge at a much faster rate than ever before, and we see the introduction of really cheap-to-produce tabloids, both print and TV, that do very little more than follow celebrity women around shaming them about their bodies. All of these “Baby Bump?” arrows pointing at bellies, when somebody basically ate a bagel that day. This was not the case when media companies cared about profit but also, in a measured way, about the quality of their content. So in the ’80s you had shows like Beverly Hills 90210, in which the girls basically looked like thin but healthy young women. Fast forward after Telecom ’96 to the current show 90210—almost every single girl looks unhealthily skinny.

Q: Why do you say violence against women is part of the subtext and text of reality shows?
A: Violence against women has always been part of the subtext and also part of the text of reality TV on networks, since 2000. That first show, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire, the guy who was considered the crown prince had a restraining order against him. Flavor Flav [of The Flavor of Love] has had charges against him for domestic violence, and yet he gets three seasons of a dating show. And then you have shows like America’s Next Top Model, which in the long and storied tradition of fashion and beauty advertisers have repeatedly used images of women in fear, in pain, and even in coffins, and in beautiful corpse challenges in which they’re supposed to pose as gorgeous, glamorous dead girls, murder victims, while judges say things like, “Beautiful, gorgeous! You look great dead.” So what are we to make of season after season after season of beautiful corpses and Tyra Banks telling girls, “Pose as if you’re in pain. Think pain but beauty.” You remember, I’m sure: in Canada this was a big thing—two summers ago where Ryan Jenkins got voted off the show Megan Wants a Millionaire, went home—where he was positioned, by the way, on that show as great boyfriend relationship material—went home, married his ex-girlfriend, Jasmine Fiore—she was a model—married her, and then allegedly killed her and mutilated her body so badly that she was only able to be identified through the serial numbers on her breast implants, and then killed himself. People at that time called me, lots of reporters called me and said, “Has reality TV created a monster?” No, they did not create a monster, they cast a monster, and they should have known that they were casting a monster because he had a record for domestic violence.

And the thing that that says is that reality producers tend to rank women’s safety lower on their priority list than lighting and the provision of alcohol and set design. And the idea to women at home that these people are princes among men, that these people are worthy of being fought over, says basically as long as a guy has a firm ass and a firm financial portfolio he doesn’t need to be respectful, he doesn’t need to be smart, he doesn’t need to be loyal, he doesn’t need to be funny, he doesn’t need to be a good partner, and even at the baseline he doesn’t need to treat you with any kind of physical dignity, he can be a batterer, and you should still fight over him because he can bring you the bling.

Q: Is reality programming the new reality?
A: If we continue to allow media companies to let market forces define everything to the point where quality means nothing and the economics behind production is 100 per cent of the priority, then every season will have more provocative, more bigoted fare. For example, Bridalplasty is about to debut: cosmetic surgery given to brides who compete to get procedures while they plan their wedding. We’ve had Extreme Makeover, The Swan. So what can they do to make it even more disgusting? Oh, let’s merge the wedding-industrial-complex shows with the cosmetic-surgery-is-liberating-for-women shows. They have to go further and further, more racist, more misogynistic, more over-the-top. We will see more of that if we don’t become very critical very quickly.

Will Jennifer Lopez be good for American Idol?

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, September 28, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Everett Collection/ CP/ Eric Thayer/Lucas Jackson/Reuters

When asked what he thinks of Jennifer Lopez replacing him on American Idol, Simon Cowell said, “I got to know her quite well,” damning with faint praise as usual. We’ve all gotten to know Lopez quite well over the past decade, but is that a good or bad thing for the world’s most popular competition show? With the departure of superstar judge Cowell and failed judges Ellen DeGeneres and Kara DioGuardi, Idol has seemingly turned to Lopez as its last best hope: TMZ and other publications reported that Fox is giving her a one-year, $12-million contract to sit and listen to young people who can’t sing. Fans of the show are already skeptical of Lopez’s ability to hold our interest: “I doubt Jennifer will be an entertaining character,” says Dave Della Terza, whose website Votefortheworst.com is dedicated to whipping up votes for bad but entertaining Idol candidates. “I’ve been saying they need a judging panel of Kanye West, Whitney Houston, and Howard Stern.” But there might be one hope for Lopez, and the show: Idol needs someone who can be as hated as Cowell was. And if anyone can generate that level of animosity, she can.

Of course, many people are comparing Lopez not to Cowell, but to the much-missed Paula Abdul. Like Abdul, Lopez started as a dancer (she performed on In Living Color on Idol’s own network, Fox). Also like Abdul, her work in the music business isn’t behind-the-scenes like Cowell, but a series of hit records and videos. And now her career is more or less where Abdul’s was in 2001—not completely gone, but not where it was at her peak of popularity. We’re a long way from the days when Lopez and Ben Affleck were the most famous couple in the world of celebrity gossip, or when she was giving well-regarded performances in movies like Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight. Even her fashion choices don’t seem to matter much; it’s not like it was at the 2000 Grammys, when her famously revealing Versace dress made her a role model for women who wanted to be sexy without being skinny.

