American Idol

by Richard Rushfield

  As far as the voting goes, Idol producers are no doubt right. But as American Idol sought to be the first show on network television to put the controls in the hands of its viewers, Dave Della Terza and his merry men have served, in their way, as the authenticators of the democratic process, ensuring through their rowdiness that the larger Idol experience never becomes too controlled, too staid, too programmed.

  No other TV show has spawned such a camp following of Web sites devoted to it, and in the end, nothing proves how much the show ultimately belongs to the public like the persistence of Vote for the Worst.

  “That’s the thing,” Della Terza reflects, looking back on eight years of mocking Idol. “I don’t know why they don’t embrace Vote for the Worst more. I know we expose their show as being fake, but the thing is, if they would just keep the Vote for the Worst contestant on longer, people will be talking about your show more. They always get so angry and send the Vote for the Worst contestants home so fast that I think, really? Why don’t you have a little more fun with it and people will probably get more pissed off and more people will talk about your show. A lot of people think Vote for the Worst is paid for by American Idol, but of course we’re not.

  “I was born two months premature and my mom always said, ‘You’re going to do big things.’ And now she says, ‘You were going to do big things, but I didn’t know it was going to be an American Idol Web site.’ We all joke about it. It’s so silly. . . . I think it’s hysterical that it gets so much attention.”

  Photographic Insert 2

  The Creator. Simon Fuller with two of his champions, Jordin Sparks (season 6) and Carrie Underwood (season 4). (KEVIN MAZUR)

  (2009) A pioneer of the reality age, Fox’s iconoclastic Mike Darnell pushed for the show to break new boundaries. (FRANK MICELOTTA)

  (SEASON 8, 2009) Idol’s greatest fan became one of its unlikeliest stars. Ashley “Crying Girl” Ferl with Allison Iraheta. (STACY FERL)

  (SEASON 7, 2008) Teen sensation David Archuleta’s rise woke up Idol’s sleeping giant— the tween vote. (FRANK MICELOTTA/AMERICAN IDOL)

  (SEASON 8, 2009) Cast into the middle of the world’s most famous buddy act, Kara Dioguardi struggled to find her role amongst the judges. (KEVIN WINTER/AMERICAN IDOL)

  (SEASON 8, 2009) The founder of American Idol Ministry, Leesa Bellesi with season 8’s Danny Gokey and his family, one of the many Idol clan that have been part of her subterreanean mission. (LEESA BELLESI)

  (SEASON 8, 2009) Adam Lambert dominated season 8 as the greatest phenomenon the show had seen in years. Privately, however, the crew was aware there was a ceiling on the controversial singer’s support. Ultimately, Kris Allen’s victory, while shocking to the audience, wasn’t even close. (KEVIN WINTER/AMERICAN IDOL)

  (SEASON 8, 2009) Two of the quirky new breed of Idol stars, season 8’s Nick Mitchell, aka Norman Gentle, and Megan Joy. For Megan, who secretly fought a child custody battle while on the show, Idol was the best and worst months of her life. (RICHARD RUSHFIELD)

  (SEASON 8, 2009) After leaving the Idol bubble, the next stop is the fifty-city concert tour where the Idols for the first time come face to face with their fans. Season 8’s Matt Giraud called it his “redemption tour.” (RICHARD RUSHFIELD)

  (SEASON 9, 2010) It was hoped that Idol’s #1 fan Ellen DeGeneres would confer her own star power upon the show. Instead, lacking a musical background, she seemed a fish out of water through the difficult ninth season. (KEVIN WINTER/AMERICAN IDOL)

  (SEASON 9, 2010) Crystal Bowersox was the one breakout star of season 9, as well as its major source of backstage drama. (RICHARD RUSHFIELD)

  (SEASON 9, 2010) The cast of season 9 rehearses for their summer tour. (RICHARD RUSHFIELD)

  Chapter 13

  DÉTENTE

  For a little while, there was some doubt as to whether there would be a season 5. With the suit still unsettled and the deal completed after season 2 having lapsed, Fox questioned whether it would be able to even produce the series. Then, as he was wont to do in these negotiations, Cowell put the word out that he was ready to move on.

