American Idol

by Richard Rushfield

  For the fledging Fox network, reality had proven the key to breaking through the media landscape and attracting new viewers. Mike Darnell, Fox’s impish head of alternative entertainment, a determined iconoclast given to dressing like a bejeweled marching band, pioneered the rule-breaking brazen new style of television. A former child actor who had appeared in his youth on 1970s staples such as Welcome Back, Kotter and Kojak, the young man dreamed of following in the footsteps of NBC’s legendary chief Brandon Tartikoff. He found his way through the production door working on the news team for Fox’s local L.A. affiliate, and shot up the ranks when he put together a segment of TV Stars: Where Are They Now?, featuring Batman’s former leading men. That piece caught the eye of Barry Diller, then head of the Fox network. Eventually, Darnell became director of specials for the young network, which did not yet have a full-blown reality division. He had his first hit with Alien Autopsy: (Fact or Fiction?), a quasi-documentary that debated the veracity of a bootlegged video purporting to show an extraterrestrial corpse being dissected by earthling scientists.

  Throughout the 1990s, with shows like Temptation Island and Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?, Darnell and Fox found that by continually reaching outside of the public’s expectations, by pushing the staid boundaries of network programming, they stampeded their way into the center of America’s cultural dialogue with love-them or hate-them programs you had to watch. By the end of the 1990s, these programs had helped put Fox on the map, adding a fourth network to the ranks of the big three for the first time since the dawn of television.

  But reality had a downside. It was one thing to create waves, to shock an audience into viewing. Keeping them shocked—getting them to return week after week once the outlandish became familiar—was quite another.

  “The first time you view it,” explained Preston Beckman, Fox TV’s head of scheduling, “nobody knows what the fuck it is. You know, like with Survivor now everybody knows, Oh, here’s how you play the game. So, it’s a phenomenally well-to-do show but there’s nothing like that first time. I think that’s what happened with Joe Millionaire and that’s what happened with Temptation Island.”

  In the years before Idol, ABC had learned this rule in an especially harrowing manner. In 1998, the network had scored a monster hit with the prime-time quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Seemingly drunk on the show’s success, the following season they practically turned over their entire schedule to the quiz show, running Millionaire a shocking five nights a week. The audience quickly overdosed on the novelty and turned away as fast as they had come, leaving ABC, which had cancelled and halted development on a slew of shows to make room for it, with barely a heartbeat.

  Likewise, by 2001, Fox looked back on a decade of hits and found that after many successes, the cupboard was nearly bare. The network’s attempts to market itself to male viewers with edgier, darker programming seemed to have run its course. Its once buzzed-about new show, 24, was receiving good press, but had yet to find a major audience.

  Then came September 11. If that day changed much for the nation, it changed everything for network programming. The attacks on New York and Washington ignited a bomb under the nation’s already tenuous economy, sending the ad market reeling, decimating the funding base for new programming.

  At the same time, the boom in the shock value–centric brand of reality suddenly evaporated in favor of comfort programming. Wrote Cox News service at the time, “Sure, millions of folks still tune in to Survivor to check on the contestants in Africa, but the once-deafening buzz has faded to near silence. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire has sunk like a stone, and Temptation Island 2 arrived to a hurricane of indifference.”

  “After September 11, there was speculation of massive changes in popular tastes,” said Tim Brooks, a vice president of research for Lifetime cable network in an interview. “Instead, we’ve just moved to the familiar and safe. People now seem to prefer plots and performers they know and are comfortable with. . . . We’re in for a long period of shows that are reassuring.”

  And at this moment, a little singing competition called Idol arrived.

  Gail Berman, then vice president of Fox Programming, later to become president, tells the story this way: “We were proposing in the press that we were going to offer year-round programming. Year-round programming was our mantra.” This meant stocking the summer months with fresh content, not just filling it with reruns as networks had traditionally done. “The problem was that we didn’t have any money to pay for year-round programming.”

