Maybe, maybe not. Too soon to tell. But I do think the show faces an existential crisis.

I dropped out of watching the show after American Idol Gives Back because it occurred to me at the time that the mega-special was an enormous, possibly fatal, betrayal of the audience, on two grounds. The first is that the American Idol franchise is half built on the art of the tease as they draw out their results shows once a week.

If you’re good at it, you can tease the audience for forever. But the only Cardinal Rule of the Tease is that you absolutely, positively must deliver the payoff. During Idol Gives Back, the producers teased the audience for two excruciating hours, pretending that they were going to send someone home. And then, at the final moment, went back on their word. That’s very, very bad. It breaks your bargain with the audience and makes them much less forgiving. I don’t know if you can ever re-establish that trust once it’s gone.

The other betrayal of “Idol Gives Back” was the show’s honesty. A big part of the appeal of American Idol is that Simon is unscripted and, if not heartless, then at least clinical enough not to pull his punches because of sentimentality or politeness. That gives the show its tiny frisson of danger. The Idol Gives Back show gave us a neutered, Hallmark-ready Simon. Which is death.

I don’t think audiences want to believe that Simon can be as pre-packaged and fake as everyone else on television because it introduces the possibility that even his critical schtick is an act. And the minute audiences believe that Simon is playing a part is the minute Idol starts to wane.

It’s completely possible that I’m overstating things, but the numbers on Idol post-Gives Back must be giving Fox a fright–it’s down and now tied with the much-diminished House.

Maybe Idol will make a comeback and this is nothing more than a blip, but I suspect that the Gives Back show may have been the night when Idol began its gradual eclipse from the culture.

Hugh lovingly–and rightly–defends James Lileks here. But in the course of his defense he makes a large mistake. He asks,

If, as I hope happens, the Strib wakes up and keeps Lileks as its online anchor and Jim Boyd disappears into well-deserved obscurity, what will that tell us about the talents of the two?

Umm, it will tell us absolutely nothing. Just as if, Lileks falls into obscurity and Jim Boyd goes on to run the New York Times, that, too, will tell us nothing about their talents. We measure talent by the work it produces, not the rewards it reaps. Need we recite a long, long, long list of spectacularly untalented hacks who have seen their careers as an endless buffet of prizes and payouts? Need we recall the depressingly long list of superb talents who go through life toiling in the shadows of said hacks? Tina Brown is much more conventionaly “successful” than, say, Ramesh Ponnuru. Katie Couric is much more “successful” than, say, Chris Wallace. Cynthia Tucker is more “successful” than Matt Labash. Who’s the bigger talent? We could go on and on and on with this list and it’s not just a question of left-right media bias.

Lileks is a treasure and he deserves a great future. But the world is frequently an unfair place.

Update: I don’t know why this chafes me so. I think it’s because there’s a certain strain of free-market conservatism which insists that the only values are market values and that whatever a market declares is the Eternal Truth. These are the loud people who tell you that CEO X, who has driven his company into the ground, must have been worth $140 million a year, because if he wasn’t, nobody would have been willing to pay him the money. I hate these people.

I’m as much for the free market as the next guy, I suppose. But market failures are real and pervasive and much, much more common than most conservatives would like to acknowledge. Sometimes they work themselves out over time, sometimes they don’t. In any event, I’m happy to live my consumerist life by the free market, but we should never allow it to dictate to us moral truths.

And that’s why we don’t write about politics here.

Our homeys at Pajiba have their list of the Top 10 Celebrities They’d Like to Bang, which is as edifying as it sounds. Dustin Rowles gives us this bit of awesomeness:

6. Maggie Gyllenhaal — Gyllenhaal happened to be number two on my list, which Ms. Pajiba-hyphenate suggested looked like a list of women who would work in a book store if they weren’t celebrities.

And then Pajiba points us to this excellent exploration of the recent history of digitally-enhanced breasts on movie posters. Special Matus Alert: Exhibit A is Hermione Granger.

I’m just saying that if you were to find yourself at work, trying desperately to avoid writing, you could do worse as a distraction than sifting through the Alexandra DuPont archives. DuPont is what people pretend Pauline Kael was. Only smarter. And funnier.

Favorite tidbits include:

From a review of The Mummy:

The plot is straight out of an old Hollywood serial: A ragtag bunch of adventurers in 1930s Egypt accidentally unleash an undead, nigh-invulnerable, utterly evil Egyptian priest. Then they spend the rest of the movie trying to kill him.

