STARTING with tonight’s “American Idol,” the screechers, warblers and endless freak parade of deluded wannabe pop stars will have to wait until next year.
Our long, national, ear-splitting nightmare is over. Welcome to the show’s Hollywood edition – where only those
few, truly gifted, golden-throated singers will prevail.
“The level of talent this year is quite high,” “Idol” executive producer Ken Warwick told The Post yesterday. “It’s a tiring, exhausting, stressful process, and they were OK up until the first batch got voted off.”
After last fall’s national search, only about 175 contestants were chosen to try out for the show’s second round in Los Angeles. Of that bunch, just 48 singers make it into the next round.
The group is then whittled down to 24, and that’s when viewers begin to cast their votes.
“There are kids this year who are very good, who are very confident, but in relation to the other kids [in the competition], they get sent home,” says Warwick.
“The fact that there were kids who expected to stay and other kids expected them to stay – but they were told to leave – made [the mood] a little more edgy than in the past.”
There are also three sets of twins that made it through to Hollywood this year. One set, Derrell and Terrell Brittenum, 28, turned out to be in trouble with the law – they were charged with using another man’s identity to buy a car. An episode featuring the stolen-car saga unfolds next week.
“They certainly gave Hollywood a flavor of its own this year,” Warwick says of the Brittenums. Another set of twins lost its footing when one girl ended up having throat surgery. As to the fate of the third set, Warwick says, viewers will have to see what happens.
“It’s very dramatic, too,” he says.
Warwick says that while he usually gets a lot of laughs out of the first phase of “Idol” – a part of the show that once spawned the improbable celebrity of William Hung, the worst singer ever to become famous from the show – he personally likes the final few weeks of “Idol.”
“I prefer it when it gets more serious,” he says. “I love it when I see a kid who genuinely is talented and would not have had the chance otherwise.”