It’s hard to stand out in an audience of enthusiastic supporters—parents, spouses, friends, and fans who whistle, cheer, clap, and cry for their chosen contestant—but the crying girl did just that. When Sanjaya sang the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me,” this gawky thirteen-year-old girl was overcome with fits of hysterical sobbing, reminiscent of girls screaming for Elvis and the Beatles in the 1950s and 1960s. For the young fan, it was to be another Idol fairy tale come true.
With her emotion beyond the call of duty, young Ashley won herself a permanent place in the Idol canon, making her a celebrity in her own right on the Idol circuit. A Southern California native from Riverside, about an hour from Hollywood, Ashley had been watching Idol since she was in elementary school. Her mother, Stacy Ferl, recalls, “We had to tape every episode, and oh, my gosh, if we weren’t home to do something she had a cow about it and called a friend to make sure someone recorded it for her.”
“I just think it’s a really cool show—giving people chances and stuff,” says the now sixteen-year-old Ashley. “Some people, they seem so fake on reality shows. But then American Idol is, like, you know they’re normal.”
Even for an obsessive fan, Idol is perhaps the hardest ticket in Hollywood to land, with even people connected to Fox waiting years for a seat in the studio. On the night she stepped into fame, Ashley and her mother had learned that people who attended tapings of Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader were offered tickets afterward to the Idol dress rehearsal. There, she was spotted by Idol producers, who summoned her to return for that night’s taping and her moment of fame.
The call to destiny came after Ashley sighted one of her favorites, season 4’s Mikalah Gordon, in the crowd. Stacy Ferl recalls, “She just started bawling her head off and the usher comes over and says, ‘Is she all right? Is something wrong?’ and I told him, ‘No, she just really likes Mikalah.’ ”
Three days after her Idol cameo, Ashley found herself flown to New York to appear on the Today show. Three years later, she has traveled the country, attending dozens of concerts of Idol alumni. Still just as emotional when she sees them, these days, however, she often finds the Idol stars recognizing her before she does them. Recently, a high school senior with a driver’s license and college plans, she has taken her Idol punditry into the media age, beginning a Twitter account largely devoted to Idol affairs. Her Twitter bio eloquently harks back to where it all began. It reads, “Ashley Ferl: I cried for Sanjaya.”
The haters, on the other hand, were moved by the same things as Sanjaya’s young fans—his oddness, his emotionalism, and the growing sense that once this young man got to the big stage, he was in over his head, and in deep.
It remains an open question how much Sanjaya curried his antihero status and how much it was forced upon him. As the season progressed, his songs became louder, screamier. He picked songs like “You Really Got Me” that allowed him to flounce around the stage, screaming his head off. To many he seemed to be just messing around on the hallowed Idol stage. Nevertheless, he continued to rise through the ranks. And week after week, the media demanded an explanation. “What Force Is Keeping Sajaya On?” asked the Florida Today headline. The Associated Press investigated and reported, “In the Case of Idol Star Sanjaya Malakar, Clues Add Up to Conspiracy, Kids, and Confusion.” His father’s native land publicly distanced itself from the young singer. “Sanjaya’s Idol Run Not India’s Fault” was the AP headline, which quoted several sources who adamantly denied rumors that India’s call centers had fueled Sanjaya’s rise. “He’s an object of ridicule,” said one Indian blogger.
Ultimately the finger of blame pointed again at Vote for the Worst, which had endorsed Sanjaya, this time in league with Howard Stern, who rhapsodized about Sanjaya on his radio show, saying he would use him as a weapon to bring Idol down. “We’re corrupting the entire thing,” he told his listeners, taking credit for Sanjaya’s rise. “It’s the number one show on television and it’s getting ruined.”
