American Idol

by Richard Rushfield

  The episode revealed how different this show was from all that had come before it. Until now, network shows had been self-serious, packaged projects that never referred to their own missteps and internal drama, never gave any hint of the life offscreen. All of a sudden, here was this renegade show, American Idol, that was celebrating its backstory, playing up its frictions, and openly acknowledging its missteps. Every tabloid brouhaha would be played up on the Idol stage rather than being shoved under the carpet. It was completely unprecedented in American programming.

  The following night, Idol reveled in the altercation; the show was all but turned over to repeating the clips of the fight. This time, for whatever reason, the crowd did not stand by Cowell’s victim and Helton failed to advance to the finals. He looked on as Nikki McKibbin, EJay Day, and Christina Christian moved forward.

  The first season was a time of trial and error, as the show stumbled into what became the U.S. formula. The judges summoned the abused Helton back for the Wild Card round, in which ten contestants were to compete for one last slot. Helton remembers that in those early days of Idol, the judges mingled more freely with the contestants on the set, even offering advice. Despite his earlier bashing, in private Cowell had been shockingly supportive. “He said, ‘I believe in you but come back and wow me.’ It was behind the scenes that he talked to me, which was much different than on camera. On camera he said, ‘You were average,’ and then behind the scenes he was like, ‘You’re really an exceptional singer but you need to pick ballads or things that can really showcase your voice.’ That’s one thing about Simon that I was surprised about. He is pretty cocky and arrogant but he knows it and he has this really great personality and even behind the scenes, while he knows he’s an ass, he can still be very, very kind.” This was a dichotomy many contestants would note in the years ahead.

  Fortunately for Helton, that kindness continued on-screen, and he found himself chosen as the Wild Card pick to join that year’s top ten on the big stage.

  For Nikki McKibbin, however, the backstage mingling led to what she remembers as a very different kind of encounter, one that would have a big impact on her Idol career. In her semifinals appearance, she had wowed the judges with her take on “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” a performance that led Cowell to call her “one of the strongest singers in this competition. And I hope you do really well in this competition.”

  Sometime in the weeks that followed, Cowell chatted with Nikki backstage. She offers the following description of their encounter: “He told me that my eyes were beautiful and he wanted to take my eyeballs out of my head and put them on his nightstand so that he could look at them every night before he went to bed and I pretty much in a nutshell told him that I thought he was a perv and kind of creepy. He was never nice to me after that.”

  However Cowell meant the statement, one can imagine the gale force winds that blew over him when the cussin’ and cursin’ Texas girl McKibbin lashed back. Whatever the reality of that encounter, as they entered the big stage, Nikki found herself recast as the judges’ whipping post from that day forward.

  Ten years later, Cowell protests that he doesn’t recall the incident and claims no ill will toward Nikki. “I genuinely don’t remember it. Look, I get it a lot. After a live show, you bump into someone afterwards and they might not be very happy, but I don’t remember it being anything unusual or over the top. Normally you just get glared at. I actually liked her. I thought she was feisty. I quite like it when they argue with me afterwards. I think they wind themselves up over a period of time. They like to think that somebody else is the reason for it not working out. I’m a decent person to blame for that.”

  With the naming of the top ten, the media coverage continued to grow. The handicappers at Entertainment Weekly named Guarini the heavy favorite, giving him 3 to 2 odds of winning. Clarkson sat near the back of the pack at 10 to 1.

  The journey to the big stage also brought the singers into a new home, the Idol Mansion, a house far up in the Hollywood Hills, which the show played up as a bit of a fantasy element.

  “We were so thrilled about this house because we had never seen anything like it,” recalls Guarini.

  The mansion was intended to add a bit of The Real World drama to the show. “We had them living in a house at that point and people always sort of loathed that because it was nothing to do with what we were doing,” Lythgoe recalls. “We weren’t out to make a group. We weren’t out to be nice to each other. I wanted a much more cutthroat environment. It was, ‘I’m really sorry to see you go but thank goodness you’re going because a place is open for me now.’ It wasn’t Big Brother. I wanted us to be a leader and not a follower.”

