Hold Your Applause

Survivor Lives On

The first 2/3 of the "Fans vs. Favorites" edition of Survivor wasn't doing a lot for me, to be honest. The fans weren't especially interesting and the only one who seemed to want to play, Tracy, became marginalized right away. The favorites were somewhat more tolerable, and Cirie will never not be great to watch, but the inclusion of Johnny Fairplay let a bad taste right off, and the premature loss of Yau-Man (wrong side of intertribe alliance, too feared for his reputation for smarts) and Jonathan (injury during poorly designed challenge) took away a couple of the better characters.

The first little hint of intrigue came around the time of the merge, when Parvati decide to put herself at the center of a second solid alliance in her new tribe to go along with the original favorites alliance she had (everyone on that original alliance still being in the game). This isn't something we've seen very often on the show, and it was a surprise to see Parvati, basically an empty (bathing) suit in the Cook Islands, being the one to pull it off. We assumed that at some point Parvati would be forced to choose an alliance, or would be able to use one as an escape pod when one alliance got the upperhand, but instead we saw something very different: she and Cirie engineered the ouster of Ozzy while still keeping the overall trust of Amanda, the other member of that original alliance and someone who was completely left out (wisely) of the Ozzy plot.

Ozzy leaving seemed like one of the epic moments in recent Survivor history, but little did we know it would touch off the greatest sustained run of memorable tribal councils in 16 seasons--an incredible accomplishment. Jason (who had foolishly quit the immunity challenge the week before and was saved only because Cirie and Parvait became more interested in Ozzy) failed to play his individual immunity idol, even though he had to have known how vulnerable he was and stood a very good chance of winning future individual immunities had he used the idol the week he didn't have it. Then Amanda, who was becoming a target due to her likability, fooled everyone except Parvati by playing individual immunity and engineering the boot of Alexis, who had sent her to exile island in the first place. Finally, and most inexplicably, the remaining four women convinced Erik that his only chance with the jury was to "redeem himself" (for what was never explained) by giving away the individual immunity idol to Natalie, who then proceeded to vote him out along with the rest. Erik has thus gone down in reality show infamy, a cruel fate for someone who apparently cares more about winning the approval of Survivor contestants more than is really healthy.

One would assume the excitement is just about over, and it's hard to sense who might have the upperhand in tonight's finale, though I don't think Natalie has much of a shot. Erik and Jason would never vote for her, and I doubt any of the favorites would support her over one of their own. In fact, I don't know why Cirie and Natalie weren't more genuinely interested in the phony deal they presented to Erik (the three of us vote out Parvati). There was apparently a little concern about Parvati either having the individual immunity idol or giving it to Amanda, but if I'm Natalie that's a chance I'm willing to take, because I suspect she's finishing fourth unless she wins the last immunity challenge (and I think Amanda will be favored to win this, as she won it in China). For Cirie's part, I think she would win in a trio with Natalie and Erik, and possibly with one of these two plus Parvati, but I don't think she can beat Amanda.  Cirie too could be in for a fourth place finish (although I think she's a lock to win the fan vote for the $100,000).

At any rate, Amanda looks like the favorite to win tonight, which is interesting because many found her to be downcast when she appeared on the China season finale. Little did any of us know she had made her second straight final four (at least), and is one tribal council away from becoming the first person to play the game twice and never be voted out.

A few other tidbits:

* The game would have been very different had Jonathan not been to injured to go on and Kathy not followed behind him. That tribe never lost an immunity challenge after the player switch, but they went into the merge with no numbers advantage. It's likely that Parvati would have found herself marginalized had Jonathan and Kathy not left, but when they did, she took advantage and hooked herself up with Alexis and Natalie. (And as we've found out the last few weeks, Alexis and Natalie weren't nonentities as much as we weren't learning much about them because they spent several weeks not going to tribal council.)

* Ozzy's first time playing the game didn't really provide him with much Survivor experience, because he was hardly ever in any jeopardy, losing individual immunity only once. Although he lost the first 2 individual immunity challenges to Jason this time around, he certainly figured to win his share had he just stayed in the game, which is why I can't understand how he could have been so casual about the individual immunity idol, which he never once carried with him to tribal council. He seemed to think that because he was in an alliance, everyone would just stand back and let him win the cash. He forgot he was in an alliance with Cirie.