  Idol had been around the block in U.S. programming. In this much the legend is correct. Even before Pop Idol had launched in the United Kingdom, Fuller, Cowell, and ludicrously, a third Simon—a FremantleMedia executive named Simon Jones—traveled to Los Angeles to pitch the show for the American airwaves. Every major network slammed the door in their faces.

  Cowell remembers, “We genuinely believed we had a hit format and the first person we walked into was going to buy it. And of course it didn’t work out that way. We had some awful meetings. They were so bad they were actually laughable. I remember saying to Simon Jones after one meeting, ‘It cannot get worse than this.’ ”

  As it turns out, what had helped them in the United Kingdom was hurting them in America. Whereas the success of Popstars had opened the doors for Pop Idol in the United Kingdom, its relative failure in the United States had done just the opposite. In 2001, Pop Stars had debuted on the WB Network, where it failed to catch fire. The show attracted a modest following, and the band it produced—Eden’s Crush—went on to put out a decent-selling record, but by and large, the show’s reception did little to fuel the idea that there was much public appetite for a TV singing contest. Another music-oriented reality show, Making the Band, likewise had met with mediocre results.

  Contrary to legend, the executives at Fox were not blind to the success of Pop Idol, but it had hit the U.S. market at an inopportune moment. “There had been a lot of shows in this area in the marketplace and they hadn’t performed particularly well,” says Gail Berman, “. . . so there wasn’t any real reason why anyone would go crazy on the concept.” But Fox was still seeking a summer show that could come fully paid for, and with the Coca-Cola connection kept the conversations with Idol alive, if on life support.

  Meanwhile, Idol’s producers, unwilling to give up, were scrambling to raise the money to make the show happen in the United States. Cecile Frot-Coutaz, the Belgian native who was head of FremantleMedia’s North American production arm and who would oversee American Idol, and become the keeper at the brand in the years ahead, remembers traveling to New York with others from the company to persuade advertisers to come aboard. “I went to see this lady who represented an auto maker. She said, ‘Well, do you think you can feature cars in this?’ We answered, ‘Oh, of course we can feature cars.’ At that point we would have done anything to get it off the ground and anything to get the money. We were just throwing out ideas on how we could get the cars into the singing competition. When we left, we looked at each other, we’re like, ‘Boy . . .’ We were very aware of what we had just done, which is just promise something that we weren’t sure we were going to be able to deliver just to get the money.”

  They brought aboard Sony as their partner on the record side, persuading them to invest money up front to cover the show’s production costs. It was a risky move for the label; Pop Idol’s first season was still playing out, so the idea that people would buy records based on a TV talent contest was untested.

  It was at this moment, while the Idol team was pulling together its funding, that Elisabeth and Rupert Murdoch had their legendary call. Murdoch would later say he was also told of Idol by one of his editors in London when he called to check in on what was hot over there. Shortly after, Rupert Murdoch got in touch with the network—not to tell them about this great new show his daughter had tipped him off to, but to find out what they were doing about it. Something had changed, people at Fox noted, and at that
moment, signing Idol became a major priority for Murdoch, and hence for Fox. Murdoch called Fox Entertainment Chairman Peter Chernin who, in turn, called Gail Berman. “What are we doing with that show?” Berman recalls Chernin asking. “And I reminded him that we were waiting to find out whether Coca-Cola is in or out. As a full sponsor of the show.” After hearing her response later that day, even though the network still didn’t have an advertiser-supported situation, Chernin instructed Berman to close the deal with or without Coke.

  Frot-Coutaz remembers getting the call. “All right, there’s a change coming from the top. We’re buying eleven episodes and we’re paying for them. That was a complete change overnight. So, all the initial conversations with the auto maker went out the window. Fox had a relationship with Ford, so Ford came in.”

  Fox, however, decided they wanted more than just the show. They wanted its star. “We had seen footage and of course we knew for sure that Simon Cowell had to be there. Period,” Darnell says. The sensation he caused was “immediate. From like the moment we saw footage we knew that he had to be part of the show.”