  Another problem with shooting in the house was that the goal of stirring up backstage drama was fundamentally at odds with the goal of a fair competition. “The things that they wanted to shoot at the house, it was the clash between the kids,” Bruce Gowers recalls. “But it was incredibly negative. If you could see somebody who seems rude to one of the other kids or seems nasty to one of the other kids, when that kid got on the show to sing, people would say, ‘Ah, I’m not going to vote for that one. That was the one who had the fight with so and so.’ So, that was dropped almost immediately . . . it was really a nonstarter.” In the end, the mansion’s onscreen appearances would be limited to the setting for the Ford commercials and video packages of the top ten getting makeovers and the like.

  The first night on the top ten stage, dedicated to Motown songs, seemed to confirm all everyone had hoped for: the grandeur of the big stage, the excitement of seeing these ten kids, plucked from the haystacks a month before, elevated by the spectacle, with a surging audience behind it. It confirmed everything Fox had hoped for too: The top ten episode saw the show’s highest ratings yet, with 10.3 million tuning in.

  The first night also confirmed the public’s early selections of Guarini as the runaway front-runner, with Tamyra Gray stepping into her role as the leading challenger. Guarini thrilled the crowd with an exuberant “For Once in My Life,” which left the girls in the audience shrieking and Cowell cooing, “All I’d say is, Timberlake, watch out for you.” After the show, a USA Today online survey confirmed Guarini’s status at the head of the pack, with 30 percent selecting him as their favorite to 21 percent for Gray, and the rest in single digits.

  Guarini recalls of that first night on the big stage, “It was the culmination of everything that I had done up to that point. I go back and I look at it and I listen to it now and I cringe at the performance, but at the time people really enjoyed it. I certainly enjoyed it. . . . That night was really special to me because it was just the first time that I had ever been live on television in front of millions and millions and millions of people under my own terms.”

  On the following night, the show eliminated Jim Verraros and EJay Day. After they wrapped, however, the set was hit by a bit of unplanned backstage drama as an accident sent RJ Helton to the hospital, coming extremely close to paralyzing him for life. “We were doing a bunch of interviews onstage, all of us, with like Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, and I ended up losing my balance and I fell off the stage onto my back and knocked myself out. I was rushed to the hospital for a few days. The next show I got out of the hospital to do I was on pain meds and was in a wheelchair onstage and I don’t even remember doing the show but somehow I was there.”

  “That was so emotional,” recalls Debra Byrd. “It was so devastating. I had to do his song choice from the hospital on the phone. We had to sing in the phone because he couldn’t come to the show. . . . They thought he may never walk again.”

  As they prepped for the following week’s show, ratings continued to climb. Fox announced it would be bringing back Idol for a second season. A mere two months before, no one in the media or in network television had given the show a second glance. Now it was being quickly re-upped in the middle of its run. At the annual Television Critics Association meeting that convened that week in Pasa
dena, American Idol was on everyone’s lips. The gathering was treated to a group number from the top eight contestants, singing “California Dreamin’.” The trip would be the first and last time they would come to visit the press. After that first season, Idol didn’t come to the press, the press came to them.

  The bulk of the questions, however, were directed not toward the contestants but to the series’ one already certified phenomenon, Judge Cowell. Canada’s National Post wrote, “The great irony of American Idol is that the show actually discovered its superstar in its first episode: He is Simon Cowell, the frank, villainous Brit who serves as one of the judges and without whom the series would most likely have been on a voyage to the bottom of the Nielsens. Last week, Cowell was compelled to return to London on business, and the show missed him the way Andrew Ridgeley misses George Michael.”

  As the competition got serious, a new element was about to be unleashed in earnest: the power of Kelly Clarkson. Despite her strong semifinals showing, Kelly continued to coast at the back of the pack. Now audience and judges alike were about to see what they had overlooked.