* And regarding our favorite nurse: the thing that makes her a great Survivor player is that while so many always say "It's a game, nothing personal," she really means it. Everything with her is a means to an end; all relationships are about trying to get her closer to the money. She's a lot like Richard Hatch in that respect. All she does is think about ways to get ahead in the game, and she has antennae for opportunities and potential fractures to exploit that are absolutely uncanny. If only some more of the so-called fans had anything like the same game skills.

Tell Me You Love Me: Naked Emotion

The irony of the HBO series Tell Me You Love Me, which ends its first season Sunday, is that a show initially promoted as having a level of sexual explicitness never before seen on television has turned out to be almost the complete opposite of ratings bait.

The series is almost European in its deliberate pace, insistence on the importance of dialogue, and yes, the amount of nude flesh on display. The prototypical Tell Me You Love Me scene is two people alone in a room, talking quietly (or even harder for some to bear, not talking). There's no music until the closing credits roll. There aren't fights so much as there is emotional violence, and things that don't happen tend to have more import than things that do. Even the sex isn't the sort of rapid-edit, Adrian Lyne-style music video knockoff that Americans are used to seeing onscreen. The lengthiest sex scene so far this season, if not necessarily the most graphic, a "nice to see you again" grappling between exes Jamie (Michelle Borth) and Hugo (Luke Farrell Kirby), conveyed the physical need of both characters, but was so matter-of-fact it ended up about as erotic as those nature films from your 7th grade science class.

The show is structured around 3 couples, all of whom have a relationship with therapist May Foster, played by Jane Alexander (the 68 year-old Alexander had her own sex scene this season, perhaps inspired by her stint in the Clinton administration). The closest thing to an Everyman couple, certainly the pair that seems exactly right as married, is Katie (Ally Walker) and David (Tim DeKay). The couple has stopped having sex, but seem mutually unable to articulate exactly what went wrong, although the accumulated weight of responsibility and family seems as good an explanation as any. In what has been the most startling outburst so far delivered on the show, David used his first visit to May's office to unload at length on how it's impossible to get turned on surrounded by the mundane details of his suburban existence. Katie is incredulous and hurt: "Our entire life. That's what you just trashed," she responds.

For her own part, Katie is obviously uncomfortable dealing with the whole notion of sex as a pleasurable activity in itself, going so far as to recently bring up with  David the subject of having another baby, as if by becoming a mom again on the threshold of middle age, she can put off ever having to think about sex again. On the most recent episode, Katie was alarmed to discover that her best friend Rita had decided to divorce. The women had always listened to each other's gripes about husbands and family; now with Rita ditching a husband, making the decisive move that her friend would find unthinkable, Katie seems adrift and hyper.

The other couples are less interesting, if only because the females in them aren't especially likable. Carolyn (Sonya Walger) is an attorney, the sort of driven career woman that doesn't come across well in pop culture. Husband Palek (Adam Scott) is an easygoing builder. The first several episodes of this season chronicled the pair's heavily scheduled sex life as Carolyn set out to get pregnant, something that finally happened only after they had more or less given up on the idea--and after Palek said he really didn't want to have kids anyway. As the last episode ended, Palek, overwhelmed by the baby and a major work setback, suffered a panic attack and later told Carolyn (who had just quit her job) that he needed to leave the marriage. Neither of these people seem well-suited for any relationship, let alone one with each other (I had been blaming Scott for my problems with their storyline, but he's really picked up his performance the last two weeks). But can Palek just walk away from fatherhood with no regrets, the way his own father did?

That leaves Jamie, who has been a lightning rod for critics of the show, in part because Borth's voice takes a lot of getting used to, and in part because as the youngest of the females, Jamie has borne the brunt of the nude scenes. However, I think she's a good deal easier to take now than she was at the start of the season, when she broke things off with Hugo over his refusal to definitively promise he could stay monogamous forever. After Jamie began therapy and confided to May that she herself had never been monogamous, she became more interesting to watch, because she's young enough to show some growth. She went from Hugo right back into a fling with Nick (Ian Somerhalder, who was much cleaner-looking playing a plane crash victim on a tropical island on Lost than he is on this show), but now seems ready to try life alone for a while.

