Since the TV show "America's Got Talent" wrapped up last week, and because it has somehow managed to be a topic in 0.8% of the pieces on this site, I figured that since the outcome was so silly, I'd be remiss if I didn't comment on it.
Now, the outcome is often unfortunate, but when it gets to the point of being so silly as to make the viewer suspect something more sinister, well, you have to get into it a bit deeper.
"AGT", the show, features otherwise ordinary people (I don't say "Americans" because they're quite commonly not; even 75% of the judges are immigrants) performing for a minute or two, going through rounds judged by four celebrities, and finally a live Semifinals and Finals purported to be decided by the "voters" in America, so they say.
Last Tuesday was the live Finals, with a live, interminable two-hour results show on Wednesday. At the end of the interminable results show, they announced that the winner was Grace VanderWaal, a 12-year-old girl from outside New York City, whose "talent" was singing original songs while playing the ukulele. "Singing" would be a bit of a stretch, her voice is the sort of on-pitch whisper characteristic of middle-school chorus sopranos lacking the confidence to sing out.
For her win, she received $1 million and a "live show in Las Vegas", which is a one-time event that can be assumed to be the relative end of her career, at least until she grows up enough to where her voice matures into something that someone would actually pay to listen to. I mean, here is her Finals performance starting at about the 1:30 mark. She has little or nothing in the way of presentation skills, a very weak 12-year-old's voice, and the words are not understandable too much of the time.
But please listen to the part afterward, where the judges comment on her performance. Tell me, please, what performance they were listening to, because it wasn't what the TV audience was hearing. In fact, rewind back to where they start talking, and imagine that Grace was, say, the daughter of an NBC executive, the judges were instructed accordingly, and it was all rigged so that she would win. Tell me where the comments would be any different. Aside -- both parents are in marketing, the father with LG Electronics, the mother independent, according to LinkedIn.
Am I wrong? Take a listen to this performance from the Finals. It was by Laura Bretan, who just turned 14, and is also too young to be doing anything but mastering her skills, but who is so sufficiently, amazingly advanced in that process to where her God-given performance already brings tears. Then tell me, after looking at and listening to both clips, where the "talent" resides. And after watching and listening to both sets of judges' comments, tell me who they wanted to win, and in whose winning they had a vested interest.
And ... how that interest conflicted with the talent level, especially given that no published "America" voting results are provided.
Just Laura? No; here is the third solo singer from among the ten acts, Brian Justin Crum of LA. Once again -- compare and contrast with Grace VanderWaal and tell me where the bigger talent was. The same can be written about the amazingly entertaining singer Sal Valentinetti (link here), the magician, the artistic juggler, the contortionist, the clairvoyant act, the odd act called Tape Face, and certainly the male singing quartet Linkin' Bridge which was the focus of an earlier comment on the TV acoustics.
This is not the first time that there has been some disconnect between perception of a group and judges' commentary, for sure. I did a piece on one such oddity here from when Howard Stern was judging. But this one is way different.
First, of course, is that in this case the judges' comments were across the panel, not from just one of them. Second, and this is troubling, is that Simon Cowell, who is the executive producer of the show (judge Howie Mandel occasionally refers to him as Howie's "boss") is now also on the judging panel as of this season. This is a troubling conflict of interest, in that the production of the show is related to the outcome.
We don't like rigged outcomes, and we don't like the appearance of rigged outcomes. And if this one were not predetermined, I'm sorry, but Grace VanderWaal would not be through the first round. In fact, before the Finals show with the last ten contestants, nine of whom were clearly talented enough to have won, where Grace was positioned last (to leave the last voting impression), my best girl said this:
"She [Grace] is definitely going to win, because otherwise there's no way that she would even be in the Finals, if something weren't going on."
I don't know what to say. This show has had some odd turns over the years that it's been on and I've tried to document some of them, starting with this piece in 2014. This is one of the oddest. I simply don't think anyone can look at the actual performances in the Semifinals and the Finals and conclude, on performance quality and on any judging of talent, that Grace belonged there, let alone won.
It's not that she was "a bit" less talented, or that her performance was "a bit" less impressive than the others; it's that she was (A) so much less capable than the others, and (B) so over-praised and gushed over by the judges in light of the mediocrity. The two facts clearly don't combine well, and with the conflict of interest on the panel already there (at least the channel for such a conflict being present), it all adds up to a single explanation, and it's not pretty.
By the way, again, AGT does not release vote totals, nor do they indicate that an independent entity is collecting and counting them. Surprise!
America is not that stupid. But, like the limousine-liberal left, those with a desired result and contempt for America can simply bulldoze their way past us as if it assumed we were, even on a stupid TV show that we should none of us care or get too worried about.
I'm not a "hater." I like her. Grace VanderWaal seems like a perfectly nice girl who writes pretty songs, at least to the extent we could make out the words she mumbled into the mic (sort of a "Look, Mommy, I wrote a song all by myself!"). It's not about her. But in a show purporting to present America's greatest previously-unseen talent, or whatever they say they are purporting to do, Grace is not who we would see has having that talent.
But at least she now has a million dollars, and whatever connection she has to NBC that got her that win will eventually come out, sadly for her, for her parents and for NBC.
I actually wish her well.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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