American Idol has been the top viewed show on US television for six years, but the NY Times points out, among other things, that the Emmy award for best reality-competition all of those 6 years has gone to The Amazing Race. That NYT article talks about some of the reasons why the industry (except Fox, of course) isn't particularly fond of the show or unscripted/reality shows in general:
Many people in the television business feel little love for reality shows generally, which take work away from actors and writers and sometimes use nonunion production crews. [...]
Chris Coelen, the chief executive of RDF Media USA, which produces reality series including “Don’t Forget the Lyrics” for Fox and “Wife Swap” for ABC, said he believed that there remained some prejudice against reality series that voters might be taking out on “Idol.” “I think ‘American Idol’ is a great show,” Mr. Coelen said. “But it’s been portrayed as ‘the coming annihilation of the scripted television business.’ And people who work in the reality genre haven’t been fully accepted at the grown-ups’ table.”
That makes complete sense to me. Creative and business people involved in scripted television feel their livelihoods threatened, and they react negatively. The business people at other networks get tired of losing the public competition (and more importantly, the revenue one) with Idol year after year.
What has surprised me in the two years that we've been running the site is the volume of anti-Idol comments we've gotten in just our general daily or weekly ratings posts from (presumably) regular viewers, many sounding as threatened as you'd assume those TV industry people would be. Comments from people who have no financial stake in the success or failure of American Idol (or any other TV show). And we almost never do posts specifically about American Idol, these comments are in regular ratings posts.
It's one thing not to like a show (full disclosure: I've never watched an entire American Idol episode), but another to feel threatened by it, or what it represents. Dateline NBC for example, sucks up a lot of NBC's schedule time too, presumably at the expense of scripted shows, but nobody leaves general negative comments about it (or any, for that matter).
Is it that Idol represents the threat to scripted television and that people just react negatively in general to that perceived threat? Is it a general dislike of anything successful? the Fox broadcasting network? generic whack-a-mole commenting?
Update: I focused on American Idol partially because that was the subject of the NYT piece and partly because it's the most watched US TV show, but the general negative comments about Dancing with the Stars, and simply reality/unscripted TV shows in general on our site are certainly of comparable volume.
Tall poppy syndrome. Simple as that. Although i can see where people are coming from where they feel threatened by the show, given that it has such a large audience at the expense of their favourite shows.
Because is less space for good shows
My reason for hating American Idol has nothing to do with ratings, or taking FOX’s schedule time. It’s because the “finalists” are cookie cutter singers with just as much talent as the homeless guy on my street corner. Beyond that, it’s also a pretty poor show overall.
All of the above. I’ve never watched the show and could never be persuaded to do so (well, unless Summer Glau was singing on it!) The entire premise of “talent contest” shows just bores me. I used to watch that one Ed McMahon used to run years ago, though. Once in a while I imagine they really do find someone talented – or at least good looking enough to SEEM talented.
But the fact that most of the country seems to like the idea of talent shows tends to rub people with brains the wrong way. Especially as the networks seem to feel they need to put up their best scripted shows against them, and when they get crushed (because it’s simply apples and oranges to compare a one hour scripted show to a reality show), to cancel them. Which makes no sense.
If the networks want to compete against reality shows, they should put up their OWN reality shows against the ones on the other networks. With enough copycats, the whole genre should get boring and go away like other TV fads.
It would also help if the networks could actually find some intelligent scripted shows to put on instead of endless police procedurals and lawyer and medical shows – while at the same time not probing the bottom of the barrel for weird concepts.
Generally, I like the Tall Poppy Syndrome theory reasoning! It is simple and gets to the heart of it.
But I think Bill is wrong to suggest Idol is in a class by itself when it comes to bashing in our comments. It’s anecdotal, but I’d say bashing of Dancing With the Stars is as frequent if not more so than Idol Bashing, despite Idol having the better ratings.
