American Idol: David Wins!

Yeah, I know, it's a lame joke, but if professional comic Mike Myers can use it, so can I. Spoilers about which David is the 2008 American Idol coming up... after the break!

I called it! I knew it! I never doubted it even... OK, maybe I doubted it a little. Missouri's David Cook was crowned American Idol by a margin of 12 million votes. This despite the fact that his opponent, David Archuleta, was judged the prohibitive favorite by the pundits and experts before the finals even started. This despite the fact that Tuesday night, the judges, especially Simon Cowell, literally declared David A. the winner before the voting had even taken place. By design, or by accident, AI's voters decided they did not like being told by the powers that be who to vote for.

The competition among the Presidential candidates over who gets to use that as a metaphor for themselves starts... now. (Hat tip to commmenter Disenfranchised_Libertarian for pointing out the analogy—and calling it for David Cook—in an earlier thread.)

Seriously, though, what did you make of Simon's about-face before the winner was announced, actually apologizing to Cook and saying he'd been "disrespectful" to him? Did he have a word with the other producers, who reportedly wanted Cook to win? Or did he just peek at dialidol.com, which accurately predicted the Cook landslide?

As for Cook, watching him sing the godawful Idol coronation song—"Time of My Moment" or "This Is My Tomorrow" or "Today Is My Now of My Life" or whatever the songwriting program that generated it called it—gave a little insight into part of the reason why he won. Yes, the song was a piece of crap—there was a line about a "magic rainbow" in it, for God's sake. I'm sure he knew it was a piece of crap. And yet he didn't seem awkward or uncomfortable or, most important, too cool for it. He sang it straight, sang it his way, found whatever scrap of genuine emotion he could connect with in it, and thereby made it sound a little less crappy. That was Kelly Clarkson's talent, and David C. has got it.

The results show itself: I may lose my TV critic's license for saying it, but it was actually not bad this year. Yes, there were embarrassing bits, like the uncomfortable, whoring promo for The Love Guru. (And yet having Tropic Thunder stars Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr. impersonate the Pips? Delightful.) There were a couple too many awkwardly choreographed group sings. (Oh, Amanda Overmyer, how I missed your sullen scowling!) And seriously, Idol honchos: the bucket you keep dipping into the bad-audition-singers well is officially scraping gravel.

But give Idol and its producers credit for realizing that AI is a music program and simply loading up the two hours with performances, rather than padding it with celebrity interviews and other vamping as they did in past years. They may have skewed a bit old, if Idol is at all worried about its hemorrhaging of young viewers (ZZ Top? Bryan Adams? Was Styx unavailable?), but Brooke White duetting with Graham Nash was charming, as was Syesha Mercado with Seal. Archuleta surprisingly held his own as a rocker, duetting on Nickelback's Hero with Cook. And I'm just going to come out and say it: that Jonas Brothers' song was not bad! I may actually be a 10 year old girl!

Another quibble: the show ran long again, either an unintended slight to DVR users, or a canny strategy to foil them. (Though Ryan literally managed to announce Cook as winner a second before my TiVo stopped recording.) But at least this year it was not quite as dull a slog waiting for that result. A decently entertaining American Idol finale episode? An actually deserving American Idol winner with his own musical sensibility? Maybe it really is a new day in America!

And yes, the competition among the Presidential candidates over who gets to use that as a metaphor for themselves starts... now.