Letters, All TV gets letters, and this week we have letters about the maybe not-so-inevitable winner of “American Idol,” literary parallels for “New Amsterdam” and more.
The kid stays in the picture
Dear Alan: Who would have thought that David Archuleta could have forgotten the lyrics and blown a Lennon/McCartney song after he had done such a great job on “Imagine”? Forgetting the lyrics is just one disastrous step short of the recurrence of the vocal cord paralysis you referenced. It’s a whole new ball game. There are now at least five potential winners. Makes for a more exciting season now.
Perhaps the producers came up with a Machiavellian strategy that you had not considered for your article: have David screw up so badly that he lets the others back into the contest, thus enhancing the quality of the contest and therefore viewership for the next 11 weeks.
-Peter Behrle, Little Falls
Alan says: Yours was one of the kinder letters I received the morning after Archuleta muffed the lyrics (three different times) during last week’s “We Can Work It Out” fiasco, shortly after the publishing of my article declaring him the presumptive winner. Most were in a more taunting vein: “Your prediction was about 24 hours too early,” “your story made you look very foolish for proclaiming his greatness,” etc.
And yet Archuleta didn’t make the bottom three for that catastrophe, and if we put any stock at all into DialIdol.com (admittedly, an iffy proposition), then he was still the top vote-getter by a huge margin. And Tuesday night, we got the predictable “David Archuleta is back! We got a hot one tonight!” moment when he did a note-perfect “The Long and Winding Road.”
The wisest thing ever said about “American Idol,” on “American Idol,” was guest mentor Peter Noone’s line last year about how the show isn’t a singing competition; it’s a voting competition. And Archuleta’s fanbase is so large and rabid that everyone else is competing for second, like it or not. I could contort myself into imagining a scenario where a Brooke White or David Cook lucks their way into a win, but it would take six or seven “We Can Work It Out”-level disasters in a row to discourage Archuleta’s fans from voting.

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