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Turns out the show is really the 'Idol'

By SEAN DALY
Published January 15, 2006

After four years of pinwheel-eyed addiction, Lisa Martin is finally going public with her secret life: The English teacher from Arizona is helplessly hooked on American Idol, the reality-TV phenomenon that premieres its fifth season Tuesday. "I haven't missed a single minute," says the 31-year-old Martin. "My mother-in-law and I call each other after every commercial break. It's a family event. It really is."

It's also a national event. More than 27-million viewers, from grade-schoolers to grandparents, are expected to tune in as a melange of the talented and the talent-averse compete for a major-label recording contract.

At a time when myriad cable channels battle for niche audiences, American Idol is the rare media event that pulls together people of all ages from all parts of the country. It creates fanatical little communities in living rooms and school cafeterias, around office water coolers and on the World Wide Web, intensely passionate bonds that can continue for years.

Those connections - fans to performers, fans to each other - fuel this juggernaut and keep viewers hooked.

"It's the investment that people put into (following) other human beings," explains Idol executive producer Nigel Lythgoe, a 55-year-old TV veteran. "The emotional investment, too. You are willing them to get through. You are willing them to win."

Most reality shows lose buzz after their first season. But Fox's Idol, which allows fans to vot e by phone and text-messag e for their favorite performer, continues to snowball into a pop-culture monster with social and economic oomph.

Then there are the contestants themselves, all of whom enter as unknowns but often leave as stars. Former Idol faves Clay Aiken and Kelly Clarkson have seen their post-show albums go multiplatinum. Fantasia Barrino opened shows for rap's hottest act, Kanye West. Last year's winner, Carrie Underwood, sold 315,000 copies of her debut disc in its first week alone, second only to Madonna on the charts. Idol finalists also reap financial benefits from the U.S. concert tours that follow each season.

Last year's edition of Idol was the most-watched yet, with an average of 26.5-million viewers per show. But Idol really takes hold of fans after the credits roll. Such tie-in merchandise as DVDs, books, magazines, board games and video games have all sold well. Plus along with the face-to-face debate among families, friends and co-workers, Lisa Martin and millions like her head for the Internet, where they will spend hours on thousands of detail-oriented fan sites devoted to the show and its contestants.

""American Idol trains you like some weird seal," explains Martin, who spends "about an hour every day" at three separate fan sites devoted to her favorite Idol performers: Clarkson, Aiken and season four finalist Constantine Maroulis. "People get plugged into a contestant, and they want that contestant to be the most successful ever."

According to the Nielsen Television Index, last year's Tuesday and Wednesday Idol broadcasts were the second- and third-most-watched TV shows. (CBS crime drama CSI was No. 1 overall.) However, Idol - which was created by music mogul Simon Fuller, who launched the concept in Britain in 2001 with Pop Idol - was the No. 1 show with viewers ages 18 to 49 and teens, the two demographics advertisers covet most.

So this season, a 30-second ad spot on Idol will cost upward of $705,000, the most for a regularly scheduled prime-time series. The same ad time on CSI will cost $465,000.

There's never been anything quite like the Idol craze, says Stuart Fischoff, a 65-year-old media psychologist at California State University at Los Angeles. Fischoff says Idol is the result of "different forces converging to produce something that is relatively unprecedented" - forces that include our increasing love affair with celebrity worship, reality shows, television and the Internet.

Idol, Fischoff adds, also provides viewers a "sense of community" and the feeling of "the power to influence outcomes." Plus with the increasing presence of the media in our lives - media that routinely dole out negative news - Idol provides "fantasy" escape.

"They're like barnacles looking for a hull," Fischoff says about Idol fans. "They're looking for something to glom onto, give their lives meaning."

Fans might find that assessment harsh, but it's clear that they get mighty attached to the performers . Even the show's lesser-known contestants get plenty of love from viewers. For instance, first-season finalist Justin Guarini, who made a 2003 Idol-related movie with Clarkson and then watched his starpower plummet, still has several sites devoted to what he's doing these days (he's a jazz singer, it seems). Even William Hung, a sincerely terrible singer who took Ricky Martin's She Bangs to earachey new lows - and never made it past the initial cut, mind you - became a cult hero.

"The fanaticism for Idol seems to be very specific to the person rather than the music," says Andy Dehnart, the 28-year-old creator and editor of Reality Blurred, a DeLand-based Web site that discusses reality shows and gets more than 400,000 visitors a month. "Fans really see themselves as being responsible for a contestant's success. And if the contestant loses, that gives fans a reason to feel even more inflamed."

Dehnart, whose site gets a bump in traffic during Idol season, recently wrote a series of stories for MSNBC.com exploring the phenomenon of the show. "I received all this e-mail from fans of people who I didn't even know had fans," he says. "People like Scott Savol." (Savol was a season four contestant who made news when it was discovered that he was previously arrested on charges of domestic abuse.)

American Idol isn't all about love. It's a competition between performers - and devoted viewers.

"The fan war between Kelly fans and Clay fans has been going on for two years now," says Martin. "What's interesting is that various people get plugged into a certain contestant, and that passion will continue for years after the show is over."

Marti Goucher knows all about that. When the 52-year-old Portland, Ore., resident isn't slogging through the graveyard shift at a computer-component manufacturer, she's spending endless hours on the Internet chatting about former Idol star Aiken. Aiken didn't even win his competition, but his career has since overshadowed the winner, Ruben Studdard.

"My kids don't even know what I look like anymore!" laughs Goucher, whose screen name is Claymate Martigyrl. "I'm on the computer so much."

Goucher, who plans to watch the new season of Idol, belongs to sites that allow fans to weigh in on such topics as "Should Clay do a Christian album?" "How would you feel if Clay went country?" and "Are you addicted to Clay?"

The answer, she says, is yes.

Discovering Aiken on American Idol, Goucher says, was like being "stranded in the desert, and you're thirsty, and a drop of rain comes down and touches your tongue."

Sean Daly can be reached at sdaly@sptimes.com or 727 893-8467. His blog is at www.sptimes.com/blogs/popmusic

[Last modified January 15, 2006, 01:48:18]