Despite its ratings, which are lower than those for the show that preceded it in HBO's premier Sunday slot, the now-canceled John From Cincinnati, Tell Me You Love Me has been renewed for a second season (it has to be a lot cheaper to produce than David Milch's surfing melodrama was). The final episode is currently running on HBO's on demand channels, and without spoiling anything, I think it was meant to function as a possible series finale, with resolutions of sorts for all the pairings. Things are wrapped up so well that I wonder if the second season might not even have a substantially different cast. Whatever they decide to do, I hope more people check out this unusual and provocative drama. I'll be back next year even if everyone keeps their clothes on.

Viva Phil!

You just know Phil Keoghan has been chomping at the bit, biding his time while all those upstart Kiwis (Flight of the Conchords, that host on The Next Great American Band) attempted to steal his thunder.

But Phil's absence from our lives is nearly over. CBS, having somehow overestimated America's desire to see Hugh Jackman and Melanie Griffith sing, has canceled Viva Laughlin after just 2 episodes. While The Amazing Race was left off the CBS fall schedule, a 12th season was filmed over the summer, and many assumed TAR would be moved up from the winter to fill an inevitable early hole in the CBS lineup (you might remember this is what happened with TAR 6 in the fall of 2004--that was the year we had Seasons 5, 6, and 7 air in the space of about 10 months).

So our favorite TV travelogue is back in just 13 days, on November 4. More on this season's batch of racers (who I really want to be good so as to finally get the taste of All-Stars out of my mouth after 5 months) as we get word.

Survivor: Once More, With Egg Roll

15 seasons? Has it been 15 already? We're all getting older. And yet, Jeff Probst stays the same age. How does that work?

The flagship reality show has done a great job of not so much reinventing itself as tweaking things enough every season to keep both participants and viewers on their toes. It doesn't always work--almost everyone now concedes that despite a pretty good cast, Fiji was weakened by its big twist, the luxury v. poverty division that rendered the first half of the season drama-free.

Whether due to  some concern about the signs of age in the show or simply excitement about the fact that they're in China, CBS seems to be pulling out the promotional stops this go-round. The CBS home page provides some videos that answer some longstanding fan questions, giving a glimpse of the production base camp and showing the work of the "dreamteamers," who test all the challenges beforehand to make sure they're suitable for the show (I assume the ability to retrieve and put together puzzles is the key to getting hired as a dreamteamer).

As for the cast itself, there haven't been many recent editions of Survivor to begin with only 16 players. That makes for a fairly predictable 13-week season--12 weeks to get down to the Final Four, and then a finale--but I assume it won't quite work out that way. The larger casts seemed to make it harder to get to know everyone early, so I give a thumbs-up to this development.

I've learned from my years of following Survivor that trying to predict winners by looking at cast bios and preview videos is a fools' game (although it is often very easy to predict which players will be utter disasters). But I'll offer a few ill-informed opinions anyway.

At least early on, I'm pinning my hopes on Aaron, a surfing instructor who unaccountably grew up in eastern Ohio. Aaron is an Ohio State graduate, and frankly that's all the info I need to pull for him. While I don't know that she's going to last too long in the game, I look forward to seeing Denise, a school cafeteria worker who named her dog after Patriots linebacker Tedy Bruschi and has one of the most extreme mullets ever seen on television. Courtney has an interesting bio: she's highbrow enough to have named her cat after the poet Catullus, and yet she's had a succession of lowbrow jobs (she's currently a waitress). She shows a few indications of being the comedian in the cast, and if there's anything better than a pretty girl with a sense of humor, I'd love to know what it is.

I have no idea what to make of Steve "Chicken" Morris, who appears to be an attempt to revisit the magic that was Tom Buchanan (he's even from the same county as Big Tom). He has dogs named Zek, Cluck, Poke, and Eli...of course he does. Jaime is a native of Florida who describes herself as a lifelong Buffalo Bills fan, and there's no way that's a good omen. Todd is described as an "openly gay Mormon" (he's not the first one Survivor has had), and I'm going to describe him as quite likely to be the biggest tool in the cast. Someone who says shopping and drinking coffee are among his hobbies, calls himself "fantastic, amazing, awesome and super-original," and says "the Spice Girls are the most significant historical event of the past 100 years" is someone I'm not going to like, I'm pretty sure.