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American Idol: the beautiful, but not too beautiful

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, March 15, 2010 at 11:03 AM - 6 Comments

Herein, the seventh in a semi-regular series chronicling the ninth season of American Idol. You can read the first installment here, the second installment here, the third installment here, the fourth installment here, the fifth installment here and the sixth installment here.

The last two weeks of American Idol competition have been, at best, weird and disappointing. Where once it seemed we had the makings of a uniquely great season, we may now be faced with one of the worst in Idol‘s nine years. Though no one will remember much of any of this if the winner goes on to even a moderate level of stardom.

To review, the frontrunner (Katie Stevens) imploded, but has somehow avoided elimination. An unlikely pop star (Lilly Scott) emerged as the most self-assured contestant, only to be inexplicably cut. A candidate who didn’t make the final 24 (Tim Urban), but was brought back when another contestant was disqualified, is now among the final 12. A glass blowing apprentice who admires Courtney Love (Siobhan Magnus) is now the leading female. The leading male, and perhaps the current overall favourite, is a massive human being (Michael Lynche) who would appear better suited to the NFL draft combine.

With the final 24 now cut in half, it’s entirely debatable whether the dozen that remain are collectively as talented and interesting as the dozen that are gone. So maybe now is as good a time as any to ask an important question: Is it possible to be too good-looking?

The question must be asked because of the continued presence of Casey James, a 27-year-old blues singer from Fort Worth, Texas, who was first celebrated this season for taking off his shirt at the behest of judge Kara DioGuardi. He is blessed of curly golden locks, blue eyes and a southern twang. He somehow maintains a constant two-day growth of whiskers and scruff without appearing lazy or homeless. He is vaguely reminiscent of the late-90s Matthew McConaughey (before McConaughey stopped trying). He is, by most accepted definitions, a good-looking man.

He can also, for the most part, sing: not quite brilliantly, but well enough that he entirely deserves to have made it this far. And yet, while necessary, his ability to sing will not necessarily determine his fate. All things being equal, if he ultimately wins, it will be, in large part, because he’s so good looking. If he is eventually eliminated, it will be, in at least some way, because he’s so good looking.

Conventional wisdom has it that the better looking you are, the more likely you are to “succeed” in life—or at least the easier it is thought to be for you to find what would generally be considered success. But it is maybe not quite so simple if your life is public life.

Consider politics. Attractive politicians—especially attractive female politicians—are often quickly celebrated for their potential, only to disappoint or otherwise fail. Sometimes, granted, the beautiful in politics are too quickly promoted or advanced to positions of prominence they are not yet prepared to handle. Some though may simply be doomed by their attractiveness and the expectation that attractiveness creates. The good-looking candidate is almost implicitly expected to be as eloquent or adept as they are attractive: the better looking they are, the more likely their other attributes are to pale in comparison.

Take, for instance, Sarah Palin. In a study released last year, participants who were asked to first consider Palin’s physical appearance were subsequently less likely to consider her competent. The study did not draw a straight line between attractiveness and perceived ability, but did suggest that a focus on physical appearance—objectification, essentially—ultimately limits a woman’s ability to be taken seriously otherwise.

This does not necessarily have anything to do with American Idol. But as much as Idol is about pop music, entertainment and celebrity, it is a political exercise: a test of one’s ability to appeal widely and motivate support from the public at large. It is not quite the same as succeeding in music or movies, pursuits in which the best-looking are often the most successful. Idol contestants don’t need to be admired or lusted after so much as they need to be endearing. They need a narrative. They need you to want them to succeed. And it is maybe not coincidence that none of the previous winners were overbearingly beautiful. Idol hasn’t anointed an ugly winner, but it also hasn’t elected an underwear model.

Casey James could, conceivably, have a career in underwear modelling. And in an uneven, inconsistent competition, he is, on the strength of a decent voice and identifiable style, a legitimate contender. As Kara DioGuardi noted recently, he would seem, “on paper,” to have everything going for him. But that might not be enough. Or, more specifically, that might be too much.

Why American Idol needs Haeley Vaughn

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 26, 2010 at 4:42 PM - 3 Comments

Could Hillary Clinton win American Idol? This is not an entirely facetious question.

As Idol debuted its Top 24 this week, the women’s half of the competition breaks down like a Democratic presidential primary: one obvious and seemingly inevitable front-runner (think Hillary), several intriguing prospects who could be brilliant or disastrous (Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, Bill Clinton, Bill Bradley, Paul Tsongas or Barack Obama) and a few unremarkable candidates who will soon be forgotten (Dick Gephardt).

The last group is not particularly worth dwelling upon. Two—Janell and Ashley—were eliminated in the competition’s first viewer vote. The rest (Lacey, Michelle Paige and Didi) will probably be gone in short order.

