Surprising Sanjaya
Posted: Wednesday, March 14, 2007 6:45 PM by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper
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TV
"American Idol" held its first finalist elimination Wednesday night, and the bottom three singers were really no surprise. Or were they?
If you'd just watched Tuesday's performance show and then shut yourself in a lead-sealed capsule until the elimination was announced, you wouldn't be shocked at all that Sanjaya Malakar, Phil Stacey, and Brandon Rogers were the three lowest vote-getters. They just didn't sound that great. The six men in the contest have been almost universally decried as being much less talented than the women, so it's no surprise that half the men ended up in the bottom three.
Brandon forgot the lyrics to a very familiar song, "You Can't Hurry Love," and his dancing was called "terrible" by Simon Cowell. Sanjaya's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" was proclaimed "almost unlistenable" by Randy Jackson -- and he's not even the mean judge. Phil Stacey may have been a bit surprised that he was in the bottom three, as Chris Sligh received crueler comments from the judges than Stacey, but Sligh is recognizable and has a bit of a fan base.
But the people who were even more surprised about the bottom three were those who relied on the Web sites Vote for the Worst or Dial Idol. If you made your picks based on those sites, you likely picked Stephanie Edwards to go home (based on Dial Idol's prediction) and you almost surely didn't place Sanjaya in the bottom three. Vote for the Worst was actively campaigning to keep him, and Dial Idol thought he had the third-largest amount of votes, after singing powerhouses Melinda Doolittle and LaKisha Jones.
The sites have been eerily accurate at some points in the past, so why were they so far off? Despite all the attention such sites garner, there's still millions of homes that have never heard of them, and while Dial Idol's method of measuring busy signals is novel, it is far from complete.
But more than that, the more publicity Sanjaya gets, the worse for him. If no one was complaining about how he doesn't deserve to stick around, he might be able to fly under the radar for a little while. He's become famous for being bad. You feel sorry for him in a way -- it's a lot of pressure for a teen, belting out songs every week against older, savvier singers, some of whom have spent years performing live in bands. He should be back at his high school, starring in the school musical and performing solos at assembly.
The NCAA tourney starts up tomorrow, and one of the unwritten rules of bracketology is that it's sometimes quite smart to pick a #12 team to beat a #5, but it's almost unheard of to pick a #16 to beat a #1 seed. Melinda and LaKisha have been front-runners -- #1 seeds -- pretty much since they showed up to audition.
But Sanjaya, for many reasons -- inexperience, youth, and shyness among them -- is "Idol's" equivalent of a #16 seed. He doesn't have to go head-to-head against Melinda or LaKisha right away -- he gets the benefit of performing in the same big pool as everyone else. As it is, he can pull a few Cinderella upsets, stick around a couple weeks longer than expected, and shock plenty of viewers. But eventually, his clock is going to strike midnight.