Sanjaya insists he wasn’t trying to sing badly or make a mockery of the show. In interviews since and in his memoir, he has said he was just trying to do his best and have fun. That, unfortunately, was not how it appeared to his some of fellow contestants, who grew tired of his antics as they themselves struggled through the difficult season. Blake Lewis later recalled locking Sanjaya out of the rehearsal space during the height of the Sanjaya craze. On particularly tense nights, many of the others were observed keeping him distinctly at arm’s length. Blake would later tell in a radio interview, “I was never a fan of Sanjaya. I didn’t think he should be on the show at all. It was bad for television. Everyone there was like, why is this little kid who’s just annoying in the room? I got pissed every week because my buddies who were super talented were going home and America’s ignorant in some things and voted for Sanjaya to stay on American Idol.”
And then there was that hairstyle.
Debbie Williams remembers the day of Sanjaya’s epic hairstyle: “I got off the elevator and here comes Dean (a crew member) and Sanjaya walking down the hall and he’s got the seven ponytails. Dean said, ‘We’ve got to take him into Nigel.’ Nigel was all for it. I thought, What a smart kid. Not the best singer, but he played this other bag of tricks and it just kept him in there. It was fun. It was good entertainment.”
Ultimately finishing in seventh place, Sanjaya’s final song, a raucous rendition of “Something to Talk About,” nicely summed up the Sanjaya meteor storm that had blazed across the Idol stage. Indeed, soon after he was eliminated, ratings for the show began to fall off in the biggest slide the show had yet experienced.
For all Sanjaya’s goofiness, he kept Idol on a very human scale when it was in danger of becoming a slick showbiz machine. What with celebrity mentors such as Gwen Stefani, J Lo, and Diana Ross, guest performers during the results shows, past champions returning as icons, and superstar judges with their superstar issues, the little talent contest was having a problem of size. The production and the brand were becoming so huge they seemed to dwarf the twelve unknowns who stood up on that now historic stage, in the now historic footsteps of Clarkson, Underwood, Aiken, and Daughtry. As the coming seasons would show, some were able to step into that giant spotlight while others, such as the cast of season 6, shrank under its glare.
It was the young man from Seattle, alternately befuddled and rebellious, whose antics deflated a bit of the pomposity that had come with Idol’s overwhelming success. It was Sanjaya and his ponyhawk who kept the nation mesmerized. When Lythgoe was asked midway through the year what the season’s big story was, he answered, “Sanjaya and three great female singers,” the latter referring to season 6’s attempt at a three divas redux with Melinda Doolittle, LaKisha Jones, and Jordin Sparks. In retrospect, the memory of those three singers and their place in that season has faded, but the image of Sanjaya Malakar leaping across the stage, his hair in a braided Mohawk, will live forever.
Another new sign of Idol’s immensity came into play during season 6 and this, too, was unprecedented: the Idol Gives Back telethon special. Privately, charity work had always been a part of the life of Idol. Simon Cowell had a long-term commitment to a children’s hospital back in England. Patients he worked with could often be seen in the audience. On tour and at the show, contestants were frequently visited by guests from the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and former contestants often made visits to children’s hospitals on behalf of charities Idol was involved with—away from press.
As rewarding as those private involvements were, Idol’s ringmasters weren’t ones to think small. They wanted to parlay Idol’s connections and production talent to produce a spectacle that would benefit children’s charities around the globe, and they wanted the spectacle to be even bigger than the Idol finale. They came up with an idea that was something entirely new for entertainment programming: Turn a week of episodes into a giant telethon right in the middle of the season.
Once they had had trouble getting anyone even to allow their songs t
o be performed on Idol. But six years later, almost every act in the dying music business would kill for a piece of Idol exposure. The plan was to draw the biggest names in entertainment to participate in a supersized two-night show/pitch for contributions to an array of children’s causes. Telethons had traditionally meant nights of humdrum schmaltz, earnest appeals coupled with past-their-prime performers. It was a format that belonged largely to another, lower-pressure age of television. For Idol Gives Back, the producers pledged to break the earnestness trap and deliver, first and foremost, a night of great entertainment. The show ultimately drew a litany of stars, including Madonna, Bono, Celine Dion, and Josh Groban, raising over sixty million dollars for the benefiting charities.