  Cowell’s brutal behavior called to mind that of many Hollywood moguls. To Fox TV President (Berman’s then boss) Sandy Grushow, in particular, the resemblance in tone between Cowell and legendary manager/producer Sandy Gallin was uncanny—so much so that Gallin was summoned for a conversation about coming aboard as a judge himself. Not yet ready to make the leap to stardom, Gallin declined and the show went forward with his British alter ego.

  But Cowell got a case of cold feet. After signing on, he worried that he didn’t know the American recording world and that his persona would not translate to the more politically correct U.S. airwaves. One week before Idol was to start shooting, Cowell announced to all that he would not be making the trip after all. Cowell recalls, “I kind of went along with everything and then it finally hit me one day. . . . I remember being at a meeting about my record label. And I had so much to do outside of being on a TV show. I remember calling my lawyer and I said, ‘I don’t want to do it. I haven’t signed the contract. Get me out of it.’ . . .

  “Then a friend of mine, a girl named Nicola, called me and she said, ‘I think you’re making a big mistake because if it’s a hit you’ll wish you were on it and if it’s not a hit, you’ll think you could have made it a hit. So my advice is, take a deep breath and do it.’

  “And then Ken Warwick, the same evening, called me. And I’d gotten on real well with Ken on the first show. And he asked me what I was nervous about and I said, ‘In America, do we have to dilute the whole controversy? Do we have to go by their rules? Because if we do, I genuinely don’t want to do this. I want to make sure that if we do this we do the show we want and not what an American network would want.’

  “But he said, ‘Simon, I absolutely one hundred percent guarantee after the meeting I had with the network, you can do whatever you want. You have free rein. Nobody’s going to tell you what to do and I’m there to look after you.’ So I thought about it there and said, ‘Okay, let’s give it a go.’ ”

  Recalls Gail Berman, “We never thought that it was going to change the entire fate of the network. There wasn’t a single person who went into it thinking that.”

  There’s a rich history of foreign shows getting lost in translation on the journey to America, their rough edges being so smoothed over that their entire allure was glossed away. That had largely been the story of Popstars’ translation. The style and aesthetic of British and European TV was more brassy and brazen: hosts with pompadour hairstyles and brightly colored silk suits, sets decorated with dripping chandeliers. The effect to American eyes could be something like Liberace by way of David Lynch. And then there was the matter of tone. Compared to the reassuring, polished scripts in the States—worked on by a team of writers and subject to round after round of executive notes and revision—British shows could feel alarmingly ramshackle and laissez-faire. Pop Idol, while marking a step forward production-wise, certainly arose out of this tradition. So in thinking about how to make Idol palatable to an American audience, the Fox team got busy planning what changes would need to be made.

  However, since making the decision to import Idol, Rupert Murdoch would continue to exert an influence on the show, the consequences of which would reverberate for years. In a meeting with the Fox executive team, Darnell began to lay out tweaks and changes, many of them, one participant remembered, pushing the show in the traditional Darnell/Fox reality direction of shock value and sensationalism. In the middle of his pitch, Murdoch suddenly slammed his fist down on the desk—never a good sign from the mercurial mogul—and blared, “You Americans, you think you’ve got to change everything! The show was perfectly good! You don’t change a thing!”

  The man had spoken.

  The U.S. version of Pop Idol was to be Pop Idol in look, feel, format, theme song—even opening credit sequence. If the show was to remain the same, the first thing that would have to be boxed up and brought across the seas was the production team led by Nigel Lythgoe. American television production was traditionally an extremely closed circle. To have someone run a network show who had not worked their way up the network ladder, who didn’t understand “the way we do things here,” who didn’t have ancient relationships with the network executives, was almost unheard of. Yet dancer/choreographer/iconic personality Nigel Lythgoe was about to be given the keys to the U.S. prime-time airwaves. He was joined at the helm by yet another British dancer, Ken Warwick, a friend from dance school, whose background included the U.K. Gladiators series and who had served as the producer of Pop Idol. Not entirely able to set their minds at ease about the British invasion, however, Fox insisted that a third showrunner be added, Brian Gadinsky, a veteran U.S. TV hand who had overseen the athletic competition show American Gladiators.