The middle group is both the most interesting, albeit least likely to succeed. Of this year’s 12 final girls, at least five qualify here. Lilly is a punky former busker with platinum blond bangs who sang a relatively obscure Beatles song (Fixing a Hole) this week. Katelyn is this season’s temptress, all big eyes and curly hair, who performed the Beatles’ Oh! Darling this week, while wearing a black leather skirt and bright red lipstick. Siobhan is a glass-blowing apprentice from Cape Cod who sang Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game in an surprisingly deep voice. Crystal is a dreadlocked mum with one of those chin piercings who sang an Alanis Morrisette song while playing guitar and harmonica.

Most intriguing is Haeley Vaughn, a 16-year-old, black, female country singer and guitarist with a way of singing that can only be described as odd-sounding. She turned I Want To Hold Your Hand into something almost reggae. Kara said she was “very pure,” Ellen said she shone, Simon said she was “a complete and utter mess.” Ellen countered that if she was a mess, she was a “hot mess.” It is difficult to express just how wildly divergent the possibilities are here. Haeley could be one of the most intriguing and unique performers in Idol history. She could end up being responsible for one of most excruciating performances in the history of American television. She could be Bill Clinton, she might be Howard Dean.

The clear and unquestionable favourite is Katie Stevens, a savvy 17-year-old who swaggered her way through a Michael Buble song this week. She is pretty and cute and blessed of a big voice. She has an endearing story: her quest for stardom set up as a race against the time and memory of her ailing grandmother. She seems somehow descended from the most successful Idols: Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood and Jordin Sparks, pleasingly and unostentatiously talented and attractive.

If a woman is to win this year’s Idol—Simon Cowell is on record as saying this year’s winner is most likely to be female—it should be Katie Stevens. And maybe that’s a problem.

It is, for one thing, harder to impress when you’re expected to be great. Katie was more or less fine this week, but she was scolded for seeming too contrived and not acting her age. For another, it is harder to be motivated if unchallenged. The unrivalled front-runner tempts doom (see Al Gore or John Kerry).

Cowell has said he wants to find the next Taylor Swift, someone “relevant.” That, right now, isn’t Katie Stevens. And that’s why Idol might need Haeley Vaughn.

The meaning of Ellen (on American Idol)

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 19, 2010 at 9:49 PM - 9 Comments

Herein, the fifth in a semi-regular series chronicling the ninth season of American Idol. You can read the first installment here, the second installment here, the third installment here and the fourth installment here.

America in 2010 is a confused place. Americans are of deeply held, but divergent and often contradictory, opinions. On some disagreements they are even unsure as to what they’re disagreeing about. In a recent poll, prompted by renewed debate over the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, 1,084 Americans adults were asked whether they favoured or opposed “homosexuals” being allowed to serve openly in the armed forces. Forty-four per cent of respondents were in favour, 42% were opposed. When the same 1,084 American adults were asked whether they favoured or opposed “gay men and lesbians” being allowed to serve openly in the armed forces, 58% were in favour, 28% opposed.

And now here, at this particularly peculiar moment in American history, is Ellen DeGeneres, an openly gay woman taking her seat to the left of Simon Cowell, appearing in prime time television on the Fox network to judge a wildly popular, nation-defining talent show.

What to make of this?

It is tempting to make something of the fact that, while openly gay men and women cannot yet officially fight to protect and preserve the American Dream, they can sit in judgment of those who pursue it. But that would be glib. And it would probably exaggerate the significance of Ellen’s arrival on American Idol. It is probably more accurate to conclude that however confusing America can be, it is also easily underestimated.

Ellen is at once the most subversive and the least objectionable person in American public life and maybe the best current demonstration of the American Dream. Thirteen years ago, she announced she was gay in big red letters on the cover of Time magazine. Two sitcoms of hers subsequently flopped, but she has since hosted the Oscars, the Grammys and the Emmys, become the star of a popular daytime talk show, been paid to represent American Express and Cover Girl, and married a beautiful TV actress with an exotic-sounding name. Last year, Forbes deemed her the 40th most powerful celebrity in America, slightly less powerful than Tom Hanks, but slightly more powerful than Eddie Murphy, Jay Leno and Barack Obama. Out magazine currently ranks her the second most powerful homosexual, behind only Senator Barney Frank.

She combines the best elements of Woody Allen and Oprah, somehow cerebral and heartfelt, self-effacing and generous. She’s uncompromising, but never more than she needs to be. The defining three minutes of her career to date might be her shrugging dismissal in May 2008 of John McCain’s position on same-sex marriage—possibly the nicest, but most efficient, deconstruction of a politician and a political position in the history of television.

She debuted last week as a judge on Idol, kissing Ryan Seacrest as she arrived and quickly settling into the role with relative ease. Without dominating the proceedings, she has already established herself as the über-judge: empathetic, but mischievous; blunt and biting, but also encouraging. She watches with deep concern in her eyes and beams when contestants succeed, but will quickly scold the off-key. She prizes confidence. She arrived in time for the final round of auditions—dubbed Hollywood Week, it is essentially a televised social experiment meant to see how many desperate young singers can be made to cry on camera—and seemed determined to impose some degree of humanity on the affair.

