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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: August 21, 2002
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: American Idol, “Top 4 Results,” (Season 1, Episode 21).
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: American Idol was a phenomenon already by the time we got to the Top 4 elimination episode. It was a phenomenon in its first week, as the hyped British import that dared to be mean to its bad (and even just mediocre) contestants. Remember when Randy Jackson almost physically fought Simon Cowell because he was being too mean to the kids?
So by Top 4, that steam engine had been running for a while, and the audiences glued to their TVs had begun to handicap the field with a fair amount of certainty. After all, the truly worst singers (your Jim Verraroses; your A.J. Gills) were among the first to go, the more in-betweeners (Ryan Starr; RJ Helton) went around the middle. Christina Christian was a bit of a surprise going as early as she did, but she was also sick that one week, and she was never going to actually win. Now that we were at the endgame, though, we all knew it was coming down to Kelly Clarkson and Tamyra Gray. And while we’ve got 15 years’ worth of hindsight and of Kelly Clarkson being a superstar telling us that we all knew Kelly was going to win the whole time, people don’t remember how popular Tamyra was at the time. Praised every week by the judges, poised as all get-out, Tamyra was every bit the frontrunner that Kelly was.
And then came Top 4 week, when both Tamyra and the American audience learned a lesson that American Idol would be eager to teach again and again: your faves are not safe.
There’s always going to be a Nikki McKibbin around to scrounge up niche votes while the belters like Tamyra and Kelly split the majority of votes. As for Justin Guarini, don’t ask me, I’ve never been able to understand how he made top two in the first place. But the shocking elimination of Tamyra Gray only cranked up interest in Idol even further. Now, nobody was safe, and viewers had to tune in to make sure that Kelly survived until the end. Maybe Tamyra’s ouster was the wake-up call America needed. I’m sure Tamyra was happy to provide it.
