Whenever a controversial vote occurred, the discussion would be framed in terms of “American Idol is getting rid of” or “American Idol doesn’t want,” the conspiratorial mind-set conveniently forgetting that it was the American people, or at least the Idol voting segment of the American people, that had made the choice.
But as ever, the controversy did the show no harm. Throughout season 3, ratings continued to soar, continuing to reach unbelievable new highs. The Hudson ouster and the three divas controversy provided a dose of excitement in what had been a fairly uneventful, some said lackluster, season.
The announcements of the results were actually one of the earliest tastes of what would become one of Idol’s signatures: the delicate ballet staged each week by Nigel Lythgoe to keep the audience on its toes. While in the first season, filling up these half hours had often felt painful, by season 3 the drawing out of the announcement had become one of the show’s most delicious elements, the benefit of having a former dancer/choreographer at the helm of the show, with a razor-sharp instinct for what the audience was thinking and a keen visual sense of how to get ahead of and confound those expectations. On the night of the divas’ elimination, for example, George Huff was used as a pawn, told to go to join the top three, and then shocked to learn after he’d walked toward the divas, that he had chosen wrong.
In the seasons to come, Lythgoe would create seemingly endless variations of groupings in which to unveil the news. Sometimes he would hit the audience by surprise right out of the gate. Sometimes he would pull last-minute twists that always managed to give the audience a bit of unpredictability no matter how many times they had seen the show.
Lythgoe says of these, “In season 3, that’s where the whole thing came together timingwise, lightingwise, and everything else, getting the drama behind it, and that really became the standard. Everybody then copied that, that whole feeling of ‘And America said—’ and then I could do all the tricks like, ‘There are two groups there. One is in. One is out. Go and join the one because you’re through this week.’ George, with the three divas who were the bottom three, a ridiculous judgment from America. It gave me, though, this wonderful opportunity.
“I’d get the results at something like midnight or one o’clock in the morning. I’d be awake all night choreographing what we were going to do the next day. It was fun. It allowed me to screw around with emotions and manipulate. They say that I’m a master manipulator. I love that. Of course Ryan is so receptive to that. He would love doing it and then when he got blamed, ‘You were terribly cruel this week with that.’ ‘It’s not me. It’s Nigel.’ But it is fun and we screwed around with people, but if you come on the show you know that you’re going to get that. Every time someone knew which trick I’d used I’d switch the trick.”
Beyond the results night, season 3 was the moment when Idol stepped into its own as a production. At last not rushed to air, the look, the feel, the production values of the show finally jelled, and it became something unique on the airwaves, something that took the production of a weekly variety show to a higher standard than had ever been seen.
To that point, variety shows from Star Search to the 1970s models such as The Donny & Marie Show had been traditional sorts of theatrical stagings. Hosts stood on reflective floors in front of gaudy curtains, overlit, blocked with the finesse and artfulness of a high school production of Oklahoma!, complete with cardboard cutout sets.
Because the format had been so long in hibernation in the United States, it forced the crew to reinvent the mold. The awards show veterans who became the Idol team were accustomed to working on a massive scale in events like the Oscars or Grammys. They were the ones who conceived and executed Idol on a level far above anything ever seen in television variety. The set, tweaked by designer Andy Walmsley (also noted for creating the set of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire), became more daring. Its whirling gyroscopes, chrome surfaces, and giant video monitor—video floors, for that matter—were a huge leap from the shiny floor and curtain setup. The direction by Bruce Gowers, a veteran of music videos, kept the show from lagging. Cameras swooped from all angles, searching out the quiet moments of drama in the audience or around the room, to heighten the central tension.
The wardrobe by Miles Siggins and Soyon An, and the makeup team led by Mezghan Hussainy, who would eventually be Simon Cowell’s significant other, crafted makeovers of their raw recruits so subtly that the audience was rarely aware they were happening. The lighting team led by Kieran Healy created sharp, distinctive effects, lighting setups more elaborate than anything being done on prime-time television. At the center of every live show, stage manager Debbie Williams operated as the ringmaster, keeping a thousand balls in the air before tens of millions of sets of eyes. Season after season, she’d dodge a million near misses and almost disasters when inevitably one of those balls went flying. The team of vocal coaches—Debra Byrd, Dorian Holley, and Michael Orland—gave a new cast of singers each season sometimes their first introduction to how to expertly use and protect their instrument. Rickey Minor, who would go on to lead The Tonight Show band, coordinated a myriad of musical details and led prime-time’s finest orchestra. Each week’s show would require getting clearance for, arranging, and eventually recording a dozen new songs for iTunes. Come each year at finale time, Minor’s studio became the center of a hurricane as he coordinated with musicians, backup singers, guest performers, producers, and the contestants themselves the details of the dozen or so songs that would form the backbone of the season’s final two shows.
These are but a few of the people who bring the show together, but to be on the Idol set and see the team of professionals guided by Lythgoe and Ken Warwick is to feel you are truly watching people who are the best in the world at what they do. Though the set would be beset by tension, factions, and all the resentments that come with growth and enormous success, the sense on the set of watching a team achieve at the highest level would never change.