  On November 21, the New York Times’s Bill Carter ran the following item:

  Mr. Cowell signed a deal in 2003 that committed him to three more seasons of American Idol. But only in the first two of these did he retain the rights to sign the winner and runner-up of each year’s competition to his record label, which is under Sony BMG. For the coming edition of Idol, Mr. Cowell does not have a deal giving his label such rights. “Simon is not interested in making a star for another label,” said one of Mr. Cowell’s close associates, who requested that he not be named because the issues are still being debated. Without a deal for music rights, the associate said, Mr. Cowell would have a strong incentive to leave Idol and sell X Factor—starring him—to one of Fox’s competitors in the United States. At least two networks, ABC and NBC, have quietly expressed interest in negotiating to acquire X Factor, which this season has been the most popular show on British television.

  The “leak” produced the desired effect. Nine days later the parties in the lawsuit reached an agreement. Cowell was given a slightly larger stake in Idol; Simon Fuller took some shares of X Factor. Sony BMG would continue to own and produce Idol’s albums. Fox signed the series for at least four more seasons, with an option on six, and Cowell signed on as judge for five more. His salary? In the neighborhood of thirty million dollars.

  What’s more, Fuller had given Cowell complete and total victory in the battle of Britain. In exchange for Cowell continuing with American Idol, Pop Idol would be pulled off the air and the copyright infringement suit withdrawn, conceding the United Kingdom entirely to X Factor. For Cowell, it seemed a huge victory, and his people lost no time spinning it that way. The Independent quoted one senior music executive as saying, “It has come out 75/25 in favor of Cowell. He is the star. He had all the aces.”

  But there was a catch, and a very big one indeed. In exchange for getting the airwaves to himself in the United Kingdom, Cowell surrendered America; he agreed to give up his dream of bringing X Factor to the United States. In agreeing to serve as judge for another five years on American Idol, Cowell would spend the next half decade as “just talent” in America, while racing back and forth across the continents to preside over two empires.

  “I am happy that we have been able to sort out our differences and find an amicable solution to our problems . . .” Cowell told the Independent. “Simon and I have shown just how well we work together in recent years. We have remained friends throughout this dispute and I think that it was this friendship that allowed us to settle our differences.”

  In fact, however, as far as the underlying issues went, nothing had been settled. At the core of the dispute had been the fact that locked together under the Idol banner were two men each accustomed to unrivaled control of any project they were involved in. In starting X Factor, Cowell had attempted to break up this uneasy coexistence. But now they were bound ever more firmly together, the problems merely pushed under the rug, where, in time, they would grow even bigger as the stakes grew ever bigger.

  Another party that deserves a great deal of credit for Idol’s rise is the other networks. Idol’s reign had been aided by the fact that once it had achieved its initial burst of popularity, the other networks didn’t dare schedule their heavy-hitter programs against it. Early on, when its highly successful new show The Apprentice was surging in popularity, NBC could have used it to take on Idol directly. Even if it hadn’t beaten Idol in the ratings, The Apprentice could have taken a big bite out of its ratings, perhaps even prevented it from turning into the monster it became. But NBC got cold feet about risking its hot property and scheduled it on Sunday nights, safely clear of Idol’s wake.

  Since then, with the exception of Lost on ABC, no network dared put its big guns against Idol, scheduling only weaker shows against the Goliath and allowing Fox’s hold on midweek to go unchallenged. For a while, a rumor had circulated in the trades th
at Fox was considering moving Idol to Thursday nights—that caused a near panic at NBC, where their Thursday comedy lineup remained the last vestige of their once mighty empire—but the rumor proved to be untrue.

