It’s a “Mad World” for Idol DVR Users

It Was the Best Idol Performance You Never Saw

 

Posted April 9, 2009  

Chilling, Haunting, Genius, inspired. These are just some the adjectives that have been used to describe Adam Lambert’s Tuesday night performance on American Idol’s “Year you were born” week, when the idols had to sing – you guessed it- songs from the year that they were born. His rendition of “Mad World” by Tears for Fears was so captivating that it should have been the headline for all the blogosphere, but it was not. Instead, the talk of the town was how Fox’s show ran over so long – a full 9 minutes- that when Adam stepped up to the mic to deliver a performance that will go down in Idol history for being the first one to prompt the show’s defacto leader and castigator-in-chief, Simon Powell to get up off what some may call his pompous rear and give a standing ovation, millions of DVR’s across America had long since stopped recording.

This just may be the 21^st century version of the great NFL “Heidi Game” controversy in 1968 when NBC cut away from a monumental matchup between the Raiders and the great Joe Namath’s Jets in the last two minutes of the game to show the classic fairytale “Heidi.” But Fox actually had much more to worry about than angry footballs fans jamming the telephone lines and even calling the police, because if Lambert’s voting totals had placed him in the bottom three, the integrity of the show’s democratic selection process would have been severely jeopardized.

Lucky for Fox executives, they dodged that bullet as the Wednesday results show revealed that Adam was safe from the bottom three. If Adam had been the lowest vote getter, presumably the judges would have used their one-time ‘judges save’ authority to keep him in the contest, but that could still have consequences later in the competition if the situation arose that would have prompted a judges save that had already been used up by the judges to compensate for what is apparently grossly inept producing. Especially considering that the show has been produced live for a whole eight seasons. The Washington Post is reporting that Fox executives are staying mum on whether they did their due diligence to ensure the show would fit into its one hour time slot given the addition of a fourth judge. They would not say whether there was a dress rehearsal, which is common for live shows, or whether they are taking precautions to avoid something like this from happening again.