Spring 2013 Reality Show Wrap-up, Part 1: "American Idol, Season 12" & "Survivor Caramoan: Fans vs. Favorites"

We watch a lot of reality shows these days, and have been struggling to keep up with them all.  Maybe now that they’re officially over, we can catch up on all those old police dramas that are on our DVR all the way back to January!

     So the finales happened, and we found out the winners, but as always, it was a fun journey for all the contestants and judges.  Here’s just a few (or more) thoughts about them:

American Idol: Season 12, 2013

The guys really weren’t all that good this year.  I really didn’t like Curtis Finch Jr. at all. Unlike some of the girls, he wound up displaying the worst side of Gospel/Soul, and though the judges were pretty much bowing before him in worship, America wasn’t feeling it.  His over-singing was probably the main reason he was voted out first – well, and maybe that hideous jacket he wore on the first “Top Ten” show.  

Curtis: Couch, curtain, tablecloth or jacket:
That thing's ugly any way you slice it!

I was hoping good things for Paul Jolly, the smiley, charismatic country crooner, and Lazaro Arbos, the young, Desi Arnez look-alike with the humble personality and strong stutter.  Jolly wasn’t very country, and like most of the other guys, had a rather high pitched voice (we like ‘em deeper), and Lazaro, who loves to wear bright, loud colors, particularly pink, was always nervous and out of tune, poor guy.  He sounds much better on his studio recordings than he does live.  He wasn’t ready for this competition.  It was too big for him.  Devin Velez was the Hispanic singer who looked rather Caucasian, in a strange sort of way, and occasionally sang in Spanish.  He was merely okay.  The best of the guys was probably Burnell Taylor, who went from a very laid back, “chill” dude in his first audition to an almost Urkell-wannabe, with the short hair, bow tie, and greasy glasses.  He usually sang with his fingers gyrating and his hands moving up and down.  He had a nice quality to his voice on certain songs, but even he wasn’t quite as good as the worst of the girls, whoever that really was.

Top 4 Guys: Lazaro, Burnell, Paul, & Devin

Janelle was the first of the girls voted out of the top five, but I still loved her, and downloaded several of her songs, but she usually flew a bit under the radar when compared with the other girls, and then made the mistake of singing Dolly Parton’s “Dumb Blonde” on Diva week.  If you’re thinking that you’ve never heard that Dolly song among her impressive catalogue, then that would explain why Janelle was the first of the girls voted out.  Still, her performance on songs like “I Will” and a slower version of “You Keep Me Hanging On” explain why she was still better than the boys.  There were quite a few times I didn’t like Amber Holcomb all that much, and when compared with the ultimate winner, she paled, but there were other times I felt Amber was able to pull a rabbit out of a hat, and I wound up thoroughly enjoying her performances.  She surprised me every time she managed a performance that made me really take notice of her talent, and it happened four times (for “She’s Leaving Home”, “What About Love”, “What are You Doing the Rest of Your Life” and “The Power of Love”).  I like it more when they manage to restrain themselves from over-singing showy gospel and soul songs.  

Top 5 girls: Angie, Candice, Janelle, Kree, & Amber

Angie Miller showed herself to be a top contender early on when she sang an original composition called “You Set Me Free” at the piano and it went viral.  The producers wisely released it as a single on iTunes in the end.  But there were at least seven other performances of hers I liked enough to download.  Kree Harrison was the runner up, and was a natural with a microphone.  She was consistently good, and never gave a performance I didn’t like.  However, the thing with Kree was simply that.  She was consistently good, but some of the other girls were occasionally brilliant.  On any given week, Amber or Angie, or even Janelle, managed a bit of a better performance, and Kree didn’t always pick the best songs.  I didn’t download an awful lot of Kree’s songs (at least not yet).  That brings me to the winner, Candice Glover.  Whereas Kree was consistently good, Candice was almost always stunning, showing Curtis Finch Jr., the first one voted out, how great a restrained and controlled performance can be.  With just a few exceptions, Candice’s performances were always one of the top three on any given week.  I said from the beginning that she was undeniably the most talented one among the top ten.

Top 3 girls: Angie Miller, Kree Harrison, and Candice Glover

     Of the contestants who didn’t even make it into the top ten, the most memorable were Zoanette Johnson and Charlie Askew.  Zoanette was an annoying and garishly large black woman with a garishly large personality and not much talent.  I still don’t know why the judges put her into the top twenty! 