This edition of Survivor is unusual for casting some people who are semi-famous already, and unlike the situation is Guatemala, where ex-quarterback Gary Hogeboom hid his status from everybody, I think at least a couple of these folks are going to have problems staying hidden. Amanda is a former Miss Earth, and since I had never heard of Miss Earth before hearing of Amanda, she might not qualify as famous. But Ashley Massaro is familiar to anyone who follows professional wrestling, and Jean-Robert Bellande is a big deal in the world of poker. I'll be interested to see if the qualities that go into being an excellent poker player are transferable to Survivor, and whether the others decide to gang up early on the (presumably) wealthy celebrities.

The biggest difference between this edition and the most recent versions is that there is no more Exile Island, which didn't seem to provide the drama the producers had hoped for. The individual immunity idols are back, though, and maybe this cast learned something from the Fiji cast in terms of how to use them optimally. We'll find out, starting tonight.

Up All Night On Summer Vacation

A little reminder that my other blog is coming out of hibernation. House Happenings is a blog all about the Big Brother season as it unfolds. It was around this time last year that we were finding out which former houseguests were under consideration for All-Star spots, but with just 2 weeks to go before the debut of Season 8, we're still totally in the dark, save for the traditional promise that this will be the wildest season yet. Which no doubt means the typical gaggle of twentysomething bubbleheads half comatose on slop and chatting endlessly about favorite places they threw up. (Gee, I usually don't get cynical like this until mid-August at the earliest.)

On The Lot: Out To Lunch

I was hoping that the "let's make a movie" show On The Lot, produced by Mark Burnett and Steven Spielberg (two guys who know a little something about entertainment), would provide me with a reality fix this summer. The dog days used to be prime time for introducing new reality series, but picking have been a bit slim in recent years (Burnett's Rock Star having officially been killed off), and we've mostly had to stick with old standbys like Big Brother and Last Comic Standing.

On The Lot got a nice little lead-in from the final performance show of American Idol 2 weeks ago. The first hour introduced judges Carrie Fisher and Garry Marshall, and a low-key but likable enough host named Chelsea Handler; and appeared to be a cross between The Apprentice and Project Runway--we were going to see the behind-the-scenes of low-budget filmmaking, and at some point people would screw up and be told to pack their cameras and go home. I thought the show was pretty decent, but I was a bit concerned by the fact that after the first hour, I still didn't really know who anyone was (they began with 50 filmmakers, and several of the more memorable ones got that way for being so bad that we wouldn't be seeing them anymore). Fox couldn't have been happy that the show hemorrhaged most of its huge lead-in as the hour proceeded, indicating that people were giving it a chance and then bailing. The second show, 2 days later, began the process of fleshing out some personalities, as the young directors collaborated in teams of 3. Anytime in reality TV when players are forced to work together, you can expect drama. By the end of the night, we were down to 24 contestants, who were given an assignment to shoot a short movie practically overnight.

Which brought us to the first episode of On The Lot proper, which aired last Monday. All of a sudden, with no explanation as to the change of tone, we were now watching an American Idol of films, complete with a studio audience and the now obligatory 3-judge panel. The challenge mentioned at the end of the preceding episode was now totally forgotten, but the field had been reduced to 18, again with no explanation. Chelsea Handler was gone and a loud, annoying woman named Adrianna Costa was now hosting, complete with little note cards she read off of when ever the conversation got more involved than "hi" (I have new respect for Julie Chen after watching Costa).

To put it mildly, asking people to sit still for 2 hours and watch 18 short films, made by people no one had gotten a chance to know yet, and doing this on the evening of Memorial Day...well, there have been better ideas. The show's ratings were utterly terrible--too bad, because some of the films were really quite good and only about 4 qualified as awful. But while the Monday show dragged, the Tuesday hour-long results show was tedious on a level American TV rarely gets. Surely, I felt, they're not going to actually do the results for the whole hour--they will show some of the behind-the-scenes, or even go to the damn Farmers' Market like Ryan Seacrest. But no, Costa went down the rows and eliminated a filmmaker every 20 minutes, liberally stealing Ryan Seacrest's shtick such as "....after the break," while rewarding the directors who polled best with a second airing of their film.

