To be honest, I didn’t see the whole show tonight. I was a victim of poor planning my own, not NBCs. I spent this past weekend in Boston to introduce a friend of mine to Lost. He’d never seen it before and I had the DVD set. Since I had nothing to do, and Greyhound is relatively cheap, I decided to take the Season One box set I’d just gotten for my birthday. I planned to get home from Boston at 8pm on Sunday night, assuming the show would run from 8 10. Unfortunately, it was run from 7 9.
The same problems from last week still exist this week. The volume on the singer’s microphones isn’t loud enough. The screechy annoyingness from the people in the front row still drowns out the performers. The show is still shot at annoying angles. The judges are not nearly critical enough.
Now, let’s add a new complaint to the show. The voting. The elimination process is as follows. The bottom two boys and bottom two girls are told they are in the bottom four. At the end of the show, these four enter a sing-off, then the judges choose which of the bottom two stay and which of the bottom two go, essentially ensuring that someone they like is never voted off the show. This kind of takes away from the allure of the show. (Actually, this is essentially the same process as Rock Star. We’ve seen both the good – JD – and the bad – Lukas – come out of it -Kevin) This week, they got it right. To the surprise of, well, almost nobody, the people voted off were the people who were brought back after being eliminated during Academy Week.
I also can’t say enough how much is taken from the show from judges who are not remotely critical. They praise sub-standard performances. When I can note something is out of tune, it’s WAY out of tune. In the last hour of the show, I saw a girl sing Memories (Cats) that she could not remotely handle, another girl absolutely BUTCHER Buenos Aires (Evita), singing a song that she couldn’t keep up with and in both situations, the judges lavished praise on the contestants. I couldn’t believe it.
In fact, about the only performance I saw worth anything (which, granted, was the five second recap) was the girl who sang Don’t Cry For Me Argentina (Evita). Most of the other ones were forgettable, if not downright bad.
I’ll be back on normal rotation, with hopefully a fuller recap, next Sunday night. Now that I have an idea that the start time for this show is somewhat floating, I’ll be ready for it next week.