Zoanette & Charlie

And Charlie was a bit of a strange duck, a skinny kid with gobs of long red hair and a bit of boyish charm and his own rather unique and mystic style.  He made a huge mistake when he pulled his hair back into a ponytail with a feather earring, a camoflauged “wife beater” t-shirt and black leather pants and tackled Genesis’ very angry sounding “Mama”.  Like Lazaro, he wasn’t ready for this competition, and took the judges’ negative comments very hard.  He then lost a contest with Aubrey Cleland to be the lucky 11^th contestant to go on tour with the rest.   

            The judges were caricatures, as usual.  Mariah Carey was the prima donna in the tight dresses, overusing her hands and the word “Darling” when she talked, which was usually in circles.  For her performance in the finale, they stuffed her into something that looked like Daryl Hannah’s mermaid costume from Splash!  She’s kind of like the pop music world version of Morticia Addams, particularly the way she is restricted in those tight girdles and dresses.  Randy was, as usual, “the dog”, calling all the girls “Dude” and overusing the phrase “Ryan!  She’s in it to win it!”  Telling performers they’re the best of the night doesn’t seem to work anymore, and this year, he resorted to telling certain contestants that it was the best performance of any singing competition ever in the history of television, which he said to Candice, but Mariah Carey one-uped him when she went on the stage after one of Candice’s performances and threw gold glitter on her!  What will they think of next?  Keith Urban usually just displayed a cool vibe, but unlike Mariah Carey, he always had constructive advice for the contestants.  Then there was Nicki Minaj.  We didn’t like her from the start, and some friends and family refused to watch this season because she was one of the judges.  I checked out some of her “music” on iTunes, and I can see why.  Yet what we discovered with Nicki is that, taking a tip from Simon, she “told it like it is” and I often found myself agreeing with her assessments.  Unlike Mariah, she wasn’t attempting to be politically correct, and that’s a rather refreshing approach in this day and age.  When the remaining three guys weren’t all that great together, she told them to “get off the stage”, and she wasn’t afraid to even tell the opinionated producer Jimmy Iovine what she thought of his backstage critiques.  And, of course, it was obvious Nicki and Mariah can’t stand each other. 

     And what can I say about Ryan Seacrest that hasn’t already been said?  He’s one of the best announcers/MC’s on television, and quite the workaholic.

Survivor Caramoan: Fans vs. Favorites

 

Well, Cochran, the red-haired, fair-skinned, Woody Allen-like nerd, won the whole thing, and I can’t say I’m not happy about that.  We’ve always liked Cochran.  There may have been a few times he said the wrong thing or had the wrong attitude, or aligned with the wrong people, but then, it all managed to get him to the finish line, now didn’t it!  

What’s more, that’s a win for all geeks everywhere!  He was one of the previous favorites, and a self-described Survivor fanatic, having even written a college dissertation about the show!  I find I seem to have a lot in common with Cochran, having, like him, watched every episode of Survivor they’ve ever made, and burning after about 5 minutes out in the sun, though he seems to now be more comfortable with who he is.  Describing himself pre-Survivor as “Brilliant, insecure and neurotic”, which didn’t suit him well during his first season for Survivor: South Pacific, he said during the reunion show this year that he’s much more comfortable with being who he is.  I, too, have managed to embrace my geek nature and take pride in who I am, and I’m sure this win will allow him to go farther in life than I have so far!

Here’s all the other players this year, and a few thoughts about them:

• Francesca was a returning favorite who was the first voted out for her previous season.  Once again, thanks to Phillip, she was the first voted out this time around as well!  She said if that happened again, she'd eat a rock.  We were kind of hoping host Jeff Probst might bring that up during the reunion show, but they didn't invite back all the people who were voted out that early.
• That’s right, Phillip returned, trying to explain to everyone that he wasn’t crazy before, just crafty, and would this time be utilizing Boston Rob’s “rules” in an attempt to control the game.  However, what Phillip doesn’t realize is that he IS crazy, and built an alliance called “Stealth-R-Us” that even those in his alliance found completely laughable.  I’m surprised any of them could keep a straight face!  Phillip is self-deluded, and even seems to have convinced himself about the real reasons for his own shortcomings during challenges.
• Brandon Hantz returned, trying to once again redeem the “Hantz” family name, but going about it in a completely different way than his first appearance on the show.  During his first season, I kind of liked him, a young kid trying to live the Christian life and prove that the Hantz family is more noble than his infamous Uncle Russell made them out to be, and even though he was a bit of a psychological mess that season, I got the feeling his heart was in the right place.  This season, he was even more unstable, and all he managed to prove is that, given time, a Hantz can’t help but become a mean-spirited, selfish jerk!  If he still claims to be Christian, he gives us all a bad name.  He left the game early after a huge fight with Phillip that ended with Brandon dumping his tribe’s rice in the sand, and then having a hissy fit before they even got to that week’s challenge, forcing an immediate tribal council right then and there to just get rid of him.  It's times like these you wonder how "real" this reality television really is!
• Dawn was another returning favorite, and as before, she was an emotional wreck, yet, whereas on her previous season she was a nice but rather mousy emotional wreck, this season she was a conniving and backstabbing emotional wreck, taking legitimate friendships she had built up on the show, particularly with Brenda, and then turning on them, excusing it as being “just a game.”  She really hurt Brenda’s feelings, and Brenda said on the reunion show that she will not be a friend to Dawn any longer.  Game or no game, these people have to suffer the consequences of their actions.  And these actions didn’t even help her, because, although she was in the final three alongside Cochran and Sherri, Cochran won all the votes, and neither she nor Sherri got a single one.
• That brings me to Sherri, who was a newcomer.  Attempting a few alliances right from the start, none of them panned out, and when she found herself in Phillip’s alliance, she went along with his ridiculous “Stealth-R-Us” routine just to get further in the game.  When Phillip was eliminated, and Cochran found himself still in the game, he maneuvered her to the end with him because he knew she would be a non-entity for the final three.  True to form, most of the questions were for Cochran and Dawn only, and when a few people did question Sherri about why she was there since she didn’t do anything and was brought as a mere seat-filler by Cochran, they were told by Sherri herself that she certainly deserved to be there.  When Erik questioned her about it a bit more thoroughly, she turned on him, and told him to shut up and sit down.  Well Erik was right, and the fact that almost nobody questioned her and that none of them voted for her spoke volumes!
• On a previous season, Erik had made one of the most boneheaded plays of all time, but this season, he was more level-headed, and made it all the way to final five, and probably would have made it farther if he wasn’t removed from the game early for severe dehydration and hunger.  Complaining of dizziness that wouldn’t go away, doctors were forced to remove him from the game after checking on his nearly non-existent vital signs!

• Another person ejected from the game for illness was Shamar, an Iraq war veteran who was like a big, lazy, crying baby.  Like Phillip, he was self-delusional, and his alliance only kept him around for the numbers.  Upsetting everyone in the tribe including his alliance, he wouldn’t help with any of the chores, ate more than his fair share, and spent most of the time lying around in the shelter.  I couldn’t believe someone could get an injury serious enough to leave the game early from just lying around doing nothing, but Shamar found a way!  Lying in the shelter, he managed to get sand in his eye, and it caused an infection.  Then he started acting like he didn’t really want to leave the game early, but we were kind of wondering if he might have put sand in his eye on purpose as an excuse to leave early!
• Matt seemed like a nice enough guy, but I wanted to take a pair of clippers to his hair and beard something fierce!
• A few of the returning girls, particularly Corrine and Andrea, tried to make some huge plays, but they didn’t work.  Corrine was voted out before the jury was formed, and Andrea was voted out with a hidden immunity idol still in her bag!
• Michael was one of the new contestants, and he's so gay, you might have thought the ghost of Ethel Merman was following him around the island!  One of Corrine’s major mistakes was aligning herself with Michael just because “she loves her gays!”
• Some of the new girls, Laura, Hope, Julie, and Allie, were pretty, but not much else, and none of them went too far.
• My favorite players, other than the winner Cochran, were the “Three Amigos”, which were newcomers Reynold and Eddie, and returning favorite Malcolm, and the funny thing is, they were never aligned with Cochran, since Cochran was the self-proclaimed geek and these “Three Amigos” were the jocks who normally wouldn’t pay Cochran any heed at all.  They knew it, and Cochran knew it.  Yet even though they were the “popular”, good-looking studs, and actually even because of this, they were targeted right from the start, beginning with Sherri building an alliance and going after the cute young girls Reynold and Eddie aligned themselves with from the beginning.   Once the tribes merged, Reynold and Eddie, who somehow managed to keep themselves alive, aligned with Malcolm, who then had no one else to align with against Phillip’s “Stealth-R-Us”, yet before being voted out one by one, they managed a big move to finally get Phillip eliminated when Phillip’s team was prepared to vote out any one of the “Three Amigos”, but Reynold won individual immunity, Malcolm played the hidden immunity idol he had found, and then surprised everyone by producing a second hidden immunity idol he had found and giving it to Eddie!  With the votes from the rest of them split between Malcolm and Eddie, which no longer counted, the “Three Amigos” were able to each write down Phillip’s name to get his crazy butt thrown out!  It’s one of the best blind sides in Survivor history!  Eddie managed to make it the furthest of the three, being the most agreeable and least threatening of them all.  Besides being somewhat arrogant and so damned “perfect”, I actually found myself liking all three of them, and the audience agreed, since Malcolm was named “Fan Favorite” in an online poll and awarded $100,000.