On paper, it might not make sense that a populist, explicitly Middle-American television show pitched to a nation openly grappling with the perceived ramifications of homosexuality could, with reasonable success, put a quirky, openly gay woman in a position of prominence. But she fits. If there is anything remarkable about her inclusion on Idol, it’s how relatively unremarkable it seems.

On paper, America is a confusing and messy place. But it is almost always better than it seems.

Shy Adam Lambert comes to town

By Elio Iannacci - Monday, February 8, 2010 at 12:30 PM - 107 Comments

Adam Lambert is not a fan of the phrase “less is more.” Sitting in an office at a Toronto radio station, the 28-year-old American Idol runner-up has just undergone his seventh makeup application for the day, and is wrapped in a grey scarf that is the size of a small comforter. “It’s a gift from Oprah,” he explains, as he starts to take off the fabric—which covers his six-foot-one frame like a sari—“she’s such a sweetie.” Although today’s schedule does not include any live performances, Lambert is completely stage-ready, sporting his signature black guyliner, spiked raven-coloured hair, and a face fully coated with a heavy dose of beige concealer. “I’ve never been that guy . . . ” the singer nicknamed “Glambert” says, before untangling the nest of silver necklaces and feathers hanging down his chest.

“You know, the one who’s always wanted to have a quiet, subtle life.”

The past few months for the openly gay singer have been anything but quiet. On Nov. 22, a day before the release of his disc, For Your Entertainment, Lambert performed at the American Music Awards, broadcast on ABC. During his number, he proceeded to grind one of his dancer’s faces into his pelvis, grab the crotch of another, and passionately kiss his male keyboardist. ABC got over 1,500 complaint calls and subsequently reneged on its offer to have him perform on Good Morning America.

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Hope comes to America

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 5, 2010 at 10:53 AM - 22 Comments

Herein, the fourth in a semi-regular series chronicling the ninth season of American Idol. You can read the first instalment here, the second instalment here and the third instalment here.

“We saved the best for last,” Ryan Seacrest enthused at the start of American Idol‘s eighth episode. The previous seven episodes, covering something like eight hours of primetime television, had apparently been a tease.

“We’re saving the best for last,” Seacrest said, another 50 minutes later.

After nearly nine hours then, covering auditions in seven cities that collectively drew more than 100,000 Americans desperate to demonstrate their worthiness, American Idol had something left to show us. Something we needed to see, to hear.

And so here was Hope Johnson, a pretty 19-year-old waitress and bartender from Arlington, Texas.

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American idol, American idolatry

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 8:51 AM - 25 Comments

The highlight of last night’s American Idol was a contestant’s performance of “Footprints in the Sand”, a song that hit big for Leona Lewis as a charity single in 2008. Many viewers were probably surprised to learn that Simon Cowell, a man famous for his no-nonsense, unsentimental persona, actually had a writing credit on this piece of sentimental nonsense.

Lord knows I was surprised, even though the by-the-numbers arrangement of the Leona Lewis version and the haphazard rhythmic tethering in the first couple verses are strong indicators of Cowellian involvement. As are Miss Lewis’s melismatic flourishes and corny octave-hopping. (Hit the “play” button at your own risk.)

Cowell is full of contradictions, all right. Not the least of these is that he is the creator of a remarkable living museum for the marvels of the pop canon, but as a producer and Svengali his influence is entirely destructive, devoted as it is to the promulgation of safeness, sameness, deadness. In the name of art he should probably be assassinated, and that act should probably be followed by the erection of a great public monument to his musical pedagogy.

But there is something delightful in the way that “Footprints in the Sand” compresses so much of recent cultural, religious, and economic history into a compact little four-minute earturd. “Footprints in the Sand” is based on “Footprints”, a ubiquitous bit of embroidery-grade evangelical doggerel whose origins are unknown. You know the one—the punchline goes “It was then that I carried you.” It was probably thunk up by some minister of the Gospel many decades ago, but it didn’t go viral until the late 1970s, after which it found its way into the sermonizing, extemporizing, and storytelling of worthies such as Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Nancy Reagan, James Dobson, and Rexella van Impe. Needless to say, many lesser lights also used “Footprints” to pad books and speeches. If you grew up with churchy people you know there’s an astonishing (and quite profitable) ecology of anecdotal flotsam like this, an ecology of which the secular world knows nothing.

Since no true author of “Footprints” can be confirmed, a number of hucksters and self-deluders have emerged to claim they wrote it in a moment of inspiration. Rachel Aviv has written a good overview of their weird world; some have managed to make money out of “Footprints”, though all but one of them must be frauds (sorry, I don’t buy the “cryptomnesia” stuff; it’s the favourite Twinkie Defence of plagiarist scum in my own profession). The unexpectedly rapid digitization of the world’s literature should permit scholars to eventually establish a latest possible date for the earliest version of “Footprints”, and that should explode many of these creation myths. It would not surprise me much to learn that Fr. John Donne knew of it and deployed it in a weak moment one Sunday.

