Many television shows have changed something — the nature of comedy, the fate of a network, certain cultural attitudes, the sophistication of storytelling.
Only one changed everything: “American Idol.”
It may be difficult to remember amid the limp ratings and hollow hype of the 15th and final season. But 14 years ago, when Fox debuted the American version of a British singing competition, the success of “American Idol” was so big, so immediate and so utterly unexpected that it essentially broke television.
Pretty much everything that’s happened since is, at least in part, a product of the “American Idol” aftershock.
The ruthless rise of reality programming, as everyone scrambled to create the next “Idol,” all but destroyed the industry’s traditional business model, which, in turn, created a space into which new purveyors of scripted television could step without the support of enormous audiences.
“Idol’s” reliance on real-time participation ignited a frenzy of fan culture and real-time hashtag viewing that put television back into the center of the cultural discourse and fostered an increasingly intimate relationship between those who created TV and those who watched it.
The blatant resurrection of Hollywood’s overnight-success mythology — “Kid, I’ll make you a star!” — shaped the dreams and habits of a new generation, creating along the way a whole new self-sustaining model of content creation.
Even presidential politics have been affected. During the recent campaign, there were times when the GOP debates resembled nothing so much as the strange and often non sequitur bickering of original “Idol” judges Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul and Randy Jackson.
It may seem like ancient history, but when “American Idol” came on the scene, television was still television, in the traditional sense. Most viewers still tuned into the four big networks for a time-honored combo plate of half-hour comedies and hourlong dramas, the more successful of which drew audiences from 10 million (“Malcolm in the Middle”) to 26 million (“CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”).
CBS had launched the highly successful “Survivor” two years before, with shows like “The Amazing Race” and “Fear Factor” springing up in its wake, but though growing in popularity, reality programming was still something of a novelty.
Given the less-than-electric impact of the recently deceased “Star Search,” there was absolutely no good reason to believe that a singing competition between unknown performers, fueled by the antics of three cartoonish judges and the phone-dialing dexterity of teenagers, would survive, much less thrive.
Which is why Fox first aired it during the dead zone of summer. The attitude of network executives in 2002 being: Who watches television during the summer?
Well, as we all know now, millions and millions of people. Who then told their friends about “American Idol,” so that when the second season premiered in January 2003, the original numbers had almost doubled. By the time the finale rolled around, more than 38 million tuned in.
The next season, it become the highest-rated show of any sort and would remain so for years.
“American Idol” was ostensibly about building stars. But no star exploded as quickly as the show itself; its success became as hot a topic as the players competing each season. The judges, with their signature tics — Simon was the mean one, Paula was the crazy one and Randy said “dog” a lot — became household names.
Suddenly singing, and wanting to be a singing star, was hot like it hadn’t been since Barbra Streisand starred in a remake of “A Star Is Born.” Talent shows began cropping up again, choirs and musicals; the soundtrack of everyone’s prom was getting coverage on a weekly basis. For fans, it was a giddy time.
But times, they change, and viewers are fickle. No other reality show took off quite like “Idol” did, and aided by the now-splintered audience model, new platforms emerged with different and splendid offerings.
On its best day, “Mad Men” never got the audience “American Idol” had on its worst, but AMC’s new drama, and then its sibling “Breaking Bad,” got just as many magazine covers, in part because they were so removed from reality programming, and that began to matter as much, if not more, than the big numbers.
Indeed, “American Idol’s” enormous audience was, as it turns out, among the last of its kind. Ironically, the weight of its success helped crash the system. From it emerged a new, less monolithic model in which measurements of live viewing was only one method of many.
And the show itself grew dull, as any show will after more than a dozen years. The thrill and pageantry of the final season was entirely of its own making; even the most rabid former fans sound dutiful in their farewells.
But it doesn’t matter. “American Idol” came, it sang, it conquered, and the world will never be the same again.
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