This is going to be an American Idol themed rant, but since I only talk about AI for a very tiny portion of the year, you can just bear with me.

Last week on American Idol we said goodbye to four hopeful contestants, who had braved the cold, the rain, the heat, and the wind, just to get inside a stadium and wait for hours and hours to audition in hopes of getting on the show.

Some of those hopefuls got a lot of air time in both their audition and their back story - think Josiah Leming.

In some cases we learned back stories which made us want to vote for the person (David Archuleta - pictured) - setting them up for immediate success once the voting period started.

But in other cases, we were hearing a contestant sing as part of the Top 24 and we’d never even seen them on camera before, or if we had, it was for the 5 seconds of montage time they got during the announcement of the finalists.

Some of these kids are banking on getting into the Top 24 so their names and voices are heard and it gives their career a kick start, only to discover that due to zero air time, no one in America knows who they are, and has no reason to vote for them.

If it was me, I would be pissed. People who had no chance of making it to the Top 24 got HOURS of air time on the show, but the people that put their lives on hold to live in an apartment in LA and go through the torment of competing get nothing.

While I do not believe for one second that this is their “only shot to be successful“, I do believe that if American Idol is going to go to the trouble of putting 24 contestants on the air, then we need to atleast KNOW something about these kids that want our votes. Why give me hours of Josiah Leming’s soulful music and interesting story to see him get kicked out at the last minute? And why give me nothing from Garrett Haley or Amy Davis and then expect me to care?

That’s my rant for the day, and it’s probably because I’m tired of hearing that this is the best group of hopefuls the show has ever seen and then actually hearing them and wishing something else was on that I could watch instead.

Things are going downhill for me. We should already be in the Top 5 for the show because there’s only about that many worth listening to.

This sarcastic entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 12:26 pm and is filed under American Idol, Music, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.