Adam Lambert of 'American Idol'
Fox

Adam Lambert: He's a judges' favorite; will they protect him from the brutal operation of their own show?

UPDATE: Apparently, this twist is harder to understand than I thought, because it's making headlines that aren't even accurate.

There are probably a hundred reasons why winning American Idol is not important. Winning doesn't mean you'll be successful; losing doesn't mean you won't be; you don't actually find pop stars by making them sing Andrew Lloyd Webber; the public is fickle; the list goes on.

You may now add the fact that you can obtain a free pass from a bad week just because you are favored by the judges, who have never been able to reach their grubby little hands in to fiddle with the results...until now.

What's going on and why it's so stupid, after the jump...

 

Last night, they announced a new rule called the "Judges' Save," which means that in one week of their choice, at some point during the season, the four judges can choose to make the entire competition week meaningless by granting a mulligan to the person who got the fewest votes and would otherwise have been eliminated.

Sorry if you voted! Or practiced. Or performed well. Didn't matter! Doesn't count! Do-over!

It's a stupid idea for, again, a whole lot of reasons: If something ails the show, it wasn't a desire for more interference by the usually idiotic judges; it could suppress voting; it ruins one of the few ways something actually surprising can happen; it creates another pointless "suspense" moment when every elimination is followed by the wait to see whether the judges will undo it; and it's only good until there are five contestants left, which means that two out of the four contestants they used last night as examples of people kicked off "too soon" — Season 1's Tamyra Gray and Season 5's Chris Daughtry — wouldn't have been eligible to be "saved" anyway.

But mostly, it's a stupid idea because the show is already a favorite of conspiracy theorists who believe the judges try to force a particular person to win, and now, they have this to obsess over as well. Paula Abdul's appalling bad taste hasn't ever actually mattered, but now it does. Now, in order to figure out what will happen, you actually have to pay attention to her tendency to burst into tears when confronted with gooshy-hearted young men whose mothers she can hug.

This season, the most obvious candidate for the "Judges' Save" is Adam Lambert, a screechy theater kid the judges love unabashedly who sounds to me like an animatronic hair-band frontman purchased from Target. He's a really polarizing guy, and an off week could easily drop him to the bottom once some of the cannon fodder is cleared out. What if they save him and then he wins? What becomes the story of his victory? "America chose you, kind of!" "America loved you, most of the time!" "There but for the grace of Paula Abdul!"

Sorry: No innovation is welcome in my world if it's going to bring me more of this: