Back in Season One, there was a small bit of an argument between Simon Cowell and Randy Jackson. It was the third week of performances in an attempt to let America narrow down the last 24 contestant to a top 10. It was done in an illogical way, which was corrected the following year: 10 contestants a week would sing, and America would put through three each time. It didn’t matter if there weren’t three good ones that week or if there were seven, only three went through. The tenth was a judges’ choice.

So in week three of this, Simon had had enough. After seeing poor performances by AJ Gil and Jim Verraros be rewarded with a vote through, Simon said he was fed up. He didn’t want to see sob stories get the votes instead of the strongest singers. But the fight truly began when Simon referred to the two “losers” who had made it through. Randy and Paula booth took objection to that, and it was Randy who famously stood up with a “You want a piece of this?” posture. This was pre-weight loss Randy, by the way.

When RJ Helton started off the third show, Simon used that chance to say, in effect, that American had gotten it wrong 33.33% of the time so far, and that they’d be wrong again if they put through RJ in, based on that performance.

And you know what? The big dirty truth of The Fight is that Simon was absolutely right. Jim and EJ made it through on pity votes, and RJ’s song stank. There were many better singers that week, let alone in the last two.  I don’t blame him for being frustrated.  There were a few singers that could have blown away most of the final Top Ten from Season One, but didn’t get enough of a spotlight to get the pity votes they needed.
And things haven’t changed much to this day.  Five seasons later, contestants are still wont to complain that they didn’t get enough camera time early on in the series to build a fan base.

Thankfully, they narrow down the Top 24 to the Top 10 in a better way now — to get a final total of 6 boys and 6 girls, two from each sex are eliminated each week with America’s votes.   The need to split the sexes perfectly in half is not proven, but it’s still a much better process.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 19th, 2007 at 12:09 am and is filed under American Idol. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.