If you watch American Idol, you'll appreciate Fame. It's a good show. It's not a great show, but it could be. Let me review the strengths and weaknesses:
Strengths
1. The idea's good: as host Debbie Allen keeps reminding us, the show is trying to find the next triple threat -- someone who can sing and dance while possessing a star-like oversized personality. If all you can do is sing, that's not enough here.
2. Unlike American Idol, it is a completely contemporary show, acknowledging and fully involving hip-hop music and dance. This show is alive. It has real energy, provided by the dancing, both in the individual performances and . . .
3. The group numbers, which are fabulous. The full-cast rollcall of Kool Moe Dee's 1989 "I Go To Work" made the pilot episode just plain dynamic, and each week's ensemble performance blows away the stiff, hokey crap that American Idol passed off each Wednesday night as "entertainment". It wasn't. This is.
4. Back to Debbie Allen. She's wonderful on the show as its creator-host-denmother. She's supportive yet tough, and always enthusiastic. She's like Paula Abdul, minus all the flaky new-age bullshit, and plus a lot of talent.
5. A live band. Yippee. Much more energetic than AI's muzak.
But this show has problems. Real problems:
1. The talent, to put it bluntly, isn't talented enough. The twenty-four competitors all appear to be dancers first, singers second. And they're all great dancers. But none of them are great singers. Not one can sing as well as the final twelve from Idol this year.
It's a damn shame. The show is well-designed to boost one of them to stardom, but so far, none really seem to deserve it.
2. The judges are just 'eh' so far, but they're growing on me. Like Idol, it's one industry professional, one late-80s singer and one wildcard, but they don't have clearly-drawn personalities yet. Look: no one knew who Randy Jackson and Simon Cowell were before Idol started. They became stars because they voiced their opinions well and knew where they were coming from. With this group, that may still happen.
Early on, they were too afraid to criticize the competitors, fearful that if they said the talent sucked we'd stop watching. In that respect, they're better now. Let's hope for more. Trust that we'll keep watching so long as you, and they, entertain us. No one has to be perfect.
3. Put the two together, and that's where the real problem is: the heart of the show is comprised of six individual singing/dancing performances where the singing isn't that great and the judges aren't always willing to call them on it. So, as a viewer, you're looking for validation that yes, that singing was mediocre, but no one on screen will say that. And it's too late to recast and find better competitors, and I don't know if it was a problem of not recruiting the right people or not selecting the right people from the auditioning pool, but either way, we're left with performers not yet worthy of the show they're on.
4. Oh yeah: some of the dancing is way too provocative to be coming from sixteen-year-olds at 8:15p, what with the humping and the grinding and the fellatio-hinting glances. To quote Showgirls, dancin' ain't fuckin', and a bit more subtlety won't kill the show, or rob it of its spark.
It's still a good show, because of its energy, its hipness, its contemporary feel and the divine Miss Allen. It can be even better. It can't outdo Idol on the singing, but on the production values, the production numbers, the dancing and the hip-hop flavah, it excels. It should accentuate what it does well, and de-emphasize the areas where direct comparison to other programs shows it to be lacking. The show's still evolving, and I'm glad it's unafraid to tinker.
Fame, we ain’t seen the best of you yet, and given time, you may well make us forget the rest. I'll keep watching.
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