AGT Is Back, And So Is Simon's Deafness

I couldn't help myself.  Even after the obviously corrupt end to last year's season of "America's Got Talent", when I seriously expected to remove it from my best girl's and my DVR list, we decided to try it again.

Just in case you need a quick primer, this is an amateur talent show, purportedly about Americans, although a disproportionate number of acts clearly do not appear to have English as their first language.  Of course, I really don't care where they come from, since the judging and vote-counting is assumed to be corrupt after last year, it's only about the acts anymore.

Regional tryouts are held with the four actual judges, led by the inimitable Simon Cowell (it's ironic that none of the judges of "America's" Got Talent is an American -- Cowell and Melanie Brown are English, Howie Mandel is Canadian and Heidi Klum is German).  NBC makes a TV show out of the tryouts and trots out some of the more interesting acts.

Now, if an act gets three "yes" votes out of the four judges it advances to the next round, where they then select acts to go to the live-TV final rounds.  But there's a catch. Each judge gets to send one act through the regional round and directly to the live rounds, bypassing the middle.  When they see an act they want to bless that way, they hit a "golden buzzer" in front of them, and gold confetti rains down and the act cries because they'll be on TV.  You'd expect that to be for some astronomical talent, right?

Of course, one man's talent is another man's maybe-not-so-much.  And so it was with Simon Cowell's golden buzzer, which on last week's show was awarded (he only gets one all season, remember).  It went to Mandy Harvey, who is a 29-year-old singer who went deaf at 18, and despite having been trained from a young age, quit singing for a while.

The story was really touching.  After giving up singing when she lost her hearing, she relearned how to sing, hearing the rhythm of the accompaniment through her feet, that sort of thing (she took her shoes off to perform).  She started her song, an original and touching piece, by validating her starting pitch on an electronic pitch instrument, and held pitch throughout the song.

So why this article?  Well, I am not going to criticize Mandy Harvey, for sure.  I admire her, and she was very good.  Her story is one of fortitude and being blessed with the courage to keep going in the face of a real heartbreaking challenge.  And it is not really that analogous to the scandal of last year's winner, Grace Vanderwaal, who simply was a poor singer that had no business being in the competition in the first place.

But here's the thing.  Absent all the background story, the courage Mandy Harvey shows, there remains the fact that this is a talent show.  And as a singer, she was very good, but there are better singers each year.  I wouldn't think to buy her recordings, for example.  If you just listened to a recording of the performance, absent the story, I just don't think there was enough there to scream "star."  It was all in the story.

Was she good enough to go to the next round?  Well, I suppose, but only because of the story.  I mean, she can sing, but if the judges had said "You're very good, but we have a lot of singers and I'm afraid enough of them are better", I'd have gone along with it.

Unfortunately, Simon Cowell is a different kind of cat.  He gushed and gushed -- not that the story wasn't really wonderful -- and then hit the old golden buzzer to send her through to the live round.  My best girl and I were aghast -- "What was he hearing that we weren't?".  And I was hearing something sadder, that someone with truly memorable talent should have gotten that buzzer, a Hall of Fame talent as opposed to "Hall of Very Good."

I've no idea what sells on TV, and I suppose I should be more sensitive to it, rather than being shocked when things like this happen.  After all, I should content myself with the expectation that after a round or two of the live broadcasts, when only the voting public matters (assuming that's not manipulated), her story will tire and better performers will win out in the end.

Then again, a 12-year-old girl who sang with an on-pitch whisper and a ukulele won last year, over nine other finalists with actual talent, which put in peril the integrity of the show in the first place.

So I guess I wish Miss Harvey luck, but I wish Simon Cowell something more important for the show.

Integrity.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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