I just can't imagine who thought this was a legitimate use of an hour's time, even by the standards of summer. Costa was totally out of her league, Marshall rambled on with patronizing comments about how much we need female directors, and even the certifiably witty Fisher couldn't breathe any life into the charade. The young directors mostly looked humiliated. And to top things off, the votes of "America" left a lot to be desired. The 3 directors eliminated were either foreign-born, female, or both, leaving several mediocre American white guys unscathed. And a kid from Kentucky who had made an amateurish bordering on offensive film that appeared to make a retarded guy the butt of its joke (despite the director's insistence he wasn't supposed to come across as retarded) was given one of the best scores of the night. Now that part did remind me exactly of Idol--the one person in the field explicitly labeled as southern getting an undeserved high score.

Fox has been known to pull underperforming reality shows after an airing or two, so we have to assume it's only the pull of Burnett and Spielberg that got On The Lot another chance. The revamped version aired tonight--from now on, there's just one showing a week. Of the remaining 15 directors, 5 got to show a film tonight, and America's phone calls will eliminate 1 (presumably to be announced at the beginning of next week). We got to see a bit more of the directors themselves this week (or at least the 5 whose movies were shown), and 4 of the 5 did a decent-to-excellent job (as for Hilary, who had one of the 2 or 3 weakest films last week but got to stay while stronger women with accents were canned, she really needs to never pick up a camera again).

I doubt this new format will help the ratings much; frankly, short films made by unknown directors and cast with fellow nobodies are not an easy sell ratings-wise. At least on American Idol, you can sing (or beatbox) along most of the time. And Costa is absolutely killing the show worse than Spielberg's wife killed Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.  But now that we're a few episodes in, I hope Fox lets things play out. I still question the pace of things--if they're going to get rid of only one person a week, On The Lot won't end for till late August and I can't believe that's on the agenda. Many of the critics of the show were disappointed by the shift away from the Project Runway tone, but they have to remember that that show is a big hit by the standards of Bravo--Project Runway couldn't survive on a network with its cable-like ratings, even in the summer. But at least they got rid of the results show, and that's a start.

Finding a way to display the mechanics of filmmaking while still providing the Idol pleasure of voting for your favorites is the way for On The Lot to proceed, but I don't know if they will have the chance to get it right.

Charles Nelson Reilly: Just Give Him The Plane Fare And He Was There

James Poniewozik has a nice appreciation of Charles Nelson Reilly, who died late last week. I'm just barely old enough to remember the last role truly prominent acting role Reilly had, as comic relief in the TV version of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Prior to that he had a significant Broadway career, capped with a Tony in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, but when The Ghost and Mrs. Muir ended Reilly was only about 40. However, the era of his greatest fame was yet to take place, as he became one of the pioneers (along, I suppose, with Charo) of the role of Someone Who Is Famous For Being On Television.

Reilly was able to reinvent himself as something of a television utility man, a reliably funny presence on talk shows back when there was still a role on such shows for raconteurs with nothing in particular to promote; and a guest star who connoted camp. He became best known, of course, for his various game shows, especially the 1970s version of The Match Game, which even a sheltered kid could tell was titillating in a way that shletered kids couldn't quite get. Reilly wasn't the best celebrity player on the show or even the best drinker; those roles were reserved for Richard Dawson. But CBS needed a gay guy on its game shows to compete with Paul Lynde, and Bob Barker just wasn't up to the task. Seriously, as Poniewozik says, Reilly (and Lynde) helped introduce a gay sensibility to American living rooms in an ear when most had no idea what such a thing was.