  Unfortunately for Murdoch, he was forced to swallow one very basic change right off the bat: the name. As part of the settlement with the Popstars owners, the word “Pop” was not to be used in any of Idol’s overseas incarnations. Debating various versions, one executive had pushed to title the show America’s Idol, but Darnell retorted, “That sounds like a fireman or a policeman or a hero. That’s not what the show is. . . . This is more about becoming an idol in America.” Darnell hit upon American Idol as the proper alchemy that would capture the show’s ambitions. “I don’t believe it was ultra patriotic at the time. I really don’t. I think it was just a good idea,” Darnell said.

  Mr. Murdoch, however, was not thrilled. “Rupert was very unhappy with the fact that we couldn’t call it Pop Idol,” one executive recalls. “He thought the name American Idol was ridiculous.” While many among the Brits looked on the idea of nationalist branding as jingoist—Pop Idol had come from the more internationalist Europop tradition—American culture has no such timidity about waving the flag, particularly in those days after 9/11.

  Slapping American on the door of the U.S. incarnation in many ways sealed its fate. In the coming years, Idol would become not just our national epic, at a time when the nation needed a feel-good national epic and a full-scale variety show celebration of America. The annual audition road trip to the heartland would itself focus on every aspect of the American musical tradition, from Motown to country rock to Miami Latin rhythms. American Idol would be very much American.

  One element of the show definitely did not change, and for very good reason. When the show’s logo was first designed for Pop Idol, the blue oval with old-fashioned cursive lettering in white evoked something of an old-time jukebox look. But the resemblance would prove highly fortuitious between that design and the logo of a certain American auto maker. For years since, the Idol logo has sat atop the set, ostentatiously evoking the banner of one of its signature sponsors, the Ford Motor Company. Curiously, the resemblance is almost never noticed or commented on until, at the occasional Ford-sponsored Idol event, a backdrop will display the ovals side by side and the almost subliminal reference will, like the subject of a Magic Ey
e painting, suddenly leap to the surface.

  Soon after signing the deal, another change fell upon the Idol crew. But once again, it was a forced change that, in years to come, the team would thank God for. The problem was in revealing the voting results. In the United Kingdom, after each episode of Pop Idol aired, the audience was given a couple of hours to cast its votes, at which point the show would pop back on the ITV airwaves to reveal the verdict. There was no way to do this in a country spread out over four time zones. The West Coast couldn’t possibly vote in time to reveal the results while the East Coast was still awake.

  Beckman remembers receiving the alarm bell call from Darnell. “ ‘Look, we’ve got a problem.’ So I went down to Darnell’s office. They couldn’t figure out how to announce the results. If we announce the results at the end of the evening that would be excluding the entire West Coast and Hawaii and Alaska. I do remember someone saying, ‘Well, maybe we just don’t let the West Coast vote.’ I said they were out of their minds. Then I pitched the idea of a second night.

  “I called it a results show. I said, ‘Add a show that you do the results. Do a half hour.’ We even talked about doing like five minutes or something.” Ultimately, they accepted the need to shoot an entire second night every week.

  It was Mid-February by the time the deal was signed, which gave the team a mere two months to put the show together if they were to make it to air by summer. With a million details to be sorted out, the first major order of business would be filling out the judging panel. With the edict not to change a thing from the British version, that meant finding three new judges to share the panel with Cowell.

  Knowing that they had a very potent force in Cowell, one likely to be shocking to U.S. audiences, the team sought to soften the blow as much as possible with the rest of the panel. The idea was to cushion Cowell’s nuclear blasts in as much sweetness and light as they could get their hands on. “Non-threatening” is how Lythgoe remembers his job description for the other judges. Berman recalls as well, “We wanted believability in the music business. We wanted authenticity. We knew that we wanted only people who had professional credibility. We wanted different personality types.”