katherine st asaph

And fail, and just go off:

Vegas Round is one of the worst “innovations” <i>American Idol</i> has ever introduced. There is only one reason ever to go to Las Vegas on a reality TV show: pure, inky evil, the sort of junket that encourages singers to ply each other with diamond-infused vodka and go on poker-table crawls and whittle away whichever savings give them other life options than <i>American Idol</i>, then announce the SHOCKING TWIST that said whittling wasn’t ever on Fox’s tab, then turn the cameras on. Let us re-iterate that this is despicable—though not <i>that</i> unprecedented—and nothing Fox should ever consider, now or during any meeting where the words “<i>Idol</i> mansion” could be uttered. But what’s the alternative? Trot contestants out in cruise-ship attire on musty stages that host mustier singers, then tell them to marvel about “Vegas, baby!” and choreograph themselves just short of Rockettes while pretending that any current radio format wants anything to do with any of this. 

And let’s go back to the nightmare editing. There are two things you’ve got to balance: giving every contestant screen-time, face-time, voice-time and name-time, and making sure you can nudge the standouts to get the most of each. You’ve also got to balance singing with offstage dramatics. This is part of why people like the <i>Idol</i> audition episodes: you <i>can’t</i> introduce contestants without striking that balance by default. (Some people probably also like watching buffoonery and various unfortunate -isms, but let’s pretend they don’t exist. But by splitting Hollywood Week into drama episodes and singing episodes, you get two results, neither good: you get episodes where nothing happens, and you get episodes with a lot of good singers (who got here by being good) blending into one pretty-good vocal supercut. In a sky full of stars, no star stands out; the best you can do is a constellation, or maybe a meteor or two.

I promise I’ll write about you-know-what after this goes up.