Reilly was mostly playing a version of himself when he did any acting in the last 30 years of his life, but one exception was the character of the sci-fi novelist Jose Chung on The X-Files and Chris Carter's other Fox series of the era, Millennium (Reilly got an Emmy nominations for Millennium). Why Carter thought of Reilly is anyone's guess; perhaps it was the doing of the show's whacked-out genius Darin Morgan, who wrote that episode (and Reilly wasn't even the weirdest thing in it; Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek also had roles in the episode). But it proved that even given the strangeness of the setting--a serious part in an uncharacteristically silly hour on TV's creepiest show--Reilly really did have acting chops. Still, he never looked down on the work that paid the bills for decades, so for that, his fans say [blank] you.

Pink-slipped: Post Mortem On The Apprentice

NBC still hasn't officially said that The Apprentice is dead, though it certainly appears that the failure to announce a place for the show on the January 2008 schedule and Donald Trump's subsequent "you can't fire me, I quit" has put an end to it. This marks a milestone of sorts; with the exception of Who Wants To be a Millionaire?, which was more of a traditonal game show, The Apprentice is the first reality show to go through a full life cycle: out-of-the-box hit to slow decline to more rapid decline to eventual cancellation.

So what went wrong? For my own part, I started watching about halfway through the first season and became interested in it right away. The tasks seemed novel, the contestants were competent and (mostly) likable, and there were actual business lessons put across. The show also became a surprise ratings hit, riding on the strength of the final season of Friends and as good counterprogramming against CSI. While the decline in ratings set in immediately, I thought the show stayed pretty watchable through its fourth season. But I began to lose interest with Season 5. The candidates began to seem less interesting to me even as the on-paper qualifications continued to get more and more impressive (beginning with Randal, the winner of season 4, I started to wonder why it was some of these people were giving up what looked like a pretty good deal already to go on this silly program). And Donald Trump was becoming more and more the center of the show (more on that below).

If I had to point to a few things that went wrong, I would start with, first and foremost, the disastrous decision to run a second version of the show starring Martha Stewart in the fall of 2005, at a time when the parent show was already showing dangerously weakening ratings. A much better move would have been to have Stewart and Trump alternate seasons, though as executive producer of the show I'm sure The Donald never would have allowed this. The first season was relatively light on product placement, understandable since no one realized the show would succeed. But beginning with the second season and continuing to levels that got more obnoxious with each passing year, The Apprentice began to seem like an hour-long commercial with a small game show component tucked in somewhere in the middle. What's ironic is that the products featured weren't always shown to good effect--witness the task in Season 5 when the teams had to market the most disgusting food item imaginable, a 7-Eleven sandwich with 2 slices of cold pizza in place of bread.

Whereas the first season had two wild-card personalities, the intense Trump worshipper Sam and the sociopathic Omarosa, subsequent seasons seemed to give us more folks cast purely for the sake of drama (although Season 6 seemed a bit better in that regard). More reality show "stunts" made their way into The Apprentice, such as double-firings (even a quadruple firing in Season 4) and the idiotic "let's have half the teams camp out in the backyard" tried this past season. As Michelle so correctly stated before essentially walking off the show this past season, such an arrangement is hardly conducive to a serious job interview process, much less even doing effective work.

Finally, there was a gradual tilt on the show away from the tasks and the interaction of the players to the boardroom segments and the interaction with Trump. I would watch the show this past season and realize with surprise that we were getting to the end of the task, barely halfway through the episode and without having seen much about how the task was even accomplished. Trump's decision to bring his children in as his "eyes and ears" was off-putting to many. True, Ivanka Trump actually did a decent job in her role, never mind that her own work experience was often less impressive than that of the people she was helping evaluate. But the way her predecessor Carolyn Kepcher was fired left a bad taste in the mouths of a lot of people.

Perhaps The Apprentice was never destined to have a long run. There are only so many different types of business tasks you can design before you start repeating yourself, and the individual who ended up getting fired every week was usually so obvious it was hard to sustain suspense. But I think the actions of Trump helped to speed up the process. Let this be a lesson learned to the next network that wants to make its reality show primarily about the host. 

This Is My Ouch: American Idol 6:40

Well, it looks like Jordin Sparks will indeed become the first true longshot winner of American Idol. If she was just about even with Blake Lewis as the night began, as most believed she was, there seems little doubt she pulled away down the stretch.