Clearly for the crew, the charity became a very personal matter. I witnessed the largest fight I have ever directly encountered in entertainment reporting between a member of the crew and a Fox executive over the subject of how much airtime would be devoted to charitable pitches, with the f word liberally employed. To prepare for the show, Cowell and Seacrest had, in fact, traveled to Africa to see firsthand what the contributions would support. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” Cowell said after the trip, clearly affected. “And I’m glad I saw it because, you know, pictures on a TV screen, they never really show you quite how bad things are.”
For the contestants, who performed inspirational songs that week, the show offered them the gift of life in another way as Seacrest announced at its end that there would be no elimination, in keeping with the charitable spirit.
It had been an audacious move. Whatever the criticisms that would be leveled for the inevitable schmaltz and philosophical arguments about celebrity-driven good works, no show before had devoted so much valuable real estate to giving. It made Idol about something bigger than just handing out a recording contract.
With Sanjaya’s rise and fall, questions sprang up again about the voting system, whether Idol is “fixed” and how much influence haters like Stern have over the show. On the latter question, the answer is clear: very little. Even with the power of Howard Stern behind it, the number of votes the haters can muster are but a drop in the bucket compared to the votes cast each week by Idol fans. The number of visitors each day to the VFTW site numbers at most in the tens of thousands compared to the tens of millions who watch Idol each week. Even Howard Stern in his satellite era doesn’t begin to reach a comparable audience. In the final analysis, Sanjaya’s run likely owes far more to the crying girl and her peers than it does to Stern and the Internet.
The question of whether Idol is “fixed” remains the subject of perennial rumors and Internet theories; talk of busy signals, crossed numbers, and changed vote totals circulates endlessly. To date, nothing in any of these rumors has produced anything that smacks of actual vote fraud. And surely if the producers could tamper with the votes, the results would have frequently turned out very different than they did. Every year, from the semifinals onward, the show’s clear favorites tumble while less marketable personalities blunder on. Further, as the Idol team constantly points out, what sense does it make for a show to deliberately thwart the will of its audience? This is not a national health care policy debate where ends might justify means. In entertainment the means—popularity—are the ends; winning public support is the entire battle.
Simon Fuller explained that the very purpose of the show was to get around those who would impose their tastes on the public. “You go straight to the public and they tell you, and if they tell you, then, fine. Okay, I’ll listen. At the end of the show the winner will be someone that they’ve all bought into. The power of Idol was that connectivity and interactivity of the audience buying into these kids, believing them, voting for them, and it creates a far more meaningful, passionate relationship.”
However, to glean the public’s will, the votes must be counted, and in the conspiracy universe, Idol’s vote-counting has been the subject of endless speculation. As with the Oscars or the major awards shows, Idol’s votes are counted by an outside firm, in this case a company called Telescope, which analyzes the data phoned into the AT&T network. Cecile Frot-Coutaz explains the system: “They effectively operate as an intermediate between us and the phone company. The calls are routed from local exchanges to the AT&T network. Then AT&T gives the information to Telescope, who tabulate the votes and give us the results. Over the years it’s become more and more sophisticated, so the systems now are better able to cope with the volume than in the initial years. We have now something called the AT&T Labs 39.26, which is a section of AT&T where they analyze the result for us in the event anything looks unusual. They can drill down and look at what’s happened per state, what’s happened per area code. Anything we may want to look at.”
A clause in the Idol rules gives the producers the right to invalidate the results of any vote. This clause, Frot-Coutaz explains, is not a device for producers to interfere with the results. It exists in the event fraud is ever discovered, or if major problems occur with contestants’ lines. “The good thing is it’s never happened that we had a result that was invalid.”
Asked what would happen if they ever did discover a problem or fraud, Frot-Coutaz answers without hesitation, “If we had an invalid we would have to say nobody goes away. I think what we do is nobody goes home this week and then two people would have to go home the following week.”
There are lots of ways the producers can help move the course of a contest, from the judges’ comments to the order in which the contestants perform, but in the end, as far as all available evidence shows, the fate of the competition is turned over each week to the hands of the public and ultimately, the votes are the votes.
