Something’s Not Right

Abstract

American Idol: The Search for a Superstar. It wasn’t the first singing competition that featured a panel of judges narrowing down contestants from cattle call auditions to progressively smaller competitive rounds. It wasn’t the first to rely on voting from the public to determine the final winners. It wasn’t the first to feature backstories of the contestants to make them relatable to audiences. All this had been done before in shows like Popstars in Australia, Pop Idol in Britain, and “Eurovision Song Contest” in Europe.¹ But in 2002, when American Idol premiered as a summer season experiment on Fox Television, American audiences couldn’t get enough of it. By 2004, it had become the biggest show on US television, a distinction it held for seven consecutive years.² One television executive labeled the series as “the most impactful show in the history of television.”³