Our apologies for the delay, I’ve had some time issues. Here it is Part 3 a little later than I promised, but here it is.

Whatever people think of Season Eight, there’s no doubt that it will be an important season in the annals of Idol history. As my friends at What Not to Sing put it so bluntly several weeks ago, we’re at the beginning of a new Idol epoch.

It’s worth noting, though, that no new Idol era emerges completely new and unformed. We can tell what the characteristics of the new epoch will be by looking at what trends took place this past season – and the finale was particularly revealing in that aspect. There are two big trends that will influence the Third Epoch – and Adam and Kris each represent one.

Adam Lambert: The 40% Contestant

Love him or hate him, there’s no doubt that Adam Lambert did very well this year.  No doubt, would-be Season Nine contestants will be paying attention and trying to figure out what made him so successful.

However, not all of his success had to do him or 19E. Just as recently as one or two years ago, Adam would not have gotten anywhere near the finale – whatever the quality of the opposition. He did so partially because the Idol voting fanbase was ready – and willing – to accept someone like him.

As Idol has changed over the years, so has its audience. At the start, the audience was most accepting of the traditional power singers. Later on, as the audience matured, so did the music – more willing to accept singers who went beyond just singing to being mature, well-rounded musicians.

However, there was still some… restraint involved. Second Epoch contestants did their best to show their musical identity, sure, but they always did so with an eye towards expanding their fanbase. They tried to appeal to their fanbases, but they did so with an eye towards winning others over. The all-important crossover potential was part and parcel of the game.

However… the Idol fanbase has changed. Whereas before, you had no choice but to try to broaden your appeal because no genre, by itself, was enough to win, now with a good mixture of talent it’s quite possible. If you sing well, period, you have a decent chance of attracting a fanbase.

Adam Lambert is the perfect example of a Third Epoch contestant. He largely “did his own thing” all season. By the time of Ring of Fire and Mad World, the majority of the voting Idol population had made up its mind. They were either voting like mad, or disinclined to waste their time doing so. Neither did he really change or improve much as the season went.

Why is this possible? I can only guess, but my speculation is that the increased producer manipulation (more on that later) has begun to drive off casual voters. These are the same voters that can be won over as the season goes on – and can promote an unknown at the start like Kris Allen to the top spot. Certainly, the rating numbers – flat or down – suggest something like this is happening.

How does this square with the increased vote totals, then? Our guess is that while the number of casual voters may be down, the number of power voters has gone up. Enough to offset the lost votes – and, perhaps, much more. Remember, the vote totals for the finale were high, but the ratings were not.

Overall, this is a trend that favors more genre-specific, somewhat niche-based singers like Adam. Power voters – particularly those of the online Idolsphere – revel in picking those kind of singers the broader American public may not cotton to as easily. In addition, a larger proportion of power voters – despite their (still) small numbers relative to the Idol voting population affords a greater margin of error than in other years.

It’s actually something of a logical conclusion from the Second Epoch, and is similarly mirrored by many artists. A popular album, chock-full of crossover-friendly music, is frequently followed by a less mainstream entry. Just to cite an example from Idol alumni, Kelly Clarkson followed Breakaway with My December. In any case, artistically, we could be in for some interesting few years – if we’re allowed to have it by 19E.

Kris Allen: The Rise of the Idolsphere

A subtext of the Second Idol Epoch has been the increasing amounts of producer manipulation. Sure, favorites got kindly judged in earlier seasons, and they did get increased amounts of airtime, but over the years it’s gotten worse and worse.

The seminal event in that taking place was Taylor Hicks’s victory in Season Five. He won despite being disliked by TPTB – and his perceived commercial failure didn’t help things either. (Of course, to be fair, any winner right after Carrie Underwood would have had a tough time.) They decided: no mas, no mas, we are in charge now.

However, what’s noteworthy is how poorly the manipulation has worked, historically. True, Jordin won in Season Six – but Blake Lewis got further than most people thought, and Sanjaya turned much of the season into a punchline. Neither could have been a desired outcome.

Memorably, last year America embraced David Cook to such a degree that the judges really had no choice but to acknowledge his abilities. Even then, they tried to throw him under the bus in the finale – turning a close fight into a 12-million vote blowout, but not in the direction 19E probably had in mind.

Eventually, the Idol audience was bound to react. Violently. The amount of manipulation was becoming too much – and react they did in 2009. The Idol audience really came into its own. The furor over Joanna Pacitti’s background led to her exclusion – a warning shot across the bow of the 19E ship, but they were too stupid to notice.

The resulting fiasco was already documented in Part 2 of my post-mortem. What’s more important, though, is what it means for the future.

Unlike the first trend – which we can predict with some certainty – the second is much less predictable. It depends on three groups – only two of which have tipped their hand, while the third remains to be a big wildcard.