When American Idol began, it was the center of the lives of all involved in it. For the British expat crew, it was their sole reason for leaving their homeland. Six years later, with the show’s monumental success, each of the epically ambitious people involved ruled over far-reaching empires of their own, of which American Idol was but one piece. Simon Fuller’s 19 productions now employed nearly two hundred people. His interests had moved beyond just music to fashion—he invested in a modeling agency and clothing line —brand management—overseeing the public interests of Muhammad Ali and the Elvis Presley estate, among others—and sports. Most notably, after reconciling with the Spice Girls’ queen, Victoria Beckham, he became the manager of both her and her husband, international soccer icon David Beckham, engineering his $250-million-a-year move to Los Angeles.
In 2005, So You Think You Can Dance, a show created by Nigel Lythgoe with Simon Fuller, debuted, taking Idol’s slot on Fox during the summer months. While Lythgoe had always been passionate about Idol, So You Think You Can Dance for him, the dockworker’s son who had a yearning to dance, represented not just entertainment but a movement. Talking about SYTYCD, his eyes light up as he waxes about how he hoped dance could become a force to improve the lives of all who practice it or view it. SYTYCD often seemed to be, in many ways, his antidote to the Goliath Idol had become, a competition not about winning a million-dollar contract, but focused purely on the artistry. Indeed, stepping back into the judge’s chair for the show, all traces of Nasty Nigel were erased. The SYTYCD judging panel was not about delivering zingers, but about giving constructive critiques they could use and grow with, Lythgoe would often emphasize in thinly veiled shots across the bow of another certain judge. “It’s not about putting people down or putting them in their place; it’s about giving them advice they can use to grow,” he said of SYTYCD’s judging. After a couple of seasons, in tandem with Dancing with the Stars, the show amazingly did spark a dance revival, bringing the form to a more prominent place in national culture than it had been since at least the 1960s.
On top of that, Lythgoe and fellow executive producer Ken Warwick had set up shop as vintners, purchasing a winery in central California. Not ones to let entertainment prospects go to waste, they shot a reality show about their misadventures in agriculture, entitled Corkscrewed
: The Wrath of Grapes.
Ryan Seacrest had become a virtual hosting machine, helming not just Idol but his daily national radio show, which became the go-to confessional spot for young Hollywood and the Paris Hilton set—as well as a news show for the E! network. He was very rapidly filling the shoes he had longed for, those of Dick Clark. Not only did he take over Clark’s New Year’s Eve duties when the aging star was sidelined after a stroke, but he became America’s all-purpose ubiquitous front man, hosting the Emmys and the Super Bowl pregame, for starters. He also set up shop as a TV producer, coming out of the gate with an early unlikely hit, Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
Randy Jackson would soon himself become a TV mogul, producing MTV’s surprise hit America’s Best Dance Crew, and Paula produced a pair of cable shows. As for Simon Cowell, besides flying back and forth across the Atlantic to judge Idol and preside over X Factor, he seemed to roll out a new show every month. American Inventor debuted in 2006 on ABC, and in 2007 he launched America’s Got Talent, another show soon to become an empire unto itself, to be cloned in over thirty countries around the globe. With his judging duties on the British version of Got Talent, he was now presiding over three shows each year on either side of the globe. Of those three, the only one where his name was not on the door was American Idol.
And it was there that Cowell’s restive nature was most evident. On the Idol set, there was clearly one man who was king, calling the shots on the floor during each episode, and it was not him. Somewhere around the middle of season 6, the crew began to notice Cowell display a noticable testiness, an itchiness crew members said, about following the orders of Nigel Lythgoe.
Simon says now of their long-running relationship, “We’re like Tom and Jerry, him and I. My guess is that there’s many times that he was looking at me thinking, I want to be in that chair. But then again, I was looking at him thinking, I want to be in your chair. So I would have been quite happy to swap places. But I think deep down we had a respect for each other. No question about it, we went through many many times having big bust-ups. But I’m quite comfortable having a bust-up with people to their face, it kind of clears the air. And that happened a lot with me and Nigel.”
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