  By its fourth and fifth seasons, however, Fox’s scheduling chief Preston Beckman no longer considered the competition to be just the other networks, but a whole world of entertainment choices available to people at home. By creating a show that became such necessary viewing for so many, such a centerpiece of cultural conversation, he felt you could in fact turn back the clock on declining network shares. “When you look at the collective ratings for networks, the majority of people aren’t watching network television. So, our competition is less and less ourselves and the other networks and more and more just going out there and getting the eyeballs. I mean, that’s why we put on big sporting events. You don’t necessarily see the other networks’ shares go down. They get their ratings. In the case with American Idol, we’re not just cannibalizing the other networks. We’ve got an audience that doesn’t necessarily watch network television but makes it their business to be with American Idol.” To that end, Fox programmed what they labeled their “shock and awe” lineup: two nights of Idol paired with two nights of the hit series 24. The schedule blew the competition out of the water and established Fox as the absolute dominant force each spring. “It was a psychological thing, to be perfectly honest,” recalls scheduler Preston Beckman. “The idea was just to come on and just blow everything away and just get everybody feeling like there’s no way to stop us.”

  It worked. By 2008, CBS’s CEO Les Moonves publicly called Idol a “monster” and pleaded for somebody to “please kill that show.”

  Season 5 is arguably remembered as the most talented of seasons. Certainly it’s the season that produced the greatest number of sustained high-level careers. Chris Daughtry has gone on to huge success, selling millions of albums. Kellie Pickler, the roller-skating waitress, has become a genuine country star, serving as Taylor Swift’s opening act during her blockbuster national tour. Bucky Covington has also established himself in the country market. Elliott Yamin advanced from Idol without a recording contract, but went out on his own and sold the better part of a million albums. Daughtry won a Grammy for songwriting, as did Ace Young, who also starred in a major Broadway production. Mandisa remains a prominent name in gospel and Christian music. Katharine McPhee has had a consistent acting career as well as recording two albums.

  And then there is the champion of season 5, Taylor Hicks.

  Idol’s oldest winner to date, Hicks was one of its most controversial, too. Perhaps no contestant has ever been as determined to win as Hicks was, and whatever the show might have thought of him, perhaps no contestant was better able to reshape the show to suit his agenda.

  When Hicks auditioned for Idol, he came to the show with an already viable career. Playing bars and nightclubs across Alabama and the South, his Soul Patrol fan club was already very active. Unique among Idol contestants, Hicks came to the competition with this substantial and active backing, which mobilized to support his bid, a boost that certainly did no harm putting him through the early ranks.

  Flopping around like a drunk at a wedding, Hicks was the farthest thing from a pop star to hit the Idol stage. The judges were perplexed. In fact, midway through the season, Cowell gave up on judging him entirely, declaring Hicks’s routine “judgeproof.” Still, the good ol’ boy who talked about eating ribs for breakfast kept rising as the other talents of the season fell away.

  One crew member recalls the crooner, who stood out for his salt-and-pepper hair, his tailored suits, and also for his arrogance. “A lot of people didn’t like him. They felt he was rude. What I got was that this is a kid who I don’t think was raised with a lot of manners. Sometimes Taylor was in his own little thought world. So, like if somebody did something nice for him and he wouldn’t thank them, they’d go like, ‘Who is he’ kind of thing. But most of the time I felt like he was just in his head.”

  In his memoir, Taylor gave a good sense of the steely determination that existed beneath his goofy stage persona. In contrast to the typical Idol winner who waxes about all the great friends for life they made while on the show, he wrote of the Idol dorm, “As you might imagine things could get awkward living with the same people you were competing against. My own way of coping was keeping my eyes on the prize, which meant keeping to myself as much as possible. If you asked my roommates, they’d tell you there were times when I was fun but other times when I was a monster. And they’d be right. Then again, I was straight up with everybody. I really was there looking for fans. Not friends.”

  Debbie Williams recalls of Hicks, “He would come to me secretly sometimes and say, ‘Okay, I want to do this particular thing. But I don’t want to do it in rehearsals. I don’t want to give it away.’ Okay. The word is, if you’re going to do something always tell me. I’ve got to let the booth know. I won’t tell anybody else.

  “One night Taylor was going to lay on the floor in his number, but he didn’t want anybody to know that. So I told Bruce, ‘Okay, at this part of the song he’s going to lay on the floor.’ . . . So, he had his little secret things all the time that he wanted to pull out of his bag of tricks. I liked that. I liked him. I think he knew he wasn’t a great singer. But he had to come up with gimmicks. He had to do that kind of stuff to get himself noticed. And it worked.”

