June 21, 2006 marked the premiere of America's Got Talent, which makes this televised talent competition well on the way to having been on the air for two decades. And I, one of the nation's leading experts on the history of variety entertainment, have never watched more than a few minutes of it.
Can't stand it.
I can't stand American Idol either, and have given that one even less of my time. The few occasions I've tuned in to AGT have been when friends have been contestants. The most recent of these was just a couple of days ago. Nearly everyone I know who's gone on the program has had negative things to say about their experience. But that's not why I don't like the show. If it were a program that I liked, and my friends had had negative experiences, that would be a dilemma rather than an outright dismissal. The reason I detest both Idol and Got Talent, both created by Simon Cowell, is that they strike me as Fascist spectacles.
Some people go around saying "Don't dilute that term through over-use!" or "It's unfair to equate such and such with Fascism!" But Fascism always starts with a seed. And once it starts growing, the harder it is to kill. Yes, KILL. You want it to live? We've seen it before. "What on earth can I be talking about?", you wonder. "This is entertainment!" It has to do with the spirit of the thing. It's not that I'm against competition. One of my favorite shows on television is The Amazing Race, which I only discovered recently, during the pandemic. People knock themselves out to win on that show, they make great sacrifices, they push themselves to the limit, they step outside their comfort zone, they work through pain and fear, discomfort and inconvenience. They also help one another. And many among the competitors are underdogs or eccentrics of one kind or another, which makes it both interesting and emotionally engaging. (The most recent season had less of that, and if that proves to be a trend, the show will lose me).
In a similar vein, what I have always cherished about vaudeville are the same things one values (in the abstract, as an ideal) about America, the twin pillars of Individualism and Democracy. Strange and quirky characters throve in vaudeville. Personalities were prized easily as much as chops. And there was a certain generosity about it, a connection among audiences and those who aspired to please them. I riffed a little in No Applause, about the recurrence a century and more ago of impresarios and performers dedicating their enterprises to The People. Laying this happy ceremony at the feet of The People. And similarly, and more relevantly, the vaudeville amateur night was about about bestowing an opportunity on the people. Giving everyone a chance to shine. Even (and this is my point) if they're lousy.
The way things have evolved in show business is probably logical, of course. The population of America has increased five fold since vaudeville started. At the same time, technology has created a world where jobs in show business have evaporated by a couple of orders of magnitude. Thus it is logical for it to be much more competitive to attain the handful of available jobs. I'm sure I'm in the minority, but frankly I find the modern superhuman Triple Threats to be charmless performance robots. And this is what I mean by Fascism. Who does America love anymore for themselves? As opposed to their skills, and how badly they whupped someone's ass? Basically, this country, once theoretically a beacon of Democracy and Opportunity, has become a place where the primary virtues are Strength, Beauty, and Wealth. I call that grooming for Fascism.
So it's not that I don't love the concept of a performance competition. But I refer the older tradition, the Major Bowes and Ted Mack idea. I especially love it at the local level. In my youth it was a show called Community Auditions out of WBZ-TV in Boston. And in more recent times, similar shows on public access television, which I had the honor of working in, both as a performer and as a producer. Are plenty of the performers terrible? Of course! But you love them for it. Humanity on parade! And it makes the rise of the victor all the more spectacular.
Much more than watching the current AGT, I would like to watch the initial auditions, ALL the auditions, in their entirety, not whittled down to clip sequences. That would be a show I could sink my teeth into. And then you keep watching as it gets winnowed down. And THEN maybe, only then I might be interested in AGT as it presently constituted. But maybe not. Because I love the Jimmy Durantes and Sophie Tuckers and Bert Lahrs of this world. And, you know? They didn't sing like machines. I'm not the slightest bit interested in, or impressed by, technical prowess for its own sake. This is not athletics. It's art. Or ought to be.
Which brings us to the aesthetics of the show. Looks like the Nuremberg Rallies to me. I've always hated that industrial look that seems to be universal now. I'm not sure when it started, maybe the '90s. Where there's no set dressing or color, just sort of these huge lighting instruments and grids and catwalks all over the place. I signed on to watch performers, not lamps. Everything is, like, black or grey. And, sure, light is coming through gels so it's blue or red or whatever and coming through dry ice from a machine, but is that supposed to be cheery? Everything looks a vampire movie or a WWE cage match. It looks cold and ugly and hostile to me. Who's the designer, Albert Speer? Me for the small and intimate TV studio, as they continue to employ for the late night shows, with a warm and welcoming backdrop, and an audience that a performance can truly communicate with, instead of 3,000 people at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, separated from the entertainers by a wall of unforgiving judges, and then whatever distance lies beyond.
Am I saying the judges and producers of the shows are literal "Sieg Heil" Fascists? Of course not? "Some, I assume, are good people", haha! But as metaphor, a boilerplate, a spectacle? It's Triumph of the Will with microphones.
For more on show biz history, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcoming Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.
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