And yet, it's hard not to feel a bit dissatisfied. Jordin is highly likable and has shown a real knack for big ballads with emotional content. But such ballads are in short supply on the pop charts these days (there's a reason Celine Dion decamped to Vegas), and whether she can go toe-to-toe with the Rihannas and Fergies of the world (even though she's obviously a better pure singer than both) is an open question.  Jordin mostly won last night by not losing--it was a night without a standout performance--and Blake assisted in his own demise by his inexplicable decision to let Jordin take the coveted last performing spot.

The boy from Bothell kicked off the night with a reprise of "You Give Love a Bad Name," which, it is now clear, will go down in Idol history alongside performances like Constantine's "Bohemian Rhapsody" as a classic whose charms nonetheless go totally over (under?) my head. In fairness to Blake, it sounded like he was in slightly better voice last night (though it will never be a true rock voice); and it appears he's continued to think about the original performance and how it could be tweaked, because there were a few notable differences between the version of 3 weeks ago and last night's. With some studio help to give it punch, I can actually see this becoming the first song to go from a regular Idol broadcast to the pop charts.

Jordin led off with Christina Aguilera's "Fighter," which at first looked like a real high-risk, high-reward song for her but ended up not really impacting things much. Jordin has struggled with most uptempo songs, and the lyrical pace here figured to be a big stumbling block for her, even though this song doesn't have the gigantic range of a lot of Aguilera's songs--it's an attitude number. Jordin had a noticeable problem staying on the beat, and she seemed nervous to me. But as far as the attitude went, I bought it pretty much, despite the lack of angst in Jordin's life that has been a focus of her detractors.

I thought Blake's biggest mistake came with his second song, Maroon 5's "She Will Be Loved." It was the second straight week he went to the Adam Levine well, but picking the slowest and draggiest of their big hits was a puzzling choice, given that he had to know the finale would be another ballad. And it's an upper register song that veers into falsetto on the chorus. As we saw on Bee Gees Week, Blake may have a tenor but it's not one translatable to falsetto in any way. What also bugged here was Blake's body language. He affects a cool Dean Martin-like nonchalance that tends to make me doubt his emotional connection to the material, and has a tendency to leave his mouth open in an unattractive way. Simon had it right: you need to pick more carefully on the bigger stage, and this wasn't a good choice for him.

Jordin's reprise performance was "A Broken Wing," which she performed when Martina McBride dropped in and has apparently been part of her repertoire for years. The country audience didn't have much to root for on the show this year, so this was a canny pick for Jordin for that reason too. As she did the first time, her lower register on the verse is only fair, but she always delivers on the chorus money notes (though Simon thought it was "shrieky"). A good choice because it provided the sort of dramatic release this night demands, even if it's not really my kind of music.

And then it was time for "This Is My Now" (the title says it all, doesn't it?), the product of the Idol song contest that was supposed to put the collective power of the viewing audience to work choosing the best possible coronation song and ended up giving us...the same kind of crap we get every year at this time. Needless to say, Blake was at a disadvantage, but to his credit I thought he made a game run at it for the first minute or so. He sang the opening verse nicely in a lower voice than we're used to from him, doing a good job of not smirking through the silly lyrics. Unfortunately, he wasn't up to overpowering the chorus, which is what this song was designed to feature (there's never going to be one of these winner's songs that doesn't feature a real or implied choir of angels). His decision to start dancing halfway through it was unable to breathe life into the patient. The judges were kind enough to essentially tell the viewers not to hold it against Blake, but there are obviously a lot of people who like these kind of songs from the winner.

And Jordin, hardly a finished product at this point, tore into this dopey number as if it was specially written for her, which for all I know it was. She still sounded a bit nervous to me, and 30 seconds in I would say she wasn't even as good as Blake. But she gained confidence by the time she got to the chorus, and almost made it sound like a legitimately moving song--not bad for being--wait for it--only 17. She found meaning in there somewhere, and if you didn't buy her breaking down when she got to the last line, well, you're just a bad American.

Now, all she has to do is build a career. Good luck with that--I'll look forward to her CD, but I suspect Melinda's will be better.

Getting To Blake v. Jordin

I ended up picking Blake Lewis as the winner of American Idol once we got down to the Final 12 stage, so I guess I should be feeling proud of myself right now. But strangely, I feel less enthusiastic about him now than I did then, though I concede he's been, overall, the most impressive male in an admittedly weak field.

