Spoilers for last night’s American Idol coming up after the jump:
Scott is going home. I’m good with that. Do I need to write more? I do?
I guess this is where I should be thankful for the judges’ save, because it at least gives us something to talk about the morning after eliminations. Last night was both an example of why I suspect the producers wanted it, and why it doesn’t really work.
Idol is in a boring stretch now, and while I think season 8 is a dull batch of contestants to begin with, it’s not really the singers’ fault. In nearly any season of Idol you get to a patch in the middle of the finals where it’s pretty clear who is not going to make it to the final three or four, and the only suspense becomes in what order they will go home. (Yes, I know there is always the possibility of a Jasmine Trias or Nikki McKibbin hanging on, but since these contestants have no credible chance of actually winning, it doesn’t really add much suspense.)
So you bring in the judges’ save, so that there will at least be the possibility that someone might not go home at all next week. Except so far, there hasn’t seemed enough chance of a save for it to even be interesting. It seems clear Fox wants the save to build interest and prop up ratings, so there’s little incentive to use it early. And it’s equally clear that the judges, to the extent they still take this contest seriously at all, are only going to use it to save a legitimate finalist or at least Top Three contender from going home early.
This season, that’s Adam, Danny and… player to be named later, but that player was certainly not Scott. So it wasn’t hard to see where the sing-for-your-life would end, even if the judges again went through the embarrassing show of “debating.” Simon even said that two judges wanted him to stay and two wanted him to go, so unless you had forgotten that the save is required to be unanimous, that ended it right there. Yet the “suspense,” or lack thereof, continued.
Beyond that—well, I watched this very late, post-seder and post-Lost, so I fast-forwarded through pretty much everything else, so feel free to comment on the rest of the show below. How was Kellie Pickler?