One by one the divas fell. After Jennifer Hudson, LaToya London went out in fourth place until only Fantasia remained. In the end, it was Fantasia who endured after delivering an intense, out-of-the-park version of “Summertime” that is still referred to as arguably the best performance in the show’s history.
She was joined in the finale by Diana DeGarmo, a perpetually smiling sixteen-year-old from Georgia, whose infectious demeanor was paired with a sophisticated cabaret style of singing.
DeGarmo represented a new category of Idol performer, the stage child. The show aired images of Diana at five and six years old working the pageant circuit, images Cowell said made her look like “the product of a kept farm.” Ultimately, however, he would change his tune, becoming her biggest booster and predicting in the final weeks her ultimate victory.
Along with the new presence of a stage child on the Idol stage, Diana brought with her that ubiquitous accessory, the stage mother. Throughout the season, every decision of Diana’s would be vetted by her mother, every performance critiqued and picked apart. It made for some very hard days for the sweet-natured young singer.
In the end, there was another epic-scaled finale. Ruben and Kelly joined the two finalists onstage to sing a tear-jerking jumbo-sized version of “The Impossible Dream.” After a season of wavering, Cowell gave his vote completely to Fantasia, telling her, “I think you are, without question, the best contestant we’ve had in any competition,” putting her above not only the American contenders but every Idol contestant from around the world. The governors of Georgia and North Carolina showed up to lead the get-out-the-vote efforts for their native daughters, Governor Sonny Perdue of Georgia issuing an official proclamation of “Dial for Diana DeGarmo Day.”
The audience was down just a tad for the Fantasia/Diana showdown, at 31 million from the previous year’s 33 million, indicating at long last, to the competitors’ relief, that Idol’s rise had to stop somewhere—even if that somewhere was fifty thousand feet above sea level. Sixty-five million votes w
ere cast in the decision to make Fantasia Barrino the third winner of the Idol crown and to give the show perhaps the truest incarnation of the Idol mythology it had seen yet. And for once, with a healthy margin between them, the finals did not launch an explosion of conspiracy talk and stolen election allegations. There was reason to think that after three years, they had finally gotten it all just right.
Across the Atlantic, however, a decision was made after which the Idol world would never be the same. After its just okay second season, ITV announced that Pop Idol would be taking a year off. To fill its slot in the interim, they turned to another producer to create a new, rival singing competition. That producer was a man named Simon Cowell.
Chapter 11
SIMON VS. SIMON
This was a big deal. Even by the standards of network television, where stars fought with creators, where writers fought with programmers, and producers fought with everyone, it was a big deal. Simon Fuller was suing Simon Cowell.
To have a lawsuit between star and creator play itself out while Idol sat atop the world’s entertainment pyramid, a battle with potential to blow apart the biggest thing in show business, well, this was on a magnitude that nobody had ever seen before.
From the start, the two sides made a point of keeping the messy affair “business only” and free from mudslinging. Cowell said that suit or no suit, he would return to work at American Idol, where he still had two years left on his contract. Fuller’s 19 issued a statement, making clear, “The action is being taken to protect our [American Idol] format. It’s not personal.” Indeed, for the year to come while the legal matters played themselves out, the two sides managed to refrain from name-calling or personal invective, perhaps a reflection of just how much was at stake here and how easily it could poison the well in which the golden goose bathed, to mix a metaphor.
The suit alleged that in creating X Factor, Cowell had ripped off Idol, the show that had made him a star. “The only thing the two talent shows have in common is Cowell,” said Cowell, defending X Factor from the copyright infringement charge. Casual observers, however, could be forgiven for noticing a more than passing resemblance between the shows. Even within the ancient talent competition genre, the similarities between X Factor and Idol were eye-catching.
The X Factor had debuted on British television in October 2004, five months after Fantasia had taken the American Idol crown. Like Idol, X Factor began with regional auditions, building up to a series of live performance episodes where the contestants appeared before three sharp-tongued judges, facing weekly eliminations until the champion was left standing. In look and design, the slick, edgy art direction was very much from the same visual family as Idol.
There were some major differences too. X Factor was open to groups as well as individuals and to a much wider age range than Idol. More important was the role of the X Factor judges. In every Idol season, Cowell had come under fire for being partisan to certain performers, praising every undulation of his favorites and damning the others no matter how well they did. Whether true or not, Cowell has always chafed at the requirement to be above the fray, to not actively take sides. On X Factor, he would need no such restraint. Here, the show’s judges were not to serve as neutral overseers but as active mentors to the contestants, to the point of living with their charges during the show. The change had the effect of elevating the judges, who, on Idol, have no official role after the semifinalists have been chosen. They sound off with their opinions, of course, but both the contestants and the audience are free to ignore them. Much more than Idol, X Factor was a show from the reality TV tradition, playing up backstage drama. The contrast showed how much Idol was almost stodgily a very pure singing contest.
Today, Cowell recalls the first seeds of X Factor to be “rather like the evolution of Idol coming from Pop Stars. This was nothing more than that. I was on holiday with my girlfriend, Terri, the night it came into my head and I remember asking, ‘What do you think about a show whereby young singers could compete with older singers and they could compete with groups and the judges took responsibility for their artists?’ And Terri had great instincts, she said, ‘I think that’s brilliant.’ And I said, ‘So do I. And I want to make the show.’
