American Idol

by Richard Rushfield

  Throughout the first seasons, Cowell had been more than just talent. He had been incredibly passionate about the show, coming in early with the other new members, passionately arguing his side, and sitting through long meetings and days of rehearsal. Now his interest was starting to wane. Outside of tapings, he was showing up less and less. While the others would arrive at 10:00 A.M., he would drift in at three. Visitors to the tapings were struck by how little attention he often paid the performances, watching only the first few seconds before turning to chat with Paula. Cowell says of the time, “You get bored on any show you make. Whether it’s X Factor, Got Talent, Idol, there’s times when it just all becomes quite boring. They’re long processes.” Clearly, things were not good.

  Fortunately, season 4 had something to get everyone’s attention. Cowell has described that first appearance of Carrie Underwood in almost mystical terms. “It was almost as though the whole cast were in black and white and she was in color,” he would tell Oprah. “That’s how clear it was to me. This girl knew what she wanted and luckily we’ve spotted it.”

  It was indeed a bold prediction, and to his everlasting glory, Cowell alone made it. Carrie Underwood had been unveiled to Idol audiences as the quintessential farm girl; her introductory video featured shots of her feeding the horses, tending to her chores. In fact, as it had been with so many others, Carrie’s singing past was a bit more complex. While indeed raised on a farm, young Carrie had been trying to break into the business since before she was a teenager, belting out tunes at pageants and talent shows across the South. While on the circuit, she came to the attention of a manager who secured her a contract with Capitol Records’ Nashville division, only to have the deal fall through after a shake-up at the label. After years spent trying to advance herself beyond local contest stages, Carrie finally walked away from the performing dream and enrolled in college at Oklahoma’s Northeastern State University. She was four credits shy of a communications degree—magna cum laude no less—when she decided to take a shot at Idol.

  Simon Cowell may recall seeing her step forward in Technicolor, lights blazing, and indeed on her first appearance he seems for once utterly dumfounded, mouth agape, and at a loss for words. But the impression she made around the set was less glowing. The crew remembers Carrie as a shy, standoffish presence, reluctant to engage with them or her fellow contestants. Says one, “I didn’t notice her. I felt she was flat, although when she sang she had a great voice, but I was like, there’s nothing else there. She surprised us all, I think. She just kind of snuck in. She kept to herself. She was very quiet. She was one of those people where all of a sudden you go, oh, wow.”

  “I remember one week,” says another, “she did this number where a song was going to change tempo. She wanted to use a mic stand. So we had to figure out a way to get rid of it. Someone suggested, ‘Why don’t you kick it? Do like a karate kick.’ She said, ‘Really?’ So, she did and everybody commented about it the next day because it was, like, so uncharacteristic that she did something like that.”

  In season 3, the show had established the basic formula that would guide it henceforward. But there were still tweaks to be made. The first one was the addition, after Hollywood Week, of the “chair” or green mile episode, so named after the long, hard walk condemned prisoners take on death row. The green mile shows are unique in reality TV: two solid hours of nothing but contestants being told, one by one, whether they will advance to the semifinals. Only a show very confident of its grip on the audience would dare attempt a full episode with no singing, no competition at all, merely contestants learning whether they have made it from one intermediate point in the contest to another.

  But the episode works. By season 4 of Idol, the stakes had become so high that two hours of seeing people take an intermediate step forward in the competition made for gripping television, especially with each verdict dramatically drawn out through a tearful elevator ride or a long, cold walk to face the judges.

  Season 4 also saw a big tweak to the semifinals rounds, changing it from the three heats sudden death plus Wild Card format to what is known as the “boy/girl rounds,” wherein each week every contestant, divided by gender, sang, and each week two of them were eliminated. Time has shown each of the two semifinals systems to have their big advantages and drawbacks. With a lot of people to sort through each week, the audience’s attention has been found to wane during the boy/girl rounds. However, the three-week period lets the audience meet each contender at least three times before they make it to the big stage, giving them an opportunity to build a personal investment in some early favorites. The sudden death version creates high drama but means that in the top twelve, there will be many the audience has barely seen. Producers have expressed misgivings with each formula, and having now gone back and forth between the two, acknowledge a perfect solution has never quite been found.