And there’s this, from a review of the first X-Men:

THINGS I LIKED ABOUT “X-MEN”: . . .

The interplay between Logan, Cyclops (James Mardsen) and Jean Grey (Famke Janssen). A romantic triangle, just like in the comics — only without the I-speak-in-pseudo-erudite-paragraphs-even-as-I’m-flying-across-the-room-to-hit-you stylings of writer Chris Clairemont.

(Parenthetical remark w/r/t geek purists and C. Clairemont defenders: I’ll try to resist a profound urge to swing a Fungo bat at anyone who tells me that Magneto’s mutant-conversion-machine in this movie is dumber than anything in the comics. I read me some “Classic X-Men” comics in preparation for this film, and in one of them, our heroes found themselves aided by leprechauns. That’s right, leprechauns.)

That’s right: THAT JUST HAPPENED.

This is rich. Here’s George Lucas in an exchange with Roger Friedman on the merits of Spider-Man 3:

Lucas told me he has seen all the summer movies since his company, Industrial Light and Magic, does most of the special effects. The only one they didn’t work on was “Spider-Man 3.” What did he think of it?

“It’s silly. It’s a silly movie,” he said. “There just isn’t much there. Once you take it all apart, there’s not much story, is there?”

Well, it’s not “Star Wars.”

“People thought ‘Star Wars’ was silly, too,” he added, with a wink. “But it wasn’t.”

This from the stern intellect which gave us Ewoks, Jar-Jar, and a Darth Vader acting like Frankenstein.

Be that as it may, pace Anthony Lane and John Podhoretz, I kind of liked Spider-Man 3. The movie had all sorts of problems both in the writing and editing and not-tiny parts of it were ridiculous. Still, as a meditation on forgiveness, it worked for me and I particularly enjoyed the moments when Raimi let the movie be light-hearted–Bruce Campbell’s scene, the bad-boy Parker montage, everything with Emil Skoda’s J. Jonah Jameson. It was better than the over-praised first Spider-Man, but nowhere as perfect as the second film, which might be the best super-hero movie ever made. (The other contenders being, obviously, Batman, X-Men 2, and The Incredibles.)

But of all the problems with Spider-Man 3, the one that bugged me most–do you still have to have a spoiler alert on a movie that’s made over $160M? if so SPOILER–was when Harry Osborn’s butler announces that, like Bruce Wayne’s Alfred, he was party to all of the Green Goblin’s doings and that he himself could testify (how, exactly?) that Osborn Sr. died by his own hand. Only with this revelation does young Harry decide to come to Parker’s aid in rescuing Mary Jane.

It’s a preposterous deus ex machina, but what’s maddening about it is that there’s a simple and elegant way to write around it: Peter Parker comes and asks Harry’s help in rescuing M.J., but, still blaming Parker for his father’s death, Harry refuses. On further reflection of his fondness for M.J., he relents and follows Parker to the fight, surprising him by coming to his aid. Instinctually, he takes a mortal blow aimed for Parker and then, on his deathbed, he forgives Peter even though he still thinks Peter killed his father. Only because of this example is Peter Parker then able to forgive Flint Marko for the murder of Uncle Ben.

Is it just me, or does this solve all sorts of narrative and motivational problems without altering the story in any structural way? Perhaps they should have kept Michael Chabon, who wrote parts of Spider-Man 2 on board for the third installment.

Alternatively, they could have classed the project up by throwing in a ’50s-style robot diner.

Commenting on the NBA playoffs:

Twenty years ago, the fabled Pistons’ “Bad Boys” squads were the terror of the NBA. These days, Bill Laimbeer coaches a women’s basketball team, Dennis Rodman is an international embarrassment, John Salley’s on a lousy sports talk show that used to star Tom Arnold, and Isiah Thomas is running the Knicks into the ground. Sort of makes you wonder how Chauncey Billups is going to end up.

Precious blogging time was taken up today composing this item for Mike Goldfarb’s WWS on an Iranian endorsement of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.

Just wondering: If you’re George Lucas and you hate the evil, conservative, Bible-thumping Republicans, what do you think when you find out that an Iranian regime, which executes homosexuals and brutally represses women, (to say nothing of their terrorist activities) thinks you’re a genius? Maybe you don’t switch sides, but do you maybe, just for a second, wonder if you’re on the right side of history?

Nah, probably not. A man who defends Jar-Jar Binks to the bitter end isn’t going to be spooked by being on the same side as the Islamofascist mullahs.

Where’s Father Neuhaus when you need him?