The first episode of this season’s “American Idol” opened in typically outsized fashion. We flashed back to last season’s finale, as Laine Hardy was crowned the winner, amid blinding lights and a roaring crowd in a massive theater.
Since it began on Fox in 2002, “Idol” has never been a small show. (It ended on Fox in 2016, then ABC revived it two years later.) It’s about big dreams, big notes and big spectacle. But on April 26, after it had exhausted its pretaped early episodes, “Idol” emerged, like the rest of us under stay-at-home orders, into a world whose boundaries the Covid-19 pandemic has made constrictingly small.
Unable to have finalists perform with live bands in front of live crowds, the producers sent the singers video and lighting equipment and had them record performances in backyards, garages and bedrooms. A week later, NBC’s singing competition, “The Voice,” followed suit for its first “playoff” rounds.
The results so far have been both affecting and unsettling, emotional and apocalyptic.
Where Ryan Seacrest once held “Idol” court from center stage of a theater, he now works from home, backed by a neon logo. Like so many TV hosts today, he has the Rupert Pupkin-esque cast of someone pretending to run a show. Carson Daly opens “The Voice” from an empty set, the trademark red judges’ chairs sitting like abandoned monuments, and refers vaguely to “Everything that’s been going on.”
The shows are among the first test cases for how reality productions might adapt to a long siege. (“America’s Got Talent” returns this month and even “The Bachelorette” is exploring options for shooting, somehow, under quarantine.) How much reality can a reality show bear? Do you try to maintain the illusion of high-production TV grandeur, or lean in to the Zoom-iness of it all? Do you aim for escape or catharsis — or mash both up into a big ball of glitter and emotion?
The new “Idol” episodes, subtitled “On With the Show,” play up the homeyness of the domestic settings. The competitors perform from front porches strung with lights — the new “Idol” loves porches — or inside garages, or on living-room couches. One finalist, Sophia James, sings the Beach Boys’ “In My Room” … in her room, beside a set of sliding-mirror closet doors.
Essentially, “Idol” is trading one romantic image (the emerging star hitting the big time onstage) for another (the aspiring artist plugging away in solitude, singing in front of the mirror). At the same time, it puts an idyllic sheen on the audience’s own shelter-in-place experience. You’re stuck at home, we’re stuck at home, it says; let’s hang out and I’ll serenade you from across the street.
It all feels more intimate than the usual home-visit video packages. There’s a whole world implied in seeing the Nepalese-American singer Arthur Gunn making momo dumplings in his house in Kansas, then playing a reggae-fied “Take Me Home, Country Roads” on the porch, cars driving by on a highway in the background.
Where “Idol” styles all those bedrooms and backyards into idealized tableaus of Americana, “The Voice” takes the opposite approach — treating its home videos with saturated color and video effects to create the sort of images you’re used to getting from a TV studio.
Where a dramatic backdrop is available — for Zan Fiskum, an RV she renovated in her parents’ Washington backyard — the show uses it. Otherwise, performances are jazzed up with video overlays and mirror-image effects, drenched in jewel-tone light or rendered in black-and-white filters, through which you might notice a living-room sofa or the fluttering of window blinds.
It’s a distinct choice from “Idol,” but one that fits the electric-Thunderdome aesthetic of the now-desolate “Voice” set. If the quarantine version of “Idol” creates an idealized vision of the hearth, the homebound “Voice” appeals to nostalgia for TV itself — ordinary, pre-Covid, high-gloss TV, with all its artifice and showbiz wizardry. Both shows are applying an augmented-reality overlay to quotidian lockdown life.
It’s been tougher naturally integrating judges (“Idol”) and coaches (“The Voice”), who usually energize the shows by bantering and bickering in person. Now they’re dialing in from home too, with backdrops furnished to accentuate their personal brands. John Legend beams in to “The Voice” from a swanky home lounge; the country stars Luke Bryan on “Idol” and Blake Shelton on “The Voice” are backed with a small forest’s worth of rough-hewed wood planks.
There are attempts to lighten the mood, some more successful than others. The “Voice” coaches filmed themselves wrestling to assemble their D.I.Y. home-studio kits. Katy Perry did the entire April 26 episode of “Idol” dressed as a bottle of hand sanitizer, a maybe-read-the-room bit that clashed with her earnest remarks about being pregnant during a pandemic and learning that “there’s a lot of things that I’m grateful for these days.” (Not a sentiment you hear from your average Purell dispenser.) Her May 3 get-up, as a roll of toilet paper, didn’t last past the first commercial break.
Of course, both shows are ultimately about the singing, which is where the new adaptations get tricky. In an ordinary live performance, stumbles and off-notes are apparent. Here, while contestants perform “as live” (using audio from one home-recording take as well as, usually, studio musicians recording elsewhere), it’s hard to tell how much of what you’re hearing is the singer and what’s postproduction.
You won’t get much guidance from the judges. While “Idol” long ago moved past its Simon Cowell ugly-truth days, both it and “The Voice” are now especially generous. The contests feel like a class that, amid a rough semester, is now being taught pass-fail.
Likewise, the contestants are stand-ins for all the young people suddenly missing big milestones like graduations. “Idol” has been around long enough that its competitors have fantasized their entire lives about being on the show. Now they’ve made it and here they are, left to imagine an empty room as a stage. (There is also something unsettling and “Black Mirror”-like about the eliminated contestants arrayed in a grid of grainy rectangles, often with family members, waiting to be turned off.)
As a lapsed regular viewer of both shows, I find the quarantine versions’ attempts to power through to be the most fascinating things they’ve done in years — moving and full of the sort of actual reality that reality shows often efface. They’re not much of an escape, though, which may be one reason that ratings for the two shows have dipped.
For decades, after all, people have watched singing competitions to see dreams come true, not turn bittersweet. They’re used to impossibly polished performances, not shaky broadband connections.
But this is what we have now, high notes and best wishes transmitted in bits and bytes. You could feel the distance achingly on “Idol,” when Just Sam — a contestant who stayed behind in Los Angeles so as not to endanger her grandmother back home — learned that she had made the Top 11 and began to cry, not entirely joyful tears. Seacrest tried to console her, remotely, from his home desk.
“I just wish I had one person here,” she said.
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May 08, 2020 at 11:54PM
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'American Idol' and 'The Voice' Are Test Cases for TV Under Lockdown - Trends Wide
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