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Just a few months ago, the producers of “American Idol” declared that this would be the season they dragged the aging goliath into the future.
With ratings sagging over the past few years and its winners finding it increasingly difficult to sell records, “Idol” was in need of a dramatic reboot.
“Maybe it’s like a diva, maybe it’s more like Lady Gaga,” Randy Jackson mused about the type of star he hoped would emerge. “Maybe it’s Muse, Bono or Brandon Flowers of the Killers.”
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Now, at the season’s end, with “Idol’s” first all-country finale on tap, the “c” word — for contemporary — is not much heard.
On the ratings front, “Idol” defied entertainment gravity by actually gaining viewers in its 10th year — after the departure of its iconic star, Simon Cowell, no less.
However, while dodging the bullet, concerns about its long-term health remain, especially as the show all but took a dive on the challenge to update itself for a very different public than greeted “Idol” on its 2002 launch.
During the pre-season, “Idol’s” producers seemed desperate for a winner who spoke to today’s music buyers.
It’s been five years since the show produced a genuine mega-selling superstar like Chris Daughtry.
In the previous three years, the winners’ trophies have gone to a Cute White Boy Dynasty whose low-key rock styles have been far removed from the techno-fueled sounds which dominate today’s pop charts and radio airplay.
As we reach the finish line, the rockers’ reign will indeed end this year, but, as it turns out, it will be broken by the only style more old-fashioned than mainstream rock — country music — which gave “Idol” both of its finalists in Scotty McCreery and Lauren Alaina.
It’s not just the finalists, however.
Pre-season promises were bandied about doing away with the clunky theme weeks. Not only did they stay in the end, but the show devoted weeks to the song books of Carole King and Leiber and Stoller, composers about as relevant to today’s music marketplace as Gilbert and Sullivan.
Even the one element of the show which seems to have been an unqualified hit — the additions of Steven Tyler and Jennifer Lopez — at second glance, reinforces the stodginess problem.
Tyler, of course, flowing robes aside, is AARP eligible.
And “youthful” — rather than actually young — is the term more often associated with Lopez. The better part of a decade has passed since her zeitgeist moment.
The contrast looks especially rough when compared with the judges of NBC’s “The Voice” — a quartet of still-potent hitmakers: Christina Aguilera, Blake Shelton, Cee Lo Green and Maroon 5’s Adam Levine.
And as “Idol” theme weeks continue to honor Tin Pan Alley, in the fall it faces Simon Cowell’s “X Factor,” a show which has made being au courant its lifeblood — embracing hip-hop, for instance, in a way “Idol” has never touched with a 50-foot pole and offering mash-ups of Katy Perry and Eminem. But, in the end, “Idol’s” talk of younging up the show may have been a very clever head fake, sending its rivals scurrying in the wrong direction.
Let the others fight it out to see who is the edgiest; being the favorite of the wide, uncool middle has never been a losing strategy in TV.
And with 20 million plus viewers to spare, old and stodgy looks like a pretty solid formula. — Richard Rushfield is the author of the first comprehensive history of “Idol,” “American Idol: The Untold Story.”