Idol? Homicidal!
We’re a happy family, we’re a happy family…
Confession: I watch American Idol. And have for over a decade. I missed Kelly Clarkson and Ruben Studdard and Fantasia and Carrie Underwood years one through four but Sweet T. and I were watching when Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul, Randy Jackson and America crowned Taylor Hicks the winner in 2006.
(Feel free to unsubscribe to NIHILISTIC or unfriend me on social media or whatever allows you to keep your punk rock purity intact.)
When you’re married, living in sin, coupled, throupled, Big Love’d Mormon-style or merely roommates, it’s exceedingly difficult to find programs on which everyone agrees. The roadside is littered with the carcasses of TV shows Sweet T. and I tried and abandoned because one of us was not feeling it. Our standing agreement - “I can watch this myself...” is rarely invoked but we have amassed “alone” shows in addition to the handful we watch together. American Idol is the longest-running and we’ve hung in through the entire Fox era and into the current everything-is-vertically-integrated (movies, music, theme parks) Disney run.
Maybe you and yours regularly gather around the flatscreen for Survivor or The Amazing Race or Jeopardy or sportsball. I won’t judge, especially not when we also imbibe from the stupid cup filled to the brim with Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and Secret Lives of Mormon Wives (Jeebus, if you’re real, please bring us a Real Housewives of Scientology). We began down that rabbit hole with Real Housewives of New Jersey until, after one particularly dumb episode, I turned to Sweet T. and said “Why are we spending so much time watching awful people do shitty things?” We were good for along time, getting our Jersey box via Jersey Shore: Family Vacation but somehow we descended back into the Housewives hell via John Oliver’s recent remarks to Stephen Colbert. Yes, it was fun to watch the whole Jen Shah arc but these shows become repetitive, especially “Secret Lives,” with its endless “I’m not talking to her because she did XYZ!” but “Jesus reminds us to forgive others.” except “She had a sex dream about my husband!” and, oh yes, “We’re using TikTok to smash the patriarchy!”
Sometimes... sometimes I can feel my brains leaking out my ears.
American Idol, as reality TV goes, is a wholly different beast, especially since Disney revived the franchise in 2018. Experts at telling a story, the House of the Mouse leans hard on the human interest angle. You’re meant to get caught up in the will-they-or-won’t-they-triumph drama after seeing a contestant’s humble origins and hardscrabble back stories, presented in short interstitials replete with one-horse town back-home visuals (there’s always a few boarded-up stores on main street), heartstring-tugging music and familial pride (some variation on “I knew since she was little she was destined for stardom and only wish her daddy hadn’t been in that thresher accident and could see this.” and “I’m doing this for my kids, so they can have a better life than I do.” and “I was raised by my mee-maw because my father killed my mother and now he’s in jail.” and “We bought him his first guitar and told him he could be anything he wanted to be!”).
I noticed years ago while watching any tender family moment I soon begin to squirm with hot confusion, then invariably fill with a steely resentment. Ice-water runs through my veins, my cheeks flush with bitterness and I ask myself “Who the fuck are these parents who’ll do anything for their kids?!” and “Who are these brothers and sisters who care for each other?!” and “Why am I laughing and full of murderous rage?!”
It’s as if these sincere, loving family members exist on a whole other planet where siblings don’t try to murder each other and parents aren’t neglectful or abusive. Just once I long to hear an American Idol contestant say something like “I couldn’t WAIT to get out of that podunk town and away from my whole hateful, useless family!” Maybe someone has and it never made it to air.
Times like these I have to come to terms with the fact I’m the fucked up one. My experience of family was so damaged I ended up in the Nihilistics, banging out ditties about death and murder and black sheep. But I often wonder how life would’ve turned out if I was a loved, wanted, happy, content, confident child, AKA the opposite of my reality. (No one in my diminishing family necessarily agrees with this assessment but I’ll to wait to read their versions in their Substack newsletters to know definitively.)
But then we wouldn’t be here, would we?