Cowell is said to have had the idea of turning “Footprints” into a song. Detractors of Cowell could choose to regard this as a cover story, concealing a revival of the old recording-industry practice of unethical horning-in on songwriter revenues by managers, executives, and other bigwigs. Even the official version of the story doesn’t really suggest that Cowell necessarily deserves a piece of the pie, technically.

But any ass who’s had a couple years of piano lessons—and, strictly speaking, even that’s not necessary—can write a middle eight. It takes a genius to see “Footprints” and hear the clanking of coin. For the purposes of hypothetical litigation, the poem was just lying there in the commons, waiting for someone to pick it up. Millions already love it. But surely it was Cowell who insisted on having the text transformed just the right amount—a subtle, difficult trick, if you think about it. The Page-Magnusson-Kreuger-Cowell “Footprints in the Sand” is wholly blasphemized; there is no Jesus in it at all, just the footprints themselves. The schmaltzy core is preserved without offering offence to those already familiar with the poem. Its audience is multiplied without limit by secularization, but Jesus people will still think of it as a Jesus song, since it’s performed asexually in a vaguely gospel-y style. They may never even notice that the Lord has hit the cutting room floor.

Combine these expert gymnastics with Cowell’s finishing move of forcing his intellectual property onto broadcasters, retailers, and record-buyers as a charity single—i.e., a loss leader that will pay dividends in the future, when the record is covered and sampled—and what you have is truly a command performance. Bravo, Simon, bravissimo. I begrudge you nary a penny.

Is Avril Lavigne happy with her life?

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, January 28, 2010 at 11:14 AM - 26 Comments

Herein, the third in a semi-regular series chronicling the ninth season of American Idol. You can read the first instalment here and the second instalment here.

Wednesday night’s episode of American Idol, covering auditions in Los Angeles, was largely unremarkable, save for what might’ve been the most profound moment in Avril Lavigne’s public life to date.

In the lead-up to Ellen DeGeneres’ arrival as Idol‘s fourth judge (replacing the famously incoherent Paula Abdul), the early episodes of this season have featured a series of celebrity guest jurors. Wednesday night’s duties were split between Katy Perry’s cleavage and Lavigne. Perry’s cleavage proved a fair and constructive critic, but it was Lavigne who managed to introduce to the Idol paradigm an entirely original meditation on the precedence and value of the family unit in Western civilization.

We were first introduced to Jim Ranger, a hairy, bearded worship pastor and family man with three young children. He proceeded to sing, not badly, a song he had written himself. Randy asked Simon for his opinion. Simon deemed Ranger’s voice to be “authentic.” Randy asked Lavigne. She was apparently conflicted.

“You know, you have three children and you’re a pastor,” she observed. “To become a pop star, you know, you have to travel and you have to leave everything. It’s difficult out there on the road. But I do think that you have a good voice.”

When asked for her verdict, Lavigne responded in the negative. “I’m sorry I think I have to say no,” she said.

Kara, apparently seeing something in Lavigne’s argument, expressed some trepidation, but ultimately said yes, joining Randy and Simon to advance Ranger to the next round. Mr. Ranger celebrated excitedly.

There are perhaps two ways to look at this.

1. Avril Lavigne, a girl from a small town in eastern Ontario who sang in the church, who signed a record deal at 16, became a global pop star by the age of 18, was on the cover of Rolling Stone before she could legally consume alcohol in Canada, married her rock star boyfriend before her 22nd birthday, had divorced her rock star husband by the age of 25, at some point befriended Paris Hilton and showed up for the taping of this episode, at the age of 26, wearing a hooded sweatshirt with devil horns, is nearly the last person on earth who should be deciding who is and is not capable of maintaining a normal life while pursuing pop stardom.

2. Avril Lavigne, a girl from a small town in eastern Ontario who sang in the church, who signed a record deal at 16, became a global pop star by the age of 18, was on the cover of Rolling Stone before she could legally consume alcohol in Canada, married her rock star boyfriend before her 22nd birthday, had divorced her rock star husband by the age of 25, at some point befriended Paris Hilton and showed up for the taping of this episode, at the age of 26, wearing a hooded sweatshirt with devil horns, is precisely the person to be warning others about the potential perils of pop stardom.

The first option is possibly more ripe for mockery, but also, somehow, less plausible. However emotionally stunted Lavigne may otherwise be as a result of her early accomplishment in the entertainment industry—even by generous standards, the devil-horned hooded-sweatshirt should probably not be worn by anyone over the age of 21 who wishes to be taken seriously as a human being—she seemed genuinely concerned by Jim Ranger’s situation. Or at least the concern seemed too odd to be contrived. And while a deluded pop star might not have noticed the irony of her concern, a truly deluded pop star probably wouldn’t have cared enough in the first place to say so.

So maybe the second option makes more sense. Maybe she meant it. And maybe she knew of what she spoke. And maybe she is one of those few who can know what that life is actually like to live.

