American Idol has been getting a lot of heat on this forum recently. But I believe that we are missing an important aspect of it. The general attitude around here is that the people who audition come in, do awful, and get plastered by Simon. This is not the case.
A couple hundred people out of tens of thousands who audition make it to Hollywood. That's less than one percent. On the other hand, I'd estimate that at least one in five of the auditioners shown on the show make it in. About twenty percent. So, I don't think that the object of the show is to humiliate people on national television. If it was, then they'd be perfectly justified in making almost *all* of the auditions shown be the ones that didn't make it.

Another thing I'd like to point out is that the show shows the two extremes of the auditions: the good (ones who made it in and some who almost made it in) and the bad (the ones that got plastered by Simon), because the extremes are the most interesting parts, and that's what gets viewers. I believe that the vast majority of auditions lie somewhere in between - it would be like "Yes, that's nice; I like it...hmmm, but...well, I don't think it's quite good enought for Hollywood." How boring is that? Can you imagine audition after audition of mediocre singing followed by mediocre judging? Who would want to watch a show like that? So, they show the two extremes instead. And the lower extreme (the bad side) is often bad enough to warrant being plastered by Simon. Now, I'm not saying that Simon never goes overboard, and he *is* harsher than the other two judges, but the quotes mentioned in this thread are some of his harshest. It's only natural that we remember the worst; often, it's really just "Thank you; that was horrible." Okay, that still sounds rather harsh, but still keep in mind that these comments are reserved for perhaps the bottom ten or twenty percent of the auditioners. For the bottom ten or twenty percent of auditions, then perhaps a harsh critique is called for.

kniv"I like that show"etsil