  The boy/girl rounds were also designed to prevent the marginally talented from slipping through, something that had been an issue in season 3. However, in season 4, one particular contestant managed to create a whole new Idol category: the antihero.

  In contrast to the glowing presence of Carrie Underwood, Scott “the Body” Savol represented the other end of the spectrum. Pudgy, sullen, and uncommunicative, the R&B singer radiated anticharisma. Yet, as the season progressed, he survived as fan favorites fell. Even after The Smoking Gun revealed Savol had once been arrested for hitting the mother of his child with a telephone, he continued to climb. In the top six week of the competition, Savol finally outlasted one of the season’s breakthrough stars, long-haired rocker Constantine Maroulis. The media went ballistic and set off an investigation worthy of the Iran-Contra affair.

  “Maybe the conspiracy theorists are on to something. There’s little else to explain Scott Savol’s baffling longevity on American Idol,” wrote USA Today.

  “By 5:00 P.M. yesterday, almost 380,000 people had responded to the show’s online poll about Maroulis getting the boot, with 75 percent calling it either ‘an injustice’ or ‘shocking’ or claiming ‘America let me down,’ ” the Boston Herald reported.

  However, in good time the media coalesced around an explanation for the outrage. It was declared that a previously little known Web site called Vote for the Worst had been leading a campaign to undermine the show by encouraging visitors to cast a vote for the least deserving competitor, this season, the press discovered, boosting “Scott the Body.” While there was little evidence that this obscure site had reached enough people to affect a contest where tens of millions of votes were cast each week, the story, as they say, deserved to be true. Not only did it explain Savol’s popularity, but it captured the influence of this new sector, the blogosphere, upon the contest. Savol’s fortunes likely had more to do with his nods to Idol’s Christian viewers, but Vote for the Worst was now part of the Idol dialogue. The moment foretold a whole new generation of media about to rise from the uncharted depths of the Internet and overrun Idol nation in ways as yet undreamed of.

  Toward the end of season 4, a bombshell hit the already tense set. Idol had weathered scandals aplenty during its short life, but this one was something else, a scandal that threatened Idol’s very credibility. The Paula Abdul question had lingered at the back of Idol discussions for some time. On-screen, her behavior often went beyond ditsy into the realm of What is Paula on?, a question promoted by her often slurred speech—and unpredictable behavior. Offscreen she could be even more erratic. Getting Paula into her chair by showtime was a constant challenge. A no-show often minutes before airtime, her worried producers would send spotters out to Beverly Boulevard to see if she was nearby. On occasion, she would refuse to come out of her dressing room, and a producer would have to coax her to the stage.

  Paula was surrounded by the largest coterie of handlers and attendants anyone of this veteran showbiz crew had ever seen: A constantly revolving crew of assistants, publicists, agents, managers, attorneys, stylists, and hand-holders came and went, we
re fired and rehired. Executives and reporters who wished to get in contact with her often had trouble determining who her current representatives were.

  In December 2003, Paula had been arrested for hit-and-run driving after she knocked into another car on the 101 Freeway and fled the scene. She pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge and was sentenced to two years’ probation.

  Then there were the pills. Several witnesses from this period report seeing a veritable cornucopia of little orange canisters in her purse.

  In May 2004, as Carrie Underwood neared her coronation, Paula attempted to explain some of the erratic behavior, to make clear that it wasn’t about drugs or booze. In an interview with People, she said she had been diagnosed with Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, a chronic nerve ailment. “If people only knew what I’ve gone through with pain and pills. I’m dancing for joy at the fact that not even a year ago I was in so much pain I could barely get up.” She claimed she had been in pain for over twenty-five years, a battle that began with a teenage cheerleading accident and had been worsened by a pair of car accidents and a near plane crash. To deal with the pain, she had been through everything from bulimia to prescription drug treatments to leechings.