I find it interesting that for whatever reason, professional sports seemingly get a complete exemption from such bashing. Much of that is probably because relatively speaking little of it winds up airing in prime-time and eating into scripted shows. And perhaps it’s because single point data like a Sunday Night or Monday Night NFL contests actually don’t typically rate as high as Idol in the regular season. But the numbers across all the NFL 1pm and 4pm games are typically much, much larger than the individual games in prime-time, and it adds up to being much bigger than Idol (when you combine the FOX and CBS Sunday day game broadcasts).
The reasons people watch Idol, DWTS and NFL probably aren’t greatly different. It’s entertaining, it’s a contest/competition, and you can root for winners and against those you want to lose. Yet, I don’t really remember ever seeing any elitist style comments that people who watch the NFL are low-income idiots, and we see a lot of comments along those lines when it comes to Idol and DWTS.
As for comments like the one from “translucentfish” above, it is something that seems to exist a lot with TV fans on the Internet that I will perhaps never understand. I do understand not liking a show, not being interested in a show, and not wanting to watch a show, and not watching a show! However, I do not understand at all why people have any animosity whatsoever when it comes to shows they don’t want to watch.
Dateline at least can be claimed as news…ish most of the time.
American Idol represents the notion that the recording industry doesn’t care about music, only making money. When someone wins on American Idol, it is evident they will sing whatever lyrics are pushed into their hands thereby insuring they pop out only Big Music crap. And when they don’t do as commanded, they are tossed aside because they don’t have any clout or real celebrity power. Look at the list of top-selling AI alumni and see the inevitable truth: Imminent nosedive in sales with each record (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-selling_American_Idol_alumni). Kelly Clarkson did make a good second album, but has since followed the gravity-wins-all trend.
I think a lot of the antagonism come from multiple sources: musicians who grumble at posers dodging the hard work, people who see the overt shallowness of the entire concept, and people like me who find every single person that’s ever appeared on the show to be extremely annoying and soul depleted.
As for the dominate ratings: AI has pretty people (good), pretty people singing (better), pretty people singing fantastically (better still), pretty people singing badly (best), Simon verbally bitch-slapping people (even better), people revolting against Simon (rousing), ugly people (fat woman at the state fair wtf), ugly people singing (state fair talent show wtf), ugly people singing well (touching), ugly people singing badly (sad, yet funny), and to top it all off, the common man gets the notion of control by text voting (democracy!). The average couch slug really can’t find that swatch of emotions in the course of a season in any other show. Even I watch the Worse Of episodes, those are hilarious.
Then again, they started ignoring the voting outcomes this year, so who knows if it’ll continue to dominate if the show keeps slapping the viewers in the face.
I’m suddenly taken by the notion that American Idol could be tremendously improved if John Stossel were to replace Kara DioGuardi.
I hate American Idol, and all other reality shows, for a lot of reasons. First, it is simply a series of glorified karaoke performances. Second, I hate the fact that it is a show that allows the network to save money by not paying talent such as writers, actors, and various other employees that are associated with an actual tv show. Third, those who benefit from the show being on the air are not particularly talented (aside from the winner of said karaoke contest). Fourth, it contributes to our society’s continued devaluing of the study of music as a craft. America as a whole has continually cast aside individuals who master musical instruments, music theory, and consciously work to make good music. Instead, we all crowd around the newest person who can sing to a generic pop tune or rhyme to a beat. Shows like American Idol and Survivor encourage execs to cancel or cut back on shows that require talent and actual creativity because the ratings show that the average American is no more disconcerting than a peeping tom and they can get away with airing the cheapest crap they can. Comparing reality tv to even the worst scripted shows is like comparing romance novels to Tolstoy.
Chris says:
“[T]he ratings show that the average American is no more disconcerting than a peeping tom….”
I nominate this for the first TVBTN T-shirt motto.
