Last night marked American Idol's second annual installment of "Idol Gives Back," an episode of the wildly popular talent competition in which Hollywood mobilizes to raise money for a plethora of noble causes. Virtually everyone who is someone or was someone made an appearance -entertainment luminaries like Bono, Brad Pitt and Reese Witherspoon fell into the former category. Fossilized former funnyman Robin Williams, doing the same shtick that was tired fifteen years ago, fell into the latter, less desirable category.
The show consisted mostly of celebrities traveling around the globe to see the world's most impoverished people, and then urging the viewers to give money so that we might ease their suffering. Miley Cyrus and her father Billy Ray Cyrus journeyed to a patch of Appalachia reminiscent of "Deliverance" to visit with what had to be America's poorest and most forlorn family. Young Miley pronounced the parents "extraordinary" in a moment of pitch perfect Hollywood condescension. Personally, I would have held off on awarding them "extraordinariness" until they explained why they had all that garbage on their front lawn. Young rockers Daughtry journeyed to Uganda where things are really bad, yet thoughtfully lightened the load of the suffering natives by pleasuring them with a song.
Raising money for those in need is always a fine thing, and yet the tone of last night's show was somehow wrong. There are some entertainers who really commit to a cause. Bono and Brad Pitt from last night's show fall into that category. So do guys we particularly admire like John Ondrasik and Gary Sinise, who have quietly devoted considerable time and energy to supporting and entertaining our troops. With minimal fanfare, Sinise has made dozens of trips for the USO in recent years.
The problem with last night's show is that it reflected maximal fanfare mixed with minimal involvement. The celebrities swooped down on an area of misery, and then left as quickly as they came. You couldn't help but get the sense that many of the celebrities participated in the festivities primarily to get their mugs before American Idol's tens of millions of viewers. And that led to the disquieting inference that the world's most fortunate people were exploiting the world's least fortunate people for a photo-op.
More than anything else, the evening was about entertainment community figures engaging in unseemly self-congratulations for their nobility in caring about the poor. Worse still, the self-congratulations was misplaced. While the evening was called "Idol Gives Back," the giving in question wasn't being done by "Idol" but rather by the many parties that Idol had shaken down. Idol got Gordon Brown to promise $200 million worth of mosquito netting for Africa. And, of course, Idol expected its viewers to give until it hurt.
Truly, it's hard to see exactly what American Idol actually gives when it purportedly "gives back." With last night's extravaganza, the show expanded its brand, extended its reach and solidified its standing at the top of the Hollywood heap. Near as I could tell, Fox sold advertising for the evening, and didn't funnel the advertising revenue to either Uganda or Appalachia. In other words, just as was the case on Tuesday's ordinary episode of American Idol, Idol and its partners were turning a profit in a business as usual fashion as regards the bottom line.
It's nice that American Idol can do well and do good at the same time. But the self congratulations and the dilletantism still grate, even more than one of Robin Williams's "comedy" routines. "Giving back" is I guess particularly easy when you tap others to do the giving.
