AI: Season 6, Round of 6 & Giving Back

Due to work constraints I haven't been able to weigh in on Idol of late. In fact, I did not even see the round of 6's performances. I did however see the much hyped "Idol Gives Back" 2-hour plead-o-rama.

I gotta say: somewhere Jerry Lewis is crying tears of joy, because his attempts to kept the telethon genre rolling had seemingly died, until American Idol decided to pick it up and keep it alive. This is a touchy subject, because no one wants to bad-mouth efforts to do something good, BUT this was 120 minutes of crappy television.

First off, the parade of celebrities was about as ungenuine as it gets. I didn't believe that any of those people were there for any reason other than their own PR. The only celebrities who I believe were doing this out of their own desire to help others were Bono and Madonna. They were the only two that I knew had a solid history of doing good prior to the show.

The other bright spot was Ellen Degeneres, who at least tried to do some creative things to solicit donations.

Why put Simon in a situation where he is clearly uncomfrotable, meeting AIDs patients? And why have him and Ryan in the way of a patient getting to the hospital? Just ridiculous, set up crap to sell the idea of getting people to give. I don't believe for a second that Simon wanted to be there.

Everything else felt like it was produce by the same people who brought us Bob Sagat and America's Funniest Home Videos in the 80s. What was that horrible "music video" with all the celebrities? How scary was that Celine Deion/Elvis performance? What the hell was that? Did we learn nothing about creepy celebrity rebirths with Orville Redenbacher?

And although they gave a bunch of money, I was not impressed by all the corporate sponsors. If those companies really wanted to prove to me that they cared about these causes, they would have given the money and expected no credit for it. No logos, no sponsored music videos, no corporate personailities appearing on TV. Oh, and they would have given enough money, so that we television viewers wouldn't have been asked to pony anything up. The sad thing is that the people who probably gave the most, were the people who couldn't afford to give much anyway.

The whole thing with no one being kicked off was lame. Just tell us you're not going to send anyone home right away. You're just stringing people along and it's lame. I'd understand if you told me that you're not going to send anyone home that night. They should have had enough leverage with all their celebrity appearances, not to need to do that.

Since I didn't get a chance to say it last week, I'll quickly weigh in on Sanjaya's departure: it was a fix. How do you drop from top 5 to being kicked out in one week? You have producers manipulate the numbers, so that your charity show isn't overshadowed by the embarrassment of Sanjaya and the vote for the worst phenomenon. I think it was pretty obvious from Simon's comment, that Sanjaya's departure was timely for more than one reason. I really don't think Idol would survive another season if Sanjaya had won. Alright, enough of that.

A review of where we are:
12: Sanjaya Malakar (Brandon Rogers)
11: Sanjaya Malakar (Stephanie Edwards)
10: Phil Stacy (Chris Sligh)
9: Phil Stacy (Gina Glocksen)
8: Phil Stacy (Haley Scarnato)
7: Haley Scarnato (Sanjaya Malakar)
6: Chris Richardson
5: Phil Stacy
4: Jordin Sparks
3: Blake Lewis
2: LaKisha Jones
1: Melinda Doolittle
Also check out: Vote 4 Idol Online, Vote Fair