  What Kelly Clarkson at last related to Idol viewers was that beneath the nonchalant demeanor there was a voice that had the power to take leaps few singers could contemplate. Byrd recalls rehearsing that week with Kelly: “Her voice was getting tired, and I would lower the key a little bit. Every other week I’d lower the key. We were at Capitol Records and she pulled me in a little room. She said, ‘You know, this key is so low.’ Because she is a real soprano and, at that time, she could not sing below middle C. She said, ‘The key is too low. If it’s going to stay in this key, would you do this?’ And then she hit a Mariah Carey/Minnie Riperton note.”

  Stunned, Byrd told her, “I would do that in a heartbeat; I would sing that note.”

  Byrd was to find, however, as would many in the industry, that in this little overlooked girl at the back of the pack there was an amazing sense of where she wanted to go, a vision that took her well beyond the next week on American Idol. To Byrd, she demurred about using her “big note.” “I said, ‘Why are you doubting it?’ She said, ‘I don’t want to be compared to Mariah Carey.’ Who was huge at that time. I told her, ‘Well, Mariah Carey’s not in this competition. I’d like to make a suggestion . . .’ because I can only make a suggestion. I said, ‘I’d like to suggest you do it and then move on.’ So, we practiced it. She had this whole flourish up there. I said, ‘Hit one note. That way you won’t be compared to Mariah because she lives up there. So, sing a song, hit the note, and then move on.’ We practiced it, she dug it, but she was still on the fence about doing it. Kelly told me she spoke with her mom about this conversation. Her mom said, ‘Well, are you going to do it?’ Kelly said, ‘Mom, I really don’t know. I’ll do it in the moment if I do it. If you see me do it, you know Byrd’s got a gun to my head.’ ”

  Like some comic book character struggling about revealing her superpower, Kelly grappled with the question of whether to use her “big note” right up to airtime. But she did it.

  That night Kelly Clarkson sang what was probably the most career-making single note ever unleashed. With 10 million watching the show that had become America’s leading conversation topic, Clarkson, clad in a black fedora, a white-collared shirt, and black tie, at the end of her run through a strong but not earth-shattering rendition of “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” for five seconds held the note that suddenly made her a star. As the crowd roared, Randy Jackson shook his head and said, “I didn’t know you had all of that.”

  “Yeah, I thought I’d show my range this time,” Kelly panted, struggling for breath.

  “America,” ruled Judge Cowell, “is not known for nice singers. It is known for great singers. And you are one of them.”

  Having given the world a glimpse of her superpowers, having gotten their attention, it would be the last time that Kelly Clarkson would sing her “Mariah” note.

  “She was always fun, but she was Creek Girl,” Lythgoe recalls. “We always saw her in a little creek somewhere down in Texas and didn’t think too much about it. Then of course, when she started singing, I remember she did an octave jump in one of her songs, it was like, ‘Wow. Where did that come from?’ I still thought Tamyra was going to win. But it put us all on notice that here was a real talent. Then she did some stuff like that there, a big band number, a Bette Midler big band number and her personality shined. She was one of those girls, not particularly pretty, not a particularly gorgeous body or anything. Just talented. You suddenly realized the young girls associated with this. She wasn’t outrageously beautiful. She wasn’t on a pedestal anywhere. This was another girl like the girl next door who’s going to come on and everyone starts going, ‘She’s a really good singer.’ ”

  Until recently, it had been the job of record labels to search the nation for these unknown talents and bring them to a wider audience. But as hip-hop, grunge, and heavily produced pop had overtaken the industry, the labels had walked away from that role. American Idol stepped into the void, and it was only there that a diamond in the Texas rough like Kelly could suddenly become a star.

  The following night, sixteen-year-old AJ Gil was eliminated, and American Idol edged past CBS’s Big Brother in the ratings for the first time to win the week.

