During this year’s American Idol audition cycle, much has been made of The Chamber—the small, windowless, camera-filled space where the contestants can collect their thoughts before coming face-to-face with Jennifer Lopez, Keith Urban, and Harry Connick, Jr., as well as anyone watching the first handful of Season 13’s episodes. It’s a pretty good gimmick, as far as these things go; watching someone’s game face get put on, as it were, makes for compelling TV, even if that person is a relative unknown.
The addition of The Chamber this season also serves as a signal as far as the pacing of the show this season, and how it’s changed. The audition episodes—six of them this year; they closed out last night—are, this season, the calm before the American Idol storm plays out. Which is a change from previous seasons, when the audition episodes and the singing-challenged, yet oddly charismatic characters they attracted (William Hung! The “Pants On The Ground” guy! The “I Am Your Brother” guy and his cape!) were their own story, providing fodder for Idol parent network Fox’s morning-chat shows and extra characters for the finale.
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But this season is different, as evidenced by some chatter between the show’s producers and two of the judges, Urban and Connick. During an interlude on Wednesday’s episode (set in Salt Lake City), Urban mentioned how he wasn’t interested in making fun of even the worst singers—that he took everyone’s dreams seriously, that he knew friends and family would be home watching, that the point of substance-less meanness was, well, without substance. Sometimes the “Say Something Nice” ethos resulted in a few too many punches being pulled—except from Connick, whose “nice, but firm” manner of saying no to those contestants who didn’t pass muster in his eyes should be studied by every person heading out to an audition—but it was a welcome change from the eye-rolling and giggling that often ground previous seasons’ audition episodes to a halt.
Later that night, viewers got to see all three of the judges in their earliest days—Urban in early ’80s finery belting out a song by the heartstring-tuggers Air Supply on Aussie TV, Lopez being introduced to the country as a Fly Girl on Fox’s In Living Color, Connick bashfully talking to an interviewer about his dreams of someday working in the music business. Taken alongside Lopez’s assertion that Idol “isn’t cast, unlike some other shows,” the episode served as another reminder that Idol was taking its mission seriously—that being the only show any good at elevating new talent because of its scouring-the-country approach was something to be proud of, and not smothered by a bunch of peacocking celebrities working minutes 13 through 15. (As if to underscore this, right after I finished watching Thursday night’s episode, I flipped over to Vh1 Soul and caught the video for Candice Glover’s wrenching, elliptical “Cried”; the long-delayed debut by the Season 12 winner is for real coming out next month, and I hope that’s true, although part of me is still skeptical.)
Idol‘s last four audition episodes traveled between the South (the breeding ground for most of the show’s winners) and the Midwest. January 22’s episode was set in Detroit, and it had copious up-from-nothing shots of the city that were inspiring, although they took on a new light once I realized that the show’s longtime automotive partner was still the Detroit-based Ford. January 23 took the show to Atlanta, and capitalized on having Ryan Seacrest’s mom around. Wednesday, the show was in Salt Lake City; last night’s final audition episode took place in Omaha. Going out in the heartland provided a lot of small-town tableaux, and there was even one woman (the slightly shy, but potential-filled 18-year-old Andrina Brogden) who flat-out said that her goal was to put her home state of North Dakota on the map. She made it through to Hollywood. Better that than gas fires, I suppose.
But the two singers who Idol placed most squarely in the spotlight over this span of four episodes represent the crossroads where the show currently finds itself. The season opened with a Detroit audition by Marrialle Sellers, a guitar-toting 17-year-old with a closely cropped hairdo and a giant voice. She’s a firecracker, and more importantly, she takes a lot of cues from what’s current in the music business. During the Detroit episode, she got more screen time (a sign that the producers love her!) and a backstory about her father being her biggest musical influence, even though he died in 2008. Sellers’s audition was with Bruno Mars’s “Grenade” and the judges compared her to Miley Cyrus (probably because of the whole shaved-sides haircut), although I could see her grabbing inspiration from Janelle Monáe’s genre-melding, Lady Gaga’s showiness, and Mars’s undeniable pipes. The point, though, is that she’s very representative of what’s happening in female-forward pop music now, in a way that few Idol winners have been since maybe Jordin Sparks, who won the show in the relative dark ages of 2007.
Wednesday’s episode, by contrast, was framed around Casey Thrasher, a young dad whose goal is to make it big so he can support his kids. He’s also a fan of Urban’s, having met him at an awards show years ago. His biographical details reminded me a bit of James Durbin, the season-10 firebrand who tried to bring Adam Lambert’s octave-jumping shrieks to the rock arena. (It didn’t work as much as he wanted to, but that didn’t stop the audience from voting him into fourth place that year.) But his performance was all country—he sang a rip-roaring if technically shaky version of Brooks & Dunn’s “Believe” that blew the judges away for its passion, if not for its mathematical hitting of each note.
Sellers and Thrasher were clearly pitted as the front-runners for this season (and according to spoilers, they both make it to the Top 31, which faces off live the week of February 18—seriously, the fast pacing of this season is a delight). But they also represent the crossroads that Idol is still at, despite the nicer judges and focus on the music. Will the audience vote for Thrasher, who epitomizes the White Guy With Guitar archetype that the producers tried so hard to banish from the winners’ circle last year—and who has a family to boot? Or will the judges’ firm hand result in someone like Sellers, who represents current trends more effectively (but who also represents a post-show gamble for the people putting out the victor’s record, as the struggles of Candice Glover’s debut have shown), taking the crown?
Other singers who were put in the spotlight don’t really help make the tea leaves any clearer. My favorites from these four episodes were Paisley Van Patten, a Nashville refugee in recovery who broke up with her fiancé over the prospect of auditioning for Idol; Jess Meuse, a Stevie Nicks-like singer from Slapout, Alabama with a very friendly-lady-at-open-mic vibe; Malia Washington, whose tuba-playing intro package didn’t properly prepare me for her quite-impressive stankface; and David Oliver Willis, a casualty last season whose chopping-up of Alex Clare’s “Too Close” emphasized that song’s relentlessly percussive nature.
The auditions are over, and in a month that’s been nothing but a slog of cold temperatures and Internet infighting, they were something of a breath of fresh air—not as wholly absorbing as, say, an episode of Enlightened, but brisk enough to seem like there were actually things left on the cutting-room floor. Which isn’t something that could have been said about past seasons, during which the auditions sometimes stretched into February. A total of 212 singers will be pitted against each other in Hollywood, where they’ll be shuffled into groups and deprived of sleep in an effort to make it through to the live rounds. Whether or not the producers will eschew the drama that has pumped up these episodes to Not Here To Make Friends status isn’t entirely clear, although there will probably be at least one grand meltdown worthy of inclusion on The Soup.
Maura Johnston is a writer living in Boston. She’s on Twitter – @maura
