Tuesday night, twelve young singers entered the set of America’s leading television goliath, affectionately known to its intimates as the Idoldome. For this group, it had been a long journey here, starting last summer when they camped out before dawn at stadiums across the nation, through multiple callbacks and eventually being plucked out of their homelands and flown in for Idol’s killing field of dreams, Hollywood Week. They had walked down Idol’s Green Mile and avoided the executioner and survived the semi-final rounds wherein half of those who remained were dispatched in three short weeks.
And at last they stood on this historic stage, which they have studied so long, in an experience one former contestant described as “stepping into your television set.”
But now that they were here, the competition begins in earnest, and Wednesday night they gathered for the season to claim its first victim as, despite a decent performance in this week’s Rolling Stones themed show, Texan Lacey Brown’s journey was suddenly brought to an end.
But in the process of this first week’s competition, the children of season nine underwent the transfiguration that besets all who step through that portal; a magical alchemy of reality TV microfocus, the accumulated triumphs of eight seasons worth of the contestants who walked before, and America’s collective willingness to believe the (often true) rags to riches myth of American Idol.
