American Idle.

Ha! Starting it off with a pun. Go me.

American Idol has been a staple of American reality television for the last six years. I'm not going to go into the history of American Idol, or about how the British show Pop Idol came first, because that would make me sound like a bitter Anglophile who is sick of America ripping off other programs.

Anyway.

This season of American Idol, if Ryan Seacrest is to be believed, is the "best", with some of the "brightest talent" and "most amazing singers" that the franchise has ever seen. As viewers, we have the "amazing" talent of these young people beaten into our heads every time we turn on the television. Simon, Paula, and Randy assure us that it's "anybody's game".

And that's my issue with this season's Idol.

I was never a great AI aficionado. I watched Season 3 because my mother watched it, and Seasons 5 and 6 under great duress from friends who are far more in tune (music pun!) with reality television than I am. Reality television bores me, mostly because I watch television to escape reality, and watching a mockery of "real life" never suited me. But American Idol offers the voyeurism and buy-in of watching some young person supposedly make or break their career, and that hooked me. Some singers were talented and some were not. I liked that. I liked the fact that Sanjaya from Season 6 couldn't carry a tune in a bucket but had great hair. I liked that Chris Daughtry in Season 5 had a lot of personality and his own idea of how his songs should go. I never felt like any of the major personalities that came out of the competition lacked, well, personality. They always had something to them, some meat to sink my teeth into.

This season is just boring. Every singer is a good singer. Every singer is a consistent singer. Performances are universally pretty decent (with the exception of the Andrew Lloyd Webber theme night, where people actually didn't do well for the first time in weeks). Literally anyone could win, and it's come down to technicalities and who the American voting public thinks is cute.

The talent aspect of the oft-lauded "talent competition" has been removed.

As far as I'm concerned, this is the universal issue with reality shows once they hit the third or fourth season. Take Top Chef, my favorite reality competition, as an example. First season, several of the contestants weren't professional chefs. They were caterers, or just stay-at-home moms who really liked to cook. They had personality and drive, which made them interesting to watch even if they couldn't flambe particularly well. I related better to them as competitors because they weren't all executive chefs at such-and-such a restaurant in Big City, USA.

But as the show has become popular, the caliber of contestants who audition increases. As the caliber increases, it's less interesting to watch as a viewer because everyone's so good. This season's Top Chef is mostly about technicalities because all the chefs are talented and all the food is good. They have yet to serve a dish that the viewer, as a lay-person, can look at and reject as not appetizing. During one elimination round, one of the three who were on the chopping block was there because his station was too messy. That was it! Not a technical issue with the dish, but because it just wasn't neat enough.

I don't want to watch chefs organize their area. I want to see the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I don't want to watch the people on American Idol get voted off based solely on the fact that the fifteen-year-old-girl fanbase is simply not present for contestant X, Y, or Z. I want to see the drama and the actual talent.

We're not getting that, and frankly, it's starting to make guilty-pleasure TV boring. I'm not actually complaining--I think that it's time for the swan song of reality television, or at least, the prelude to it--but if you're going to sell it to us, Seacrest, tell it like it is:

"The most vocally similar and personality-less set of contestants in Idol history."

It's American Idol. Trust me, we'll still watch.