“And I called one of my producers in London and said, ‘What do you think about this as a format?’ and he just screamed down the phone and said, ‘Think that’s fantastic,’ and I said, ‘Good, because I want to make it.’
“We had done the second season of Pop Idol. I liked it, I didn’t love it. I was very, very reluctant to do the second season. This one I really, really had to think it over a lot. I’d say it was because of my relationship with ITV because they’d given us a shot. And that’s what they were kind of saying to me, we gave you a shot and we’d really like you to do it. And I reluctantly agreed. I didn’t like doing the second show. I didn’t have a great time and at the end of it I said to ITV, ‘That’s it. Don’t even think of asking me to do it again, because I don’t want to do this anymore. It’s too much time.’ At that point, America was taking off.”
He might have been looking to cut back his judging duties, but that didn’t mean that a man like Cowell was just looking for more free time. If he could fill that void left by his withdrawal from Pop Idol with a show on which he’d be doing much more, that was another story. “Because I thought it was a good idea, this show. I thought it was a show I’d have more fun on because I had more to do on it than just judge the contestants, so I had more of a role on it. And I thought it would be funny. I thought if I don’t make it, there’s a chance somebody else would make it.
“It was hard, and that’s the point, I think, where you have to say, ‘Look. Am I just a judge, or am I going into TV as a serious business? And I think that’s the point where I started to think, ‘I’m good at making TV shows. I would like to make more TV shows.’ So I made the decision to start producing my own ones. I just didn’t want to be a paid judge for the rest of my life.”
The first season of the X Factor was a solid hit in the United Kingdom. It didn’t bring in numbers on the order of Pop Idol’s first season, but it was solid nonetheless, with audiences typically in the seven to eight million range.
“There was an awful lot of pressure on me when I launched X Factor. I was told this very clearly by a number of people in America: You can’t launch a second show in this format. It will fail. It’s the show [Idol] that is the hit. And if X Factor fails, you’re not the reason why Idol is successful. I hadn’t quite thought of it in those terms. All I was thinking was, I think the show is good. I’m excited to do something different. I’m allowed to do something different, as anyone is allowed to do. Simon [Fuller] was off making new shows. If I wanted to make new shows I could do what I want. I didn’t tell him not to make new shows, I didn’t expect to be told I couldn’t. So I did it, but I’ve got to tell you that two-week period when we launched and the ratings weren’t great, waiting for the second week to come in, was one of the most stressful times I’ve ever had in my life.”
But X Factor became a hit. Almost the moment the show had taken off, Cowell began talking with Fox about bringing it to the United States. Competing with Idol on his home island nation would not be enough, it seemed. Having tasted the possibilities of success in America, Cowell was ready to battle the show in which he starred for control of the world’s biggest market.
One executive recalls, “Once it became viable in the UK, this was Simon Cowell’s obsession and he thought this is something that he didn’t share with Fuller.”
On Idol, he would forever be a performer under the banner created by Simon Fuller, serving under producers and executives who did not report to him. Sony, the record company he worked for (after their acquisition of BMG), owned the winners’ albums, but now just being a record executive and doing right by your company were not enough. Understood in the discussions about bringing X Factor over was the idea that if and when that happened, Cowell would make the leap away from Idol to his
own show. He might have had two years left on his contract, but contracts could be altered. If not, two years wasn’t forever.
But the tension was unbearable. Idol’s season 4 debuted just after the first season of X Factor. In the year that followed, Cowell and Fuller went about their business, exchanging nary a word. Those caught between the warring creator and star remember it as an excruciating time of go-betweens and messages conveyed back and forth.
“The battle between Fuller and Cowell that played out in the British courts, this was the undercurrent of everything that went on from the beginning of Idol,” recalls another member of the team. “It was who created this show and who was responsible and which record company was going to have the goods. But it didn’t become all-out warfare for a while because no one knew what it was yet. But once Idol became a hit, everyone’s personal interests needed to be served. That happens with most television shows. So there’s nothing particularly unique about it, but the thing that was so unusual was that whatever had gone on in their lives and their professional lives before this, there was blood in the water.”
“I just shut it out of my mind,” Cowell recalls. “I was more concerned with the ratings of the U.K. show and I thought, I’ll let the lawyers deal with that. I’m still being paid to do Idol, I have to. Our spats have been quite public. When somebody sues you, that’s a very public thing to have to deal with. But as I can say today, I didn’t steal anything. I just made a new show as he made new shows. But it was a difficult period. I think more than anything I would say this: At the point when Idol was launched, we both needed each other. . . . No question about it. I couldn’t have done it without him and I don’t think he could have done it without me. But we both are people who like running our own businesses, who like owning our own shows, and the inevitable kind of happened, really. Launch something successful together. Simon wants to make new shows, sign new artists, my attitude was, so do I. It’s a weird relationship. You’ve got to have competition, hopefully healthy competition in your life. . . . Enjoy it. But it’s been bizarre.”
American Idol Page 17