  “I love her to death,” Lythgoe says. “She is an artist who has been through a lot of pain. I’ve got one plate in my neck with two fused in my cervical spine. She’s got four and I believe that she had a morphine patch for a number of years. You’ve only got to take a sip of coffee at the wrong time or an aspirin and you’re sent. It’s not always been the easiest of times for her. I remember carrying her to the studio doors once, running down the corridor literally with her in my arms, dumping her out there and walking her out there. I really love stars. And as far as I’m concerned she’s a star and you look after her. That’s my job as a producer, to look after her and be protective.”

  Her explanation of her ordeals with pain, however, could not explain the charges that were about to be unleashed.

  It had been two years since Idol’s most notorious bad boy, Corey Clark, was eliminated from the show. Now he had a record to sell and a story to tell. On a special edition of ABC’s Primetime Live entitled “Fallen Idol,” Clark laid out a tale of a secret affair with Abdul conducted while he was a contestant on the show. He claimed that a member of Paula’s entourage had slipped him the judge’s private number, and he had snuck out of the mansion several times to visit her. “When she was dropping me off one night, she leaned over and kissed me in her car,” he told. Eventually, as they became fully intimate, he claimed she showered him with gifts and coached him on his performances.

  As evidence to back up his claims, he showed phone records purporting to list calls from Abdul, which ABC News claimed to have verified. He played on air a voice mail recording that sounds more or less like Paula’s voice, saying, “Listen, if the press is trying to talk to you, you say absolutely nothing. Something’s going on. Okay? Call me back.”

  After the interview, Clark went on a press tour, repeating the charges everywhere from Good Morning America to the Howard Stern Show.

  The reaction from Idol was instant and unambiguous, accusing ABC of wanting to destroy a rival network’s hit and Clark of fabricating charges to climb back from obscurity and sell an album. Fox said it would investigate the charges and asked Clark for his help in the matter. Clark replied to reporters that he had no intention of helping Idol, since they were “no help” to him.

  “Regardless,” the Fox statement read, “we are absolutely committed to the fairness of this competition. We take any accusation of this nature very seriously no matter their source, and we have already begun looking into this.”

  On his own, Lythgoe was harsher. Appearing on Ryan Seacrest’s radio show, he said of ABC’s segment, “The whole show was stretched out worse than one of our elimination shows. It was probably four or five minutes of content. I think it’s pretty shoddy journalism, frankly. I think we have to question the motives behind it, both ABC’s and Clark’s. They would never have done that if we weren’t the number one show in America.”

  On Clark’s charges he said, “I know for a fact that a lot of the contestants have got Paula’s phone number and contact her and she contacts them. Paula’s the den mother. . . . I don’t have a problem with that. She’s been a star and now she can help them.” To Clark’s claim that a group number with the refrain “I owe it all to you” had been his attempt to send Abdul a private message, Lythgoe retorted that the serenade had been planned and choreographed by the producers, not Clark.

  The response of the media was, of course, outraged and indignant. On Good Morning America, a writer for the Hollywood Reporter pronounced, “I think it will have very real implications for Paula Abdul. Frankly, I’d be shocked if she was still on the show next season.”

  And so it might have gone. If Idol had flinched or seemed embarrassed about the matter for even a second, the charges might have stuck. Instead, Idol did what prime-time network programs never do when they come under fire: They answered the charges immediately and head-on. They went on the offensive, mocking the accusers and giving the impression that they had nothing to be ashamed of whatsoever.

