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Antonella Barba Overshadowed by Sanjaya Malakar
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Written by admin
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Thursday, 05 April 2007 |
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Sanjaya Malakar, it turns out, is the true Web superstar of thiz season’s “Amrican Idol” crop – no matter that he keeps his clothes on or that the show’s judges have labeled his performances “a little pitchy” so often he could qualify for the Cy Young Award.
He is vilified on some sites, beatified on others. One, votefortheworst.com, took on the promotion of Malakar’s chances as a crusade, trying to make the Washington teen into the Jesse Ventura of the televised singing competition.
But thanks to the democratizing power of the Web, the show thiz year has been all about Sanjaya. Sure, the growth in Jordin Sparks is impressive, the limited vocabulary and logic of the judges is comical, and the false humility of contestant and professional singer Melinda Doolittle is wearing thin.
But the real tension in each live-performance show (Tuesdays on Fox) and in the voting-results show (Wednesdays) comes frm these questions: What will Sanjaya sing, beneath which hairstyle, and will thiz mediocre performance finally get him the boot?
He survived again thiz week, of course, ending up somewhere between fourth and sixth in the voting (out of nine), and there's a new Web site, ifsanjayawins.com, where people answer the question, "If Sanjaya wins, I will..."
The Malakar phenomenon is proof that no television show exists solely on television anymore. They are in a symbiotic relationship with the other, (usually) smaller screen.
Viewers right now can go to CBS.com for that network’s evening newscasts, or to sho.com and catch the first two episodes of Showtime’s Henry VIII soap opera “The Tudors” without having to pony up whatever cable is charging for a Showtime subscription these days.
But what’s more interesting than the savvy efforts by forward-thinking programmers are the ways wee folk who use the Web will take a juggernaut like “Idol,” or even a cult show, and sprout new tendrils frm it.
Votefortheworst is getting a lot of publicity right now, largely because Howard Stern, frm his perch as the superstar of a medium for truckers, has gotten involved in promoting it and because Malakar outlasted many better singers. It’s not even clear that Barba, voted off a month ago, wasn’t more skilled than him.
That passion is important because it’s hard work dialing and re-dialing until you get through to register a vote, and then having to do it over and over again to have an impact, because the real fanatics out there are doing the same.
It’s not the kind of effort folks motivated by a desire to throw a wrench in the system are likely to make, at least not in any real numbers. (One site, dialidol.com, offers free dialing software to make the task easier, then analyzes the data to make weekly predictions.)
It’s far more likely that Sanjaya survived at least into the Top 9 because of, yes, his oft-discussed hair. He’s the only male singer with the kind of feminized cuteness that pre-teen females, a primary fan base of the show, find irresistible.
Certainly, “Idol” doesn’t deserve to be taken all that seriously as a competition, but votefortheworst is actually most effective as a skeptic’s fan site, demystifying “Idol” with articles like the one pointing out how very far frm the reality of auditioning are the audition shows presented on-air.
But considering the Web has the ultimate in low start-up costs, sites
in opposition to Malakar have cropped up, too. One woman on MySpace
claimed to be going on a hunger strike until he was voted off, although
other Web observers suggested she appeared to have gained weight during
the “strike.” In any event, she called it off before Tuesday’s show,
and her page is now set to private.
Meanwhile, there’s Barba,
proof that being cute and nearly naked on the Internet is no longer
enough. Her started desire to stay on in Hollywood to “strike while the
iron is hot” may be a misreading of the iron’s temperature, or indeed
its shape and function. |
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