One group is the contestants themselves. Their response to 19E manipulation has been relatively simple: get the word out before 19E shuts them up. In addition, fansites – supported by the families and friends of the contestants themselves – are assuming a greater role than ever before. They’re also showing up earlier – if anything, they’re already in place even before any singing “in anger” is in place. With, as I posited earlier, power voters becoming more prominent, this is as logical a respone to the blatant pimping we’ve all seen recently. (Aside, of course, from singing well.)

The second group is the broader Idolsphere. Their response, too, is obvious. As I said last week, they’re in open revolt. Aside from the consequences for the show’s survival itself – more on that later – the consequences for the competition itself will be clear. The Idolsphere is looking at everything the producers do right now with a skeptical eye – and if there is anything they don’t like, they make it known. Violently.

The wildcard is… the producers. There are two ways to react: one would be to continue the status quo – which would have terrible consequences. The cold war could become the TV equivalent of a “hot” war – something that could kill Idol as a franchise, permanently. (This was something that I talked about last week, in Part 2 of our Post-Mortem.)

Let me reiterate that: if the producers decide wrongly, Idol will be dead. Kaput. Audience participation is indispensable to the success of Idol – and if the producers decide to keep devaluing it, they will leave.

Lest that people think this is a straight reaction to producer manipulation, it isn’t. Indeed, with three parties involved it’s not easy to say what the specifics are – particularly when what the producers do is so uncertain. I said, for example, that the manipulation would increase  but no one had any idea it would be as bad as this year.

However, here’s a possible scenario which is likely. Let’s say that producer manipulation increases – or, even, that it’s believed to be likely. If you’re a contestant who wants to win, what’s your response? You start going online, building a fanbase earlier, getting the power voters on your side. However, this might have the perverse side effect of alienating casual voters – or, more importantly, viewers.

As I said above, the tastes of power voters don’t always jive neatly with the Idol voting bloc at large. Right now, casual voters are still sufficiently numerous that power voters can’t overwhelm them at the finale. – but casual viewers might start to tune out. Something like that may well have happened already this year. The combination of niche singers, power-voter dominated results, and manipulation might well stick a fork in Idol.

There really is only one alternative that can work – and Kris Allen might well have been the slap in the face Idol producers needed. Months of pimping, couldn’t push Adam Lambert to victory – and it’s not as if he was a slouch vocally either. It was as clear a wake-up call about the failure of voter manipulation – and only complete and utter idiots will miss it.

That alternative is simple: run a fair competition. Cut down on the pimp pieces, stop the judges’s tendency for verbal diarrhea, keep the production values the same. No more groups of Cannon Fodder, no more wildcard rounds full of the Pimped and Rejected. (If you have to keep the groups, our suggestion: draw them randomly, lottery-style; post the video on Youtube.)

This is going to be what determines the second feature of the Third Epoch. If the producers ease up on the manipulation, then with exceptionally talented and diverse contestants with an active fanbase (plenty of power voters, but balanced with casual viewers) could combine to produce seasons that will be well remembered – and remembered well. That hasn’t happened in a while.

On the other hand – if the manipulation stays the same or gets worse – then the Third Epoch will be dominated by the kind of internal warfare that we all saw this past year. The primary factor will no longer be if you can sing well – the question becomes are you favored by TPTB – or, if you’re not, can you make being ignored work for you, like Kris did.

The Third Idol Epoch is going to be interesting… and it’s either going to work spectacularly well, or end up being the last. Choose wisely, 19E.

For such a disappointing season, the post-finale time is proving to have a lot of… entertainment value. Of course, it’s the same kind of entertainment a trainwreck provides, so your mileage may vary.

An awful lot of ink and bandwidth has been spent discussing just how Kris won over the “favorite” Adam. I’ll be blunt: an awful lot of it is absurd nonsense.

The nonsense generally comes in two flavors. The first one is this whole idea that the only reason that Kris won was due to… homophobia. Milder versions of this will not say it’s homophobia, but blame it on the broader “Culture Wars” idea.

Let me be blunt about this. Suggesting that Adam lost due to homophobia is the most ridiculous idea I have ever heard. It tells a lot more about those who would say such a stupid thing. It tells the rest of us decent folk that they cannot imagine a situation where others can be wrong for reasons other than hatred and groupthink. In short, they are some sort of Cultural Elite who decide What Is Right And Proper. That, in turn, is an utterly despicable idea.

Those who blame Adam’s loss on the Culture Wars may not be that wrong-headed, but it’s a revealing moment as well. Being truly objective in news reporting is hard, but people should at least try. The people blaming the loss on the “Culture Wars” know, deep-down, they got blind-sided. The part of America they never paid real attention to, as it turned out, was pretty damn big.  Blaming the loss on the “Culture Wars” betrays either the intellectual blinders too many people have, or the laziness that, in effect, made them to be little more than 19E stooges.