  On top of Fox’s defense, Abdul pulled the ultimate in bubble-bursting maneuvers. That weekend, she made a cameo appearance on Saturday Night Live. Walking in on a sketch about Clark’s charge, she interrupted Amy Poehler, who was playing her, and offered critiques of her impersonation. “You need to perfect the clap a little more and be a lot more sexier so contestants will be willing to sleep with you,” she said perfectly.

  Four days later on the top four performance show, Seacrest opened with a winking reference to the scandal, asking the audience, “How was your week?” continuing with “Lots of shock and outrage surrounding the show. I just want to say, that’s what happens when you lose a guy like Scott Savol.” When the judges were introduced, at the mention of Paula’s name the crowd burst into a frenzy of applause, waving WE LOVE YOU PAULA signs while Randy, in the next seat, blew her kisses.

  Three weeks later at the season finale, the show aired their final word on the matter, a satiric video segment titled “Primetime Lies,” in which an investigative reporter gets judge Simon Cowell to admit he is having an affair . . . with himself.

  By that point, however, the narrative had so clearly changed that that final nail in the coffin was hardly needed. Idol audiences had risen up behind Abdul, and journalism monitors wondered aloud to what depths ABC News had sunk airing these tawdry accusations about a singing contest. Howard Kurtz’s CNN media watch show Reliable Sources devoted an episode to discussing ABC’s coverage of the Clark affair, with panelists generally reaching the conclusion that the segment had been a fairly tawdry attempt to lure Idol viewers to their show. The panelists, rather than going over the charges and ABC’s examination of them, weighed in on the question of whether a distinguished news organization should even be considering such matters. “Everything about it was awful. But it got the ratings. That’s all that matters,” opined Washington Post doyenne Sally Quinn. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Gail Shister said of the report, “This is not a big news story. The thing that I found interesting, aside from the fact that it was like watching a car wreck, I kept waiting for the big payoff, because they kept hyping and hyping this phone message from Paula Abdul. I thought it was going to be a dirty—talking dirty, you know? I thought it was going to be a sexual message, and they kept hyping it. And then I felt like it was fifty-five minutes of foreplay with no payoff.” “This was horrible journalism, but riveting and you had to watch it,” was host Kurtz’s final say on the matter.

  The battle was over and so it was but an afterthought in August when Fox quietly announced its internal investigation had cleared Paula of any wrongdoing and she would be returning to the show.

  After the drama faded in season 4, the impossible happened: The front-runner actually won. After not once sinking into the bottom three, Carrie Underwood cruised to victory.

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sp; It had almost seemed like a real race in the final weeks. Almost. After spending the first half of the season in Constantine Maroulis’s shadow, Bo Bice, the show’s other long-haired rocker, surged in the final month after giving the first real rock performances—albeit a somewhat dated classic rock—the show had seen since the days of Nikki McKibbin. His chances were perhaps exaggerated by producers and judges who, wanting to make it seem like there was a real race on, did everything but sprinkle pixie dust on Bo, praising him and playing up his performances to the hilt. It worked, and going into the finale there actually was a little bit, not a lot, but a little bit of suspense about which way it would go.

  But in the end, Bo Bice didn’t need Carrie Underwood to defeat him; he was very capable of beating himself. The night before the finale, Debbie Williams recalls, “He went out drinking and got plastered. So, he came in for rehearsal the next day and I said, ‘Bo, you look a little sick.’ He said, ‘I am.’ I said, ‘You actually look green.’ And he did. I didn’t know that he had been drinking. I go, ‘Honey, you okay? You want to go lay down or something?’ He goes, ‘I’ll be fine.’ So, he got up onstage to do something and he had to go offstage and vomit. I mean he was like sick.

  “During the rehearsal I said, ‘This is not good. Do you need to go home and lay down?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I told him, ‘Do it. Just go. Just go. Get out of here. Go get yourself better.’ Then I found out he had been drinking tequila all night long. I joke to him about that now. So, he went and he slept it off that day.”

  Nearly 30 million people tuned in to see Carrie Underwood sail off to fulfill Simon Cowell’s prophecy.