  But it was a long climb up the ladder for Hicks of all people to wind up atop one of Idol’s most talented groups.

  At the season open, it was the hunky, long-haired Coloradan Ace Young who was quickly marked as the season’s front-runner. He recalls hearing that news early on: “I remember telling my brother that first week, ‘Well, I’m not gonna win this year.’ He says, ‘What do you mean?’ and I say, ‘Dude, it’s always an underdog, and I started out on top. I’m screwed.’ ”

  He was right.

  Another front-runner from the early days was a lanky but highly likable basketball-playing girl from Boston named Ayla Brown. Other than her clear musical talents, Brown stood out for the presence of her politician father, a member of the Massachusetts State Legislature who sat beaming in the front row during his daughter’s performance. Ayla was the victim of one of the season’s more shocking eliminations during the semifinals, but she would return to prominence by her father’s side when, four years later, Scott Brown would win an upset victory in a special election to the U.S. Senate, replacing Senator Edward Kennedy.

  When Simon Fuller had conceived of Idol as the ultimate experiment in entertainment democracy, democracy was still something of an orderly concept. But by season 5, the hounds of the Internet had turned loose and there was no going back. A new generation of blogs and Web sites had descended on Idol, making it one of the most searched-for topics on the Internet. Online commentary had lapped up every table scrap from the show.

  Sites sprang up devoted to Idol fan fiction, imaginary romantic encounters between Idol contestants drafted by mostly teenage admirers. One site featured an array of novels devoted to every conceivable pairing of Idol contestants, one on one and in ill-fated love triangles, divided up by season and in the forbidden “mixed seasons” category. For instance, Last Kiss, a novel of season 5, begins with the following meeting:

  “You’ll wonder late at night, whoever was that girl with those fists of fury?” Her voice was serious, but she couldn’t help the smile that escaped past her lips when she said it.

  “Oh, trust me I’ll have my ways of knowing.” He gave her a smirk, extending his hand out to her. “Chris Daughtry.”

  “Really now. Guess I’ll have to keep my eye out on you.” She matched his smirk with her own, and took his hand in hers. “Katharine McPhee.”

  “I’ll make sure to give you a little wave every time you’re watching, Ms. McPhee,” Chris quipped in reply, holding on to her hand for a moment longer before finally letting go.

  On sites devoted to the show, rumors were born and swirle
d around endlessly on message boards, never to be dispelled. Fan clubs fought vicious pitched battles over whose candidate had been most grievously cheated. Season 7, Archie’s Angel duked it out with Carly’s Angels over which site had chosen the moniker first. A site calling itself Idoltard sprang up to mock the excesses of the fans and ultimately was shut down after a libel suit from one irate target.

  Vote for the Worst continued to issue its anti-endorsements and rile up fan rage. A new site called DialIdol purported to measure the percent of busy signals on each contestant’s phone lines and predict who would be going home. These predictions were all over the place: sometimes uncannily accurate, sometimes off by a country mile. Spies outside the studio gates harangued the crowds leaving dress rehearsals and published spoiler lists revealing the song choices hours before the show aired, sending the producers into a frenzy as their element of surprise was spoiled. The Smoking Gun continued to comb their closets for skeletons. TMZ had reporters all over Idol land looking for dirt. Among their early season 5 scoops were a report that Taylor Hicks’s hair was actually dyed gray and that Kevin “Chicken Little” Covais had dumped his girlfriend to make himself more appealing to female Idol voters.

  Traveling to Vegas to be mentored by Barry Manilow, Ace Young was to find that what happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas. Not with Idol, anyway. He remembers, speaking in veiled terms, of a certain night traveling to Sin City with the others, including his roommate and newly installed BFF Chris Daughtry: “We had an interesting situation everywhere we went, but in Vegas we had a situation that was a dream come true for me, but not for Chris. There was a whole college soccer team that was hanging out . . . I got to have a lot of fun with that whole night, and Chris had to go to bed because he’s a married man. It was funny because after that evening, all the girls were putting up stuff that was true about me, but not about Chris.”