American Idol 7: Was Paula’s Comment Conspiracy or Stupidity?

by David Bloomberg -- 04/30/2008
On Tuesday night, Paula Abdul – appearing to not quite know what was going on – critiqued a performance that hadn’t yet happened. This caused an explosion in the world of conspiracy-mongers. What are they trying to claim? Is it only the fringe? And what might be a more rational explanation?

The American Idol scandal machine has apparently gotten desperate. Somehow, some way, people are actually interpreting Paula’s screw-up Tuesday night as signs of some big conspiracy. Frankly, I am amazed that anybody could think it, and initially put it down to the usual conspiracy theorist/fringe group that thinks everything related to Idol is a conspiracy. Therefore, I was taken aback to find out that it is not just random blogs cooking up this nonsense, but an article on the Entertainment Weekly website and even CNN has apparently chimed in on this as well.

The gist of it is that when Paula screwed up and started talking about Jason’s two performances when everybody had only sung once so far, some people are taking this to mean producers pre-scripted her comments and she read them all. I find this explanation entirely ridiculous, as there is a much simpler and much more reasonable answer. Indeed, Michael Slezak even mentioned it in his EW website column – he just talked about it as if it were as likely as the producer-writing idea, which it most certainly is not.

That possibility is that Paula saw the performances during dress rehearsal and took notes, knowing that she would be pressed for time on the live show. Then she mistakenly read all her notes.

Oh! My! God! It’s a HUGE scandal.

Or not. It’s just Paula being airheaded. Is that really such a surprise? It shouldn’t be to anybody who has watched Idol over the years.

Let me first go back to addressing Mr. Slezak’s article. As I mentioned, he takes two possibilities and treats them as equal, even though one is 99.999% likely and the other is 0.001% likely. Why not just throw in the possibility that aliens abducted the real Paula and replaced her with a clone who knows the future? Because, really, I don’t see how anybody can rationally believe that producers are scripting Paula’s critiques.

Foxes On Idol Associate Editor Sandy Lamparello mentioned something about this to me today, noting, “Does ANYONE think Paula would be able to follow pre-scripted comments so successfully for seven years up until now? Do they script the ‘colors’ comments too? Knowing her loopiness, if they did indeed try to pre-script her critiques, then she would have messed up LOOOOOOOOONG before now.” Sandy hit it on the head. This is Paula we’re talking about here – she actually tried to hire a professional writer the first season to help her hit Simon with zingers and she still failed. Does anybody think she could use somebody else’s pre-scripted comments? And, I should note, do it without looking down at the paper? Not a chance.

Instead, there is a much more likely. We know Paula sometimes listens to the rehearsals – she's commented on that before. We know the judges had to take notes because of the rushed nature of this week's episode. We know Paula can be a total airhead. It's not terribly odd to me that all these things combined to get what we saw Tuesday night. Paula got confused and apparently wasn't paying attention. For Paula, is that so surprising? Not particularly.

This week, in particular, because of the rushed nature, the producers might have purposely had the judges present at rehearsals so they could prepare their thoughts and not go off on random tangents like Paula often does. Little did they know that by trying to prevent disaster, they sparked something that people have blown up into one. My suspicion is that they had a couple extra minutes, so a producer/director told Ryan to get some judges’ comments in the middle of the show instead of waiting until later. Even the contestants looked confused -- Brooke was trying to get Syesha to take her proper spot in the lineup on the stage, for example.

Which brings up another point. If the producers had scripted Paula’s comments, wouldn’t they have done a better job? I mean, if everything is set up ahead of time like that, there wouldn’t have been any ad libbing going on – too risky. And if it had been planned to get the comments midway through, then the supposedly pre-scripted comments would have been written separately.

Maybe some people are upset because Paula was using notes from the rehearsal. OK, at least there is a legitimate basis for that. But the fact of the matter is that Paula actually gave a good critique of what Jason eventually did. Yes, there have been times when a performer did better or worse than their rehearsal performance – and Paula has actually mentioned such occurrences. There is no reason to believe Paula wouldn’t have changed her tune this time if somehow Jason had surprised her with a great performance. But he didn’t. Paula was right.

Here’s the thing – if people want to believe that American Idol is predetermined and scripted, they will use any excuse to support the conspiracy theory. Michael went too soon, so Idol is obviously scripted. Carly went too soon, so Idol is predetermined. Kristy Lee stayed too long, obviously for ratings. Etc. So even a stupid little mistake like this becomes fodder for the Idol scandal machine (remember the ridiculous Ramiele photos that were supposedly risqué but were really just stupid?). I’m truly sorry to see that it’s not just the fringe shouting about this one, but even otherwise normally respectable entertainment and news outlets.

There is a saying that is apparently called Hanlon’s Razor. It has a number of variants, but the one listed at the top of Wikipedia is this: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” I would substitute in the word “conspiracy” for “malice” and you have your answer to this situation. It’s not a conspiracy. Nobody is pre-writing Paula’s comments except for Paula herself. And we already know she can be out in loopy la-la land.

Everybody can calm down. Let the scandalmongers try to make their headlines using Idol. The rest of us will stay rational, thank you very much.