To just about no one’s surprise, Jordin Sparks took the “American Idol” title Wednesday night (based on a record 74 million votes).
What also shouldn’t have been a surprise, but was to me and others (see additional post below from reporter Brent), Fox and the nation’s DVRs/TiVos conspired to make some of us miss the actual announcement, or, at the very least, Jordin’s final performance.
My DVR has cut off the end of “Idol” earlier this season, and apparently I didn’t care enough to just set it to record longer. But tonight I was a little miffed, I have to admit. But it’s my own fault .
I slogged through the most bloated “Idol” finale I’ve ever seen. No, I didn’t watch every minute. I FF’d through most of it. But by my DVR’s account, it wasn’t until 2 hours and 3 minutes into the show that they finally announced the winner.
And this was after we heard from just about any notable singer ever connected with “Idol” (well, except Clay and Daughtry), and some of them numerous times and in various combos. We also heard from Gwen Stefani, Smokey Robinson, Gladys Knight, Tony Bennett (what exactly is their target audience here, anyway?!), BeBe and CeCe Winans, the African Children’s Choir, Green Day (!?) and Bette Midler.
There were medleys, there were tributes, there was a much-too-long speech from Clive Davis about the impact of “Idol” on the music industry ... oh, and there was Joe Perry on guitar.
There were also the “Golden Idol” awards so they could justify showing audition clips again and show America that, hey, calling someone a bush baby can be a good thing (and can apparently lead to the sponsorship of such a creature -- named Simon -- at the Milwaukee County Zoo … can that possibly be true? A quick check of the InterWebs revealed nothing. Anyone know for sure?)
Anyway, so while much of America shouted at their TV/DVRs/TiVos, simultaneously cursing Fox, Jordin and her family celebrated her victory. And so ends another season of “American Idol.” They leave us annoyed and possibly vowing never to watch again, but we all know we’ll be back. It’s just so much fun! :)
-- Ann Garber, assistant news editor
Reporter Brent vents his TiVo frustration:
My wife and I couldn't watch the American Idol final show live tonight (we had a childbirth class and that obviously took priority) so we set our digital recorder to capture the program for later viewing. In fact, we've had the thing set to record to record the show all season long. (I'll confess that we watch the program on fast forward for at least half the time.)
So we get home tonight to see the big finale and what does Fox do? Run long. So the big moment (which admittedly wasn't much of a surprise anyway, but still would have been nice to see after watching the darn show all season) wasn't captured. The taping ended just moments before they announced the winner. Ugggh!
Maybe we should have anticipated this and set the DVR to record long or the program in the next time slot, but when you set a program at the start of the season you don't really worry about it from that point forward -- so that never crossed our minds.
In the era of TiVo, TV networks need to get a clue!
Anybody else frustrated by this, not only with tonight's program but with other programs that run long and get missed as a result?
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