Unfortunately, if all that is true then the unavoidable conclusion would seem to be that Avril Lavigne is sort of sad. Or at least that she hasn’t always been all that happy, that she has struggled with her life as we’ve known it. This is maybe not all that surprising. In fact, it’s impossible to believe she hasn’t struggled. But it is still sort of heartbreaking to see it vaguely implied on national television under the guise of warning another human being against pursuing her line of work, lest he somehow damage what she perhaps sees as an already rewarding, or at least important, life. It is entirely possible, in this scenario, that Avril Lavigne sort of envies Jim Ranger.

Granted, it is possible to over-think this. But if one of the defining pop stars of the last decade has just conceded that stardom should not necessarily be the ultimate and all-consuming goal in the life of the vocally talented, then this truly is the end of American Idol.

Will Simon destroy ‘American Idol’?

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 10:54 AM - 13 Comments

Simon Cowell may destroy American Idol by leaving it, but does that suit his plans? The ninth season of the show, which began last Tuesday, is Cowell’s last season hosting the world’s No. 1 hit. While Fox tries to replace him, he will concentrate on developing a U.S. version of his U.K. hit The X Factor, to premiere on Fox in the fall of 2011. That show is a multi-week competition in which unknowns audition for a panel of judges, including Cowell, and the audience’s favourite performer gets to make a recording. In other words, it’s basically Idol under a different name. It might seem risky for the network to give Cowell almost the same show. But if it succeeds, it could make him more successful than ever.

Idol has been durable so far: despite the departure of Paula Abdul, the first new episode of the season showed almost no ratings drop-off from last year. But observers think that Cowell is a different story. Audiences have come to associate the entire franchise with his nasty remarks, and episodes inevitably seem to revolve around him (like a much-hyped moment in the season premiere in which people told him to “shut up”). TV writer Ken Levine compared Idol without Cowell to the PGA tour without Tiger Woods, while Craig Ferguson told his late-night audience that Cowell “is the show.” After Cowell announced his departure, Idol creator Simon Fuller left the show to “start a new entertainment company,” as if acknowledging that his old property isn’t as valuable now.

Continue…

Searching for fame with your pants on the ground

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 2:24 PM - 7 Comments

Herein, the second in a semi-regular series chronicling the ninth season of American Idol.

Behold the power of living without embarrassment.

Some months ago, a 63-year-old civil rights activist named Larry Platt went to an American Idol open call in Atlanta. Aside from not possessing the necessary vocal talent, he far exceeded the show’s age limit. Still, he was allowed to audition for the show’s judges and proceeded to sing a self-penned song entitled Pants On The Ground, an infectious jingle meant to warn against the peril of wearing ill-fitting jeans.

Last Wednesday, that audition aired on Fox. By Thursday night, Late Night host Jimmy Fallon, impersonating Neil Young, was signing his own rendition of Pants On The Ground. Saturday afternoon, after leading his team to victory over the Dallas Cowboys, Minnesota Vikings quarterback Brett Favre sang the chorus during the team’s locker room celebration. On Monday, Platt, who marched in Selma alongside Martin Luther King Jr., was a guest on The View. A small record label is offering him a chance to record Pants On The Ground. In the meantime, he has achieved the triple crown of Internet fame: YouTube tributes, a million-member Facebook group and homemade t-shirts for sale on eBay.

Continue…

This Week: Good news/Bad news

By macleans.ca - Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

A week in the life of simon cowell
The upcoming season of American Idol (the reality hit’s ninth) will be the last for snarky British judge Simon Cowell. But don’t worry, he’s not going far. Cowell’s moving on to produce an American version of his own hit British competition show, The X Factor, which is pretty much the same thing as Idol, to be aired in the U.S. on Fox, which—you guessed it—is the same network that carries Idol. And guess who he may be bringing along with him? Former Idol judge Paula Abdul.

Hope in Afghanistan
Canadian Forces in Afghanistan had a bad year in 2009—32 of our soldiers died and many more were injured. A Canadian journalist, Michelle Lang, also lost her life. But there is hope that with a troop surge and new commitment on the part of NATO troops to live and work among ordinary Afghans, 2010 could bring better news. Plus, a new poll suggests that Afghans are more supportive of NATO’s mission there and less supportive of the Taliban. This is an important step in the fight to rid Afghanistan of extremists: unless Afghans themselves are on our side, all the peacekeeping and anti-terror missions in the world will not bring peace and democracy to the country. NATO relies heavily on Afghans—for goodwill and information regarding terrorists. With them on our side, the fight against the Taliban could take a turn for the better.

The war on salt
New York is at the forefront of the war on unhealthy foods. The city famously banned trans fats and forced restaurateurs to post calorie counts on their menus, a move that has been largely successful. Now the Big Apple is planning to stick it to another food foe: salt. It has set a goal of reducing the amount of salt in packaged and restaurant food by 25 per cent over the next five years. The city may have more difficulty convincing citizens to go easy on the sodium—while high levels of salt intake can cause strokes and cardiovascular problems, consumers have traditionally been wary of low-sodium products, fearing that they won’t taste as good. New Yorkers may soon be carrying salt shakers in their pockets.