Adam Lambert didn’t lose much, if anything, this past Wednesday. One of the big losers was the big media, who all bought into the hype and ignored all evidence to the contrary. At the very least, people who pay attention will have… doubts. At worst, they’ll be regarded as complete and utter fools who don’t know what they’re talking about.

The other big loser was… the Idol producers. Yes, they may have found themselves two legitimate top-quality artists who will make them millions, but it came at an extreme cost: their credibility.

I’m not going to recap the whole tortured season here. You can read what I’ve written before for that, or the brilliant season review our friends at What Not to Sing put out here. Suffice to say that Season Eight saw unprecedented levels of producer manipulation – yet, in the end, all that power utterly, and completely, failed.

All that manipulation did was antagonize the long-suffering Idol fans. As a rule, we already aren’t predisposed to like 19E and Fox, based entirely on past behavior. Right now, though, Bernie Madoff could run Idol from his jail cell and be better trusted than the current crop.

In fact, you can argue that the manipulation made the show significantly worse – not just in angering fans, but making the singing significantly worse. Consider what was pointed out to me by my friends at WNTS: the bottom half of the finalists – Lil, Scott, Megan, Michael, Alexis, Jasmine, and Jorge – had a total of 23 performances in the finals.  How many scored over 50? Two. One from Lil, another from Alexis. That’s it.

What that means is that the top thirteen – with the exception of Allison and Kris, the Accidental Finalists – had largely turned out to be busts. Consider, too, that there was a lot of good talent left in the group round. The end result was a top 13 that was anything but the best singers of Season Eight – and everyone knew it.

Then came two months of the typical overpraise of the pimped. Adam was a fine singer, true, but the judges made excuses for those that they did like. *ahem*Danny*ahem*

Meanwhile, the Accidental Finalists were singing pretty well. Despite the lack of pimpage, they stayed in. And they got their own fanbases. They tried to run over Kris in the top four, and utterly failed.

In the end, the manipulation not only made the show considerably worse, it failed, completely. Kris won, and by all accounts the hype machine that was Adam Lambert got flatenned. Not only that, when the iTunes numbers came out, it turned out that Kris was winning there too. Things were not as the producers had said they were.

Can anyone really believe anything they say now? As it stands, if you appended a not to anything 19E and Fox say, it’d be closer to the truth. Not only that, all the manipulation is antagonizing the fanbase.

There are shows that have loyal fanbases that worship the ground their creators and producers walk on. What’s rare, however, is a show with the polar opposite. Idol fans may love the show, but the producers? No. Just no.

How long until the fans take out their anger at the producers on the show itself? Maybe we’re already seeing that. The ratings are already off from last year. No show can survive for long without angry and disaffected fans – who eventually stop being fans. Yet that is exactly what Idol’s PTB are in the process of doing.

Indeed, for acts that were all their doing, the biggest losers of the season were the producers. Some people are wondering if this is the year Idol jumped the shark. It may well be worse. This may be the year the golden goose started dying.

Later this week: Our Season Post-Mortem, Part 3: Where We Go From Here.

Back in February, I thought that Kris Allen had been a little lucky to win a semifinal slot outright due to the weakness of Group 2 (groupmates Allison Iraheta and Adam Lambert excluded). I also said then:

If Allen is a smart guy, he should take this golden opportunity and run with it. If there’s anyone who can take the underdog-who-got-much-better role this year, Allen appears to be it.

To say that Kris lived up to my early prediction is a giant understatement. He improved massively from the quiet, almost-tentative fellow early on to the incredibly confident, gutsy fellow who could take on contemporary songs like Heartless and put his own spin on it.

One would have thought that Adam, who has impressive vocal talents of his own, would have been a prohibitive favorite. After all, all the hype – from the usual media sources, even from some segments of the Idolsphere – had been all but crowned and hailed as The Next Big Thing.

Now, how could someone called that lose? It should have been obvious to everyone from Day One: no matter how good Adam was at doing what he does, that could only appeal to so many people. That’s true of any contestant, but that was more true of Adam than any contestant in the finale except Blake Lewis.

Our full analysis of the results – and the season – will have to wait until the weekend. However, here’s two big points that need to be pointed out from all the media coverage:

1. This was not some giant “shock” as I’ve seen the headlines proclaim. Not at all. A lot of people bought into the Lambert hype – and their excuse for not realizing that is to call the results a surprise. It wasn’t, as I explained yesterday already.
2. Two straight seasons have had strong manipulation by TPTB in an attempt to get the outcome they wanted. Both times America reacted poorly. If insanity is defined as doing the same thing and expecting different results, 19E is well on the way to that.

One more thing. Last year the gap between the two Davids, vote-wise, was announced – about 12 million votes. Now, this year, they announced the vote total, but not the margin (unless I missed it somewhere). I wonder why…