By the time this article is published, Ryan Seacrest will have signed off for the last time from the Dolby Theatre, bringing to a close Thursday’s two-hour finale of American Idol’s fifteenth and final season. Seacrest, a friendly robot in a dapper suit, stood as one of the few remaining elements of the original cultural phenomenon. When this last season premiered, long gone were the iconic trio of judges, the hokey Ford commercials, the Coca-Cola sponsorship, the makeover episode, and about two-thirds of viewers. Although I haven’t yet seen the finale, I can be certain it was huge—an opulent memorial for what may be the last mammoth of traditional television. And when it’s all over and a winner (whose journey I haven’t followed) is crowned in a sea of blue confetti, I’m certain I’ll be pondering one big question: what did it all mean? Or rather, how and why did this long-neglected show once manage to score huge audiences week after week for nearly a decade?
The answer is so simple it’s almost radical, kind of like Idol itself: It was great.
A short anecdote from a fan (me): My third-grade teacher held a weekly poll throughout the third season of American Idol. Despite the fact that this poll had no bearing on the show’s outcome, I’d make a strong case every week for Jennifer Hudson (and time has proved me right). The week America sent JHud packing, my third-grade nemesis did the unexpected. She came over to my desk and gave me a supportive hug.
Sure, people still watch “television” shows, and many of these shows become huge hits. But chances are there won’t ever again be on live television another program that reaches nearly everyone, a truly by-the-people-for-the-people extravaganza airing three times a week—a show that forces childhood enemies to find common ground.
Created by a Brit, Simon Fuller, American Idol premiered on Fox in the summer of 2002 to a mid-sized audience. Fresh face Ryan Seacrest (along with Brian Dunkleman, who left the show after the first season) at this point had no pull with audiences, and few could have predicted the magnetic chemistry of judges Randy Jackson, Paula Abdul, and Simon Cowell. Word quickly spread about this singing competition with an unlikely mix of charm, talent, and humor. By the end of the season three months later, it was the number one show in the country, and more than twenty-two million viewers tuned into the finale to see who would become the first “American Idol,” right after the commercial break
Kelly Clarkson, a waitress from Burleson, Texas, took that first Idol title. While it would be an exaggeration to pin Idol’s success entirely on Clarkson, the show’s producers couldn’t have gotten a more spectacular first winner if they’d sold their vocal chords to Satan. Genuinely likable and enormously talented, Kelly sailed straight to the finish line, and despite a lukewarm response to her first album and the nightmare that was From Justin to Kelly, Clarkson quickly found her footing in the pop music industry, translating reality-show domination into real-world stardom.
Her win established the ideal narrative for a season of American Idol: a rags-to-riches tale of an average American with a heavenly voice, an endearing personality, and a dream. Sure, plenty of people watched for the painful (“dreadful,” as Cowell might say) auditions, but enough viewers stayed to the end for there to be more to this phenomenon than watching deluded people find out they couldn’t sing. Following Kelly, underdog stories continued to drive Idol, and the show kept striking gold along with them, finding superstars in first-place finishers Carrie Underwood and, to a lesser extent, Jordin Sparks. Even if Idol winners lacked pop appeal, remarkable talents like Fantasia Barrino and Ruben Studdard, briefly, were able to establish niches in the music world. You didn’t even need to win to win, as Idol launched dozens of careers for those who got sent home early. Simply put, American Idol actually worked as a talent search as well as it did a reality show.
An oddly inspiring bit of Idol trivia: it took five seasons for America to select a white, male winner (after which there were far too many, but alas). With more than just its champions, Idol placed portraying an inclusive, multi-racial America at the forefront of its mission. And while it wasn’t until 2014 that Idol featured its first openly gay finalist, the show stood out for its time as refreshingly diverse family entertainment. Part of what made the show’s early seasons so special was that many Americans could find people like themselves up on the Idol stage having their once-in-a-lifetime “moments like this.”
In an unexpected way, American Idol was a political show, too. Despite its foreign roots, Idol rose to fame on the wave of idealistic patriotism that defined post-9/11, pre-recession America. It’s no shock, then, that a week after Kelly Clarkson’s win in 2002, 19 Entertainment (the management company with which America voted her into a contract) arranged for her to sing the national anthem at a September 11th commemorative event at the Lincoln Memorial. While this move earned some criticism in 2002, it seems like a natural honor, almost an obligation for a newly crowned American Idol. Beginning with gestures like this one, American Idol would entrench itself into the country’s cultural identity at a time when the United States desperately craved symbols of nationalism.
It’s an oft-quoted statistic that, at the show’s peak, the Idol finale received more votes than the presidential election. This point is usually thrown out to bemoan the state of American democracy, but that’s a rather limited way of viewing it. Setting aside the facts that American Idol set no minimum voting age and allowed each person multiple votes, Idol was a celebration of the democratic principles that guide the country. A truly direct democracy, Idol proved how effortless casting a vote could be, allowing viewers to pick their favorites just by dialing a phone number. If you’re willing to follow me a step further, Idol also encouraged people to challenge democratic systems, as fans began to question Idol voting’s lack of transparency and call for reform. In the case of Sanjaya Malakar, a weak contestant who endured thanks to an Internet effort to “Vote for The Worst,” the public witnessed an abuse of a democratic system, and oddly enough, comedian Pete Davidson and former Trump strategist Stephanie Cegielski have both compared the Donald to Malakar as twin trolls of democracy. American Idol didn’t detract from the country’s political landscape. It embodied it.
A cartoonish take on art sums up its goal as “holding a mirror up to society.” Whether or not it was ever art, American Idol held up that mirror better than anything on TV, and the reflection was a glittering two-dimensional spectacle. Highly commercial, brazenly optimistic, and simplistically patriotic, Idol captured something of how we for a short moment saw ourselves as a country until we got too bored or discouraged or cynical to believe it anymore. The show, which felt unstoppable ten years ago, of course feels out of place in 2016. Despite its many updates and modernizations, the later years of Idol were a time capsule that was making enough money as a sideshow that none of Fox’s executives wanted to bury it. As it finally lies down to rest in the void of television history, maybe we can start remembering it for what it was: an American giant.