Beware Kim Jong-Il
North Korea has said it is open to new talks about nuclear disarmament, in exchange for a peace treaty with the U.S. and an end to crippling sanctions. While we are wary of any platitudes that come out of Kim Jong-Il’s mouth, we are still encouraged that peace with North Korea may indeed be a possibility. If ending the awful human rights crisis in the Hermit Kingdom means dealing with a two-faced despot, we’d say it’s worthwhile. As long as we remain wary of Kim and his cohorts.

Medal domination
Our athletes are winning medals left, right and centre in the run-up to the Olympics. Snowboarder Jasey Jay Anderson has won his last two races; Pierre Lueders won two bobsled events last week, and our long-track speed skaters are dominating their sport. Combine that with the technological advantages (profiled last week in Maclean’s) developed for our athletes, and it looks like we may very well own the podium in Vancouver.

The return of Palin
She’s baaack! Sarah Palin has signed on as a regular contributor to Fox News, where she will also host occasional series. We don’t expect “her rogue-ness” to contribute anything worthwhile about serious news topics and politics—she’s more likely to offer shrill, empty jabs at the left-wing mainstream media, mixed with cringe-inducing memories of aw-shucks Alaska. A new book about the 2008 presidential campaign claims that John McCain’s advisers warned of Palin, “She doesn’t know anything.” That sounds just about right.

Ironic academics
On Monday, a group of over 100 Canadian university professors sent a letter to newspapers voicing their discontent with Stephen Harper’s decision to prorogue Parliament. They accused the Prime Minister of violating “the trust of the Canadian people [and] thus acting anti-democratically.” Recent polls suggest many Canadians support that statement, but we find the professors’ stance more than a little ironic, given that Ontario community college teachers are currently threatening to strike. That would be another blow to Ontario’s post-secondary students, who have endured countless walkouts and strikes by faculty and teaching assistants in recent years. Academics in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Another wall?
Israel is planning to build another separation barrier—this time on its border with Egypt. Unlike its other security fence in the West Bank, which has successfully kept out terrorists, the Egyptian wall will mainly be used to keep illegal migrant workers from entering the country—much like the barrier Saudi Arabia built along parts of its border with Yemen. Egypt has said it has no problem with the barrier—as long as it is built on Israeli land—but we wouldn’t be surprised if the wall produced a sour relationship between Israel and one of its stronger regional allies. More walls don’t make for better neighbours.

Junk snail mail
More woes for those Canadians who still rely on the post office to send and receive mail. Canada Post has upped the price of domestic stamps to 57 cents, a rise of three cents (the largest hike in the Crown corporation’s history). As if that weren’t bad enough for post office users, the infamous “419” online scam—wherein a wealthy African attempts to access bank accounts by promising a massive payout—has made its way to snail mail. There is one alternative that we can think of—it’s cheaper, faster, and you don’t need to leave your couch to send or receive. You’ll still have to deal with 419 junk mail, though.

The beginning of the end of American Idol

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 13, 2010 at 7:58 AM - 8 Comments

Herein, the first in a semi-regular series chronicling the ninth season of American Idol.

With last year’s winner now almost entirely forgotten, it is time again for a new season of American Idol. Such is the circle of life, the natural order of things, the way it has always been. Or at least the way it has been since Starbucks began systematically over-caffinating the developed world.

If everything about life has always been fleeting, it is somehow now more so. Everything about Idol has always seemed tenuous—desperate hopefuls chasing glory, contestants forgotten shortly after defeat and victory, each season daring to drain America’s well of undiscovered talent. And so it is that this season begins feeling like an end.

As announced days before last night’s season opener, Simon Cowell, the show’s British judge and central force, will be moving on after this ninth campaign, apparently to pursue another televised talent show. It is possible to overstate the implications of this, but only barely. It is Cowell, tormentor of the weak and cruel voice of reality, who is counted on to identify talent, guide the viewer and bestow his blessing on the truly worthy. The other judges are superfluous voices of generalities, the contestants interchangeable, Ryan Seacrest unremarkably acceptable. Cowell is constant, an ever-present reminder of the show’s claim to a higher purpose. He wears only t-shirts and seeks only to reward the deserving. He is possibly the last pure and uncompromised thing on television. And a post-Cowell Idol would seem destined to be something akin to a post-Jordan NBA or a post-Clinton America: strange, uninspired and grasping at golden calves (in fairness, Grant Hill and Donald Rumsfeld seemed like really good ideas at the time).