The key to Blake's success is that he's made himself memorable even when his performances have been iffy in a vocal sense. He follows in a long line of men on this show who have a bigger online fan base than any other contender, joining Clay Aiken from AI 2, Taylor Hicks from last season, and the Bo Bice/Constantine Maroulis tag team from season 4 (it's not a coincidence that year 3, the only year without a significant male contender, is usually considered the least buzzworthy of all seasons). He has a pleasant tenor, but it's not terribly expressive; his best performances have either been uptempo like last week's "When I Get You Alone" or atmospheric like his take on "Time of the Season." I'm not crazy about the beatboxing, perhaps because I'm old enough not to regard it as all that revolutionary. I thought his much-praised reworking of "You Give Love a bad Name" was a way for Blake to get around the fact that he doesn't have any sort of rock and roll edge to him. But I seem to be in the minority here, and I can't deny that this gimmick has been key to his success.

Jordin Sparks is regarded by most to be a slight favorite to win it all, and if she does win she'd be the first winner ever to have not entered the top 12 phase as an obvious favorite. Prior till now, the only real surprise to even get to the last night was another teen, Diana DeGarmo in Season 3. And Jordin has a lot in common with Diana--big voice, but inconsistent and not always believable emotionally. I like Jordin and am tentatively rooting for her to win, but I have some real questions about her long term prospects. She doesn't look much like a modern female pop star, and she hasn't come up with the kind of convincing uptempo performance that would tend to make one think she can handle the sort of disposable pop the brass likely has planned out for her. In that respect, she has a lot in common with Katharine McPhee, who excelled on dramatic ballads last season but sounded pretty ordinary doing a teenpop album.

What of the rest of Season 6? The Sanjaya train chugged to a halt exactly where it needed to; the producers obviously wanted him out of the way before "Idol Gives Back", and America complied. I don't think Sanjaya could have become this sort of phenomenon had there been more interest in the main contenders in the first place--this gets into what i wrote about yesterday. And it does appear that ratings have not yet returned to their pre-Sanjayamania levels. Chris Richardson, who gave us the classic justification "nasally is a form of singing", is presumably touring with a 'N Sync tribute boy band as I type. He is not missed. Phil Stacy really improved as the season went on, persevering despite his physical limitations that were detailed in glorious and borderline libelous fashion here. He has a limited repetoire of songs he sounds good on, but he sounds very good indeed doing them and might end up with the semblance of a career in country music. In that respect, Phil resembles Lakisha Jones, who was fine as long as she was working the diva songbook, but struggled with almost everything else. I'm probably more skeptical than most about her ability to have any sort of post-Idol career.

And then there's Melinda Doolittle. There may be performers I've enjoyed more on this show, but I'm pretty sure (I didn't watch Kelly Clarkson's season) that no one has ever gone through a whole year of AI without a subpar or even average performance. Her take on "My Funny Valentine" is probably still the moment of the season for me, though Jordin's two takes on "I (Who Have Nothing)" come close, especially since the first time she scored with it, it shocked everyone. So what went wrong? Part of the problem is that Melinda didn't seem to have the sort of "journey" that leads people to bond with the singers. She came across as a finished product already, and perhaps it was just more fun to root for people like Blake and Jordin who had identifiable ups and downs. As Melinda herself recognized, not only was she old for the show at 29, but her sensibility skewed old as well (the same could be said of Taylor of course, but maybe the rules are different for the guys). Even her much-praised uptempo efforts on songs like "Trouble Is a Woman" and "Have a Nice Day" brought comparisons to Tina Turner, who is nearing 70. As I feared she might, Melinda's classy restraint didn't bring her the sort of fan base you need this close to the end of the season, and her absence will make these last 2 shows seem anticlimactic...which doesn't mean I won't watch, of course.

I think Blake is building momentum and has a good chance of stealing this thing. I'll even say that the person who wins tonight is going to win Idol 6, and that's rare since we usually have an obvious favorite by now (we might have to go back to Clay v. Ruben to find the last nailbiter on this level). I won't make a final prediction until I've seen the show...23 minutes away now.