For me it’s about how the music suffers. AI provides the world with an idea that by following a few steps A-B-C-D you can be a star…There has been absolutly nobody to go through the process to have any original spark or individualism at the end. Such things are lost when contestants have someone to…
Tell them how to dress…
Tell them what to sing…
Tell them how to sing…
Tell them when they perform good…
Tell them when they perform bad…
Even someone to write a hit single and album worth of material in the event they win…or get close to winning…
The artist/singer songwritter side of the business has been completly left in the dust. As much as the show is meant to be about music & talent it’s about anything but…It’s about how well you can sell yourself or how well you let someone else sell you…
I find it all very sad.
I guess I’m someone who feels threatened by the success of American Idol (and other reality shows). While AI keeps on racking in the viewers I’ve seen many original and intelligent scripted shows struggle to find an audience, with most falling by the wayside. Meanwhile, the genre of contrived reality flourishes.
To be fair, even most of the scripted shows that succeed now are the most formulaic and derivative. “Hey CBS — how about another police procedural?!”
I guess American Idol is a convenient symbol to viewers like me of the ongoing dumbing down of network tv.
@RSH — Ed McMahon helmed Star Search, just FYI
By the way, I honestly don’t see a parallel between reality shows and live sports. I don’t think live sports are competing directly with scripted shows, while reality shows obviously are.
There was also a lot of hate for Survivor when it first came on the air.
The AI hate really picked-up around it’s 5th season because up untill then, scripted shows weren’t doing as bad as today. In the 2003/2004 and 2004/2005 seasons, Idol finished first because of CSI’s in-slot reruns that lowerd its average.
In my opinion, Idol hate has more to do with scripted shows not doing well as a whole.
Mike S. says:
“I guess American Idol is a convenient symbol to viewers like me of the ongoing dumbing down of network tv.”
But isn’t “the ongoing dumbing down of network tv” little but a convenient symbol itself? Where in the past is the fixed point at which network TV smartened up, and when was the inflection point at which things started to nosedive?
I wouldn’t have the slightest idea as to why people people react negatively for no reason at all !
American Idol sucks ass.
Robert: “Yet, I don’t really remember ever seeing any elitist style comments that people who watch the NFL are low-income idiots,”
That’s only because I haven’t bothered to post any comments on sports, BECAUSE I despise sports and because as you say, other than Monday Night Football and the big series games, sports rarely intrudes into prime time. (And of course, I don’t watch TV, I download, so sports is completely irrelevant to me now.)
However…
An acquaintance of mine back in college used to remark that if we nuked the college stadium during a football game, we’d get rid of most of the morons in town.
There’s nothing I like more than listening to the moans and groans on the radio when the home town team is CRUSHED mercilessly, especially if the entire previous week the radio hosts were touting how wonderful the team is and how they were gonna kick ass on the weekend. It’s music to my ears.
SW; Yeah, that was it, Star Search. I just looked it up on Wikipedia. They don’t seem able to name anybody that came off that show – even those they do name as having gotten recording contracts – who we still have any memory of today.
Which means the entire concept was and is bogus. Nobody with stand out talent is ever found on those shows.
Heh, RSH, in the Star Search wiki, if that is accurate, I recognize one name in the champion’s categories (an incomplete list from what I can tell, though). However, in the competitors list there are many names I recognize. Drew Carey, Ray Romano, Brad Garrett, LeAnn Rimes among many others. Interesting… these folks were contestants but did not win on Star Search. They didn’t do too bad for also-rans LOL
I thoroughly enjoy American Idol. I’ve watched the last two seasons and find that much of the vitriol directed its way is based in ignorance. The contestants who succeed are extremely talented. Good musicianship is rewarded. Both of the last two winners played instruments. All of the successful contestants are very good at arranging their songs with the band and adding unique flavor. It is not bad karaoke by pretty people as so many haters who obviously don’t watch the show contend.
There also seems to be this idea that if music is popular it sucks by default. People want to seem like they know something cool about music that most people don’t, and so they think that if music is popular it must suck because too many stupid people like it. So when Idol produces platinum selling artist after platinum selling artist (every previous winner in fact has at least one platinum selling record) people who have never watched AI bash on it because not doing so would damage their indie cred (sense of personal superiority). It’s mostly just wannabe hipster snark.