The producers—perhaps astutely, perhaps accidentally—had already begun to transition to something new. A fourth judge—the relatively substantive, if easily antagonized, songwriter Kara DioGuardi—was added last season. After an acrimonious split, Paula Abdul, Cowell’s effusive foil, will ultimately be replaced by the vaguely subversive Ellen DeGeneres. (Randy Jackson, a former music producer who may or may not have been created by Jim Henson, remains and could well endure in a post-Cowell Idol. If only because it is impossible now to imagine him existing outside this show.) Assuming Cowell is replaced by someone with some wit—and a British accent—it is possible to see Idol surviving and succeeding, in some sense, for several years more. But it won’t be the same. It will be somehow more complicated. Idol, as we’ve known it, will cease at this season’s end, destined to struggle for some time unless and until a transformative figure (its LeBron James or Captain Sully) arrives to save it for a new generation.

We have then but five months to revel in simpler times. Let us cherish them.

The first episode of this ninth season, chronicling the start of open auditions, was in keeping with what we have come to expect from each season’s opener: a parade of weirdos, performance artists, deluded narcissists, sobbing also-rans, irrepressible talent, conspicuous product placement and heartwarming tales from Middle America. For all the mocking freakishness of the early going, it is on inspiration that Idol ultimately depends. In these first two hours, covering tryouts in Boston, we were introduced to the girl whose family adopts children with Down Syndrome, the plus-sized Italian bartender, the floppy-haired hippie with two broken wrists, the girl whose grandmother has Alzheimer’s, the handsome cancer survivor and the Long Island girl whose parents were strict churchgoers. This last singer, apparently chasing her parents’ approval, somehow seemed the most affecting.

We were also introduced to one girl, a student from Boston, who was said to possibly possess “it.” And Victoria Beckham was there, for some reason. And, in one segment, American Idol was explained as the ultimate end goal of the American Revolution.

In its own way, this all made perfect sense.

Confusion reigns

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 2, 2009 at 3:16 PM - 43 Comments

First, a report that Suaad Hagi Mohamud may have referenced American Idol judge Randy Jackson in her interview with consular officials in Kenya. Now, more on what the government knew, when it knew it and what it was saying publicly.

In June, Mohamud’s MP Joe Volpe (Liberal, Eglinton-Lawrence) starts making inquiries. Although the investigation was closed, emails show officials deciding to tell him they are working with Kenyan authorities to verify the identity of the individual.

On July 2, a day after the Star broke the story, the media line changes. A department spokesperson says the woman has conclusively been determined an imposter. Behind the scenes, officials were second-guessing themselves. ”Have we done our due diligence?” the minister’s office asks.

On July 3, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon’s spokesperson Catherine Loubier writes: “Could we look into other options … such as fingerprinting and genetic testing?”

The Prime Minister is on record as saying “we”—however you interpret that—became aware of the situation in mid-August.

These Friends of Ellen's

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 10:30 AM - 1 Comment

So as I understand it, Ellen DeGeneres will finally be returning to prime-time with a midseason replacement sitcom. She plays a daytime talk-show host who unexpectedly gets the chance to host a popular music competition show. She has crazy adventures with her mismatched friends: the acerbic wisecracking British guy, the black guy, and the pretty, ditzy girl who can annoy Ellen, kind of like Audrey on Ellen’s first sitcom. Meanwhile, Ellen’s life is complicated by the woman she replaced, an unpredictable and possibly unhinged woman who finds ways to sabotage Ellen’s new career.

I know midseason replacement sitcoms are a gamble, and Ellen hasn’t had a sitcom in a while, but I’m going to predict that this show will get pretty good ratings, and might even win its time slot.

High school jock forced to sing!

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

Just because Glee has a lot of singing and dancing doesn’t make it a musical; it’s just trying to get in on the market for musicals. The new Fox show, which begins its official season on Global on Sept. 9 (the original pilot will air on Sept. 2), is an irony-filled comedy-drama starring Matthew Morrison as a teacher who sees the school choir as a way for kids and teachers to fulfill their dreams; it’s like Friday Night Lights if singing Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat were more important than football. Dante Di Loreto, one of the executive producers of the show, told Maclean’s that “people who enjoy musicals will enjoy the show, and we also think that people who never thought they would enjoy a musical will enjoy the show.” Glee is coming along at a time when many musical franchises are more lucrative than scripted-series television. Glee doesn’t want to imitate those shows, but if it gets some of their crossover popularity, the producers won’t complain.

Many critics have compared Glee, co-created by Ryan Murphy (Nip/Tuck), to that other franchise about teenagers who want to sing their hearts out, High School Musical; that may have made networks receptive to upbeat, song-filled high school stories. (Not only networks: a movie remake of Fame comes out in September.) Of course Glee aims to be edgier than High School Musical. It has an athlete (Cory Monteith) who crosses over into singing, but in his case, it’s because the teacher frames him for marijuana possession and blackmails him into joining the choir. Another thing that sets Glee apart from its Disney Channel predecessor is that all the songs are done in the “real” world of onstage performance; Di Loreto says that they’re “never doing what you do in a traditional musical, which is bursting into song at any moment.” That brings it closer to American Idol, a show about young performers trying to prove their singing abilities. Fox even ran a sneak preview of the Glee pilot (in a shortened version) after an episode of Idol. Continue…