America’s Got Talent Rapping Granny Revolt
The stupidest line in the premiere of America’s Got Talent came at the end of the two-hour slog. “Rapping Granny,” exclaimed judge Piers Morgan, “you are what this show is all about.”
Wrong, Mr. Token Snippy Brit Who Wants to Grow Up to Be Simon Cowell.
America’s Got Talent is not about a bobbing senior in an apron hoping to win a million-dollar prize. The already popular TV-talent contest, poised to be a summer ratings hit for NBC, is more about the Clapping Viewer than the Rapping Granny.
Yep, it’s all about us.
The show, which airs Wednesday night at 9, is all about the audience’s cheers and jeers, and not a professional digit-snapper named Bobby Badfingers or a 60-something male stripper with a bronzer addiction. Like the many other voter-based contests on TV, America’s Got Talent is about giving viewers a voice in the entertainment world. We get to choose which novelty act – the 8-year-old stand-up comic? the 76-year-old lady belting out “God Bless America”? – will become this summer’s big star. We get a sense of power.
Traditional thinking has it that audiences love TV talent shows for the vicarious thrill of seeing a Taylor Hicks-ish nobody become a somebody. “I’m looking forward to the American Dream,” judge David Hasselhoff said on America’s Got Talent.
And that up-from-nowhere excitement may have been true in the late 1940s with Ted Mack & the Original Amateur Hour (formerly a radio show) and Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. The folksy Godfrey ushered unknown performers before a newly TV-wired nation and fed into the much-loved myth of being discovered in a drugstore, as was falsely said of Lana Turner.
But the new generation of voter-based shows, including American Idol and its knockoffs, such as Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance and CMT’s Nashville Star, are about our empowerment, not the contestants’. They are little elections, opportunities to flex our muscles – particularly those on our dialing, texting and typing hand. With their text message and phone-vote abilities, the new contests make pop culture feel like a democratic process.
If we identify with anyone who appears on these shows, it’s the judges who sit in positions of authority. The most imitated element of American Idol has been the triumvirate of “experts,” those celebrities and professional snipes who get to voice our opinions in public. They represent us, not the contestants.
Cowell, the man behind America’s Got Talent, wisely chose Morgan, Hasselhoff and Brandy as judges to re-create the three-monkeys chemistry he has with Randy Jackson and Paula Abdul on Idol. They span the tough (Morgan), the middling (The Hoff), and the easy (Brandy). Indeed, with her wildly generous pronouncements, Brandy rivals Abdul in the indulgent department. “It’s different, it’s hot, it’s right now,” she gushed to an a cappella group.
Later in the summer, a few other interactive contests will appear to stir us from viewing passivity. Like American Idol, America’s Got Talent and American Inventor, they will make us into little moguls who vote in a virtual board meeting. ABC will have The One: Making a Music Star, and HGTV will have Design Star. And next year, Steven Spielberg will invite us to create the next big Hollywood director with Fox’s On the Lot. The show, co-produced by Spielberg and Mark Burnett, is bound to speak to the viewers’ inner film critics.
Perhaps ABC should have given us voting rights on its new contest, Master of Champions. The show, which airs Thursdays at 8 p.m., includes an old-fashioned audience meter, for fans on the set. But we at home are left fidgeting while watching this reality loser. The premiere was baffling in its sheer pointlessness. If America’s Got Talent is like The Gong Show, then Master of Champions is like The Broken Gong Show.
In the first hour, two drift-car drivers had to grate cheese rounds by driving in circles on the stage. Seriously, a critic couldn’t have asked for a more ready metaphor for the entire show. Cheese, going in circles, grating – it’s all there.
