Are ‘American Idol’ singers too similar?

Any show that has been successful for as long as “American Idol” provokes regular declarations that it’s peaked and that it’s all downhill from here. No season has drawn as much criticism as this one, and it’s hard to deny that something about the current competition seems off.

Even with the exquisite musicianship of Melinda Doolittle, the old-fashioned belting of Lakisha Jones, and the intriguing, melodic-rhythmic work of Blake Lewis, there’s not a lot about this cast that’s provoking much talk. By this time last season, there was already the Soul Patrol. By this time in the season before that, Constantine Maroulis was a simultaneously loved and hated sleazeball. By this time in the second season, Clay Aiken was becoming what he is today, whether you find that heartening or frightening.

In spite of a couple of weak semifinal shows, especially among the men, the total complement of talent isn’t any lower than it’s been in the past. Chris Richardson is nothing special, but neither was Ace Young. Haley Scarnato is a bland pop singer, but so was Jasmine Trias. Even the widely ridiculed Sanjaya Malakar isn’t consistently any worse than John “Crocodile Rock” Stevens or Kevin “Part-Time Lover” Covais.

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Doolittle is a more sophisticated musician than anyone who competed last season, and Lewis is both more creative and ambitious — even though not every experiment is successful — than someone like current chart monster Chris Daughtry, who threw everything into the same growl-rock blender until it emerged as a bland puree.

Even looking at the other side of the equation, this season has already shown the door to two talented musicians in Brandon Rogers and Stephanie Edwards, who certainly compare favorably to last year’s first two bootees, Covais and Melissa McGhee. It doesn’t seem like the problem is that the singers are worse than ever, so what’s the problem?

The best guy in a college a cappella group
The most likely explanation is a divide in the talent that’s much too obvious. There are Melinda, Lakisha, Blake, and perhaps Jordin Sparks, and then there is an entire field that simply is not nearly as good.

Chris Richardson, Gina Glocksen, Scarnato, Phil Stacey, Malakar — these people are utterly outclassed, which means that one of two things will happen. The first is that the four talented ones will be the final four standing, which means we are about to see six uneventful departures in no particularly important order. The second is that one or more of them will be prematurely knocked out, which will only be disheartening and fuel the constant conspiracy theories that plague the show.

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Really, who cares whether Phil Stacey goes home before Chris Richardson or the other way around? They’re both just about good enough to be the best guy in a college a cappella group, and no better. Does earnest but outgunned rock chick Glocksen go home before earnest but outgunned perky chick Scarnato? Now that all the singers who remain will make the tour (which generally takes the top ten contestants), it looks like six weeks of tapping your foot and looking at your watch, waiting to get to what matters.

In past seasons, producers did a better job of balancing the talent so that it wasn’t just an excellent group and a lousy group; it was a clash of styles. The interest came from which style would prevail. Taylor Hicks versus Katharine McPhee versus Elliott Yamin versus Chris Daughtry was largely a matter of what you like. They all had roughly comparable levels of talent at doing very different things: the bluesy bar-band singer with the weird tics; the pretty, stage-mothered warbler with the unsettling tendency to remind everyone of the most annoying girl in a high school theater production; the lovable soul-singing white kid who desperately wants to be Donny Hathaway; the guy who works at the Best Buy who brings down the karaoke bar doing Bon Jovi.

Here, as dangerous as it is to get into the business of lumping black women singers as if they automatically have the same appeal, Doolittle, Jones, and Sparks really do represent (outstanding) variations on a similar, big-voiced theme, stylistically speaking. Doolittle and Jones have been by far the most broadly praised contestants of the season, so their virtues are the best known.

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