  If the top eight week marked the beginning of Kelly’s rise, it also showed the first chink in the front-runner’s armor. For the first time, receiving poor reviews for his take on “Sunny,” Justin appeared to argue with, even talk back to Cowell, responding to his criticism by saying, “I’d like to hear what they [the public] have to say.”

  In the United Kingdom, talking back to Cowell had fueled Will Young’s rise, but Guarini would find no such support. The next day he found himself labeled “cocky” by the media, which a week before had called him unbeatable. “Cocky, look who thinks his fan base is bigger than it is!” wrote the heretofore Justin partisans at Entertainment Weekly. The next night on the results show, Justin found himself in the bottom three for the first time. Ultimately on that night, it was the controversial midriff-baring Ryan Starr who saw her time come to an end. But for Guarini, the brush with death was harrowing enough that he felt compelled to offer an apology to Cowell—and to the audience—for his seeming back talk the night before.

  A decade later, the memory of that night still packs a punch. “It was rough. I went out and I did a song, a good song, a decent song. But unfortunately it just wasn’t one that people knew. The song was great. My performance of the song was okay. I go out there and I was angry at myself. I got a negative critique and it was hard to hear. It was one of those things where, again, you grow up in front of the camera and you learn one way or another to think before you open your mouth. So when Simon finished his critique I said, ‘Okay, great. I hear that but I want to know what the audience thinks.’ It was not meant as a slight to Simon or the judging panel but it certainly came off that way. . . . So there I was having my entire existence on American Idol, everything that I had worked for for twenty-three years, threatened by my own doing. I just didn’t think before I opened my mouth.” It was to mark one distinct feature of the U.S. version: Throughout the years, American audiences would demand their stars be respectful and well mannered. Insolent brooding rockers need not apply.

  After that brush with death, Guarini would never again find himself in the bottom tier. Nevertheless, what had seemed a closed contest was now wide open.

  For Nikki McKibbin, the week marked her permanent move to Cowell’s black list. Whatever had happened in their private encounter, and whether or not that had influenced him, a month after he had told her, “You’re exactly what this competition needs,” he was now saying, after her rendition of “Heartbreaker,” “It was not good enough. And you will not win this show.” Nikki found herself in the bottom three the next day, a position she would occupy every week until she was ultimately eliminated; she herself began to refer to the bottom three as the “McKibbin Zone.”<
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  As the Cowell juggernaut grew, he settled into America, renting, as the Los Angeles Times reported, a $25,000-a-month five-bedroom, seven-bath home equipped with guest house, pool, and waterfall. And on-screen, Cowell was finding his public image evolving in quite an unexpected way. In the United Kingdom Cowell remained the man you love to hate, but in the United States he was becoming the man you love to love. As Guarini demonstrated, while Cowell’s early slams had generated sympathy votes, a month later the audience followed his lead close to the letter.

  When the season began, Lythgoe had told Brian Dunkleman that he would eventually become Cowell’s foil. “ ‘Simon’s the mean guy and there’s going to be one episode where you’re going to stand up for those kids,’ ” Dunkleman recalls. “ ‘The whole country is going to be behind you and cheering.’ But then the season went on, it was like, everybody loved Simon. How was I going to be the foil for this guy? They loved him.”

  That left Paula as sole counterweight to Cowell, which so strengthened the chemistry between the two that their buddy act became the linchpin around which the entire show revolved. However, the sheer potency of Cowell’s barbs allowed the show itself to play nice guy. Throughout the first season, Idol featured segments where Seacrest mocked not just Cowell’s ego, but his fashion choices. The effect was magical. Cowell may have served the yearning for unvarnished truth-telling, providing a sensational, attention-getting element, but the show itself managed to float above his brutal edge. While Cowell was seen as lovable, if vicious, the audience came to see the show itself as supportive, nurturing, and protective of its young stars—a sentiment that would prove crucial as Idol busted beyond the niche audience of reality shows to become an all-American pastime.