- Journalist
We've wrapped up our coverage of American Idol Season 16 this weekend in the traditional manner: publishing the final normalized "gold star" performance ratings, and our annual end-of-season editorial. Both can be found on the home page.
No performance rated a 90 this year, as expected. Maddie Poppe's "Nothing Compares 2 U" did round up to an 89. Two performances normalized into 5-star territory: Michael J. Woodard's "Titaniam" and Gabby Barrett's "How Come U Don't Call M...e Anymore?". Poppe's 73.1 contestant rating ranks her 7th among 192 finalists. Michelle Sussett set not one, not two, but *three* new WNTS records for finalists -- highest growth trend at +14.4 (achieved, to be fair, by being rather awful for three nights and then delivering a great elimination performance on the fourth), highest average standard deviation at 26.0 (edging out AI10's Paul McDonald, which truth be told is quite a feat). and Youngest Average Song Age at 1.8 years.
As for our season recap, it might be longer than the actual season. But, there was a lot to cover and a lot to think about for AI17. Thanks everyone for your support this short but entertaining season! We'll be back on the first day of summer (looks like it's Thursday, June 21st this year) when Camp Should-A-Been reopens.
Let's see...the second season-long American Idol perfect game ever...an all-expense paid trip to Hawaii with her new boyfriend...a stunning Repeat Factor of just 0.18...a spot in the all-time WNTS Top 10 rated finalists at 71.6 (knocking out Trent Harmon and Bo Bice from their tie for 10th and making it an all-girls club, no less).......and, oh yeah, she even won. It's Maddie Poppe's world right now; the rest of us are just renting space (and compiling ratings) in it. Congr...atulations, Maddie, welcome to the Disney Princess Club, and best of luck with your single and what we hope will be a long and prosperous career.
Our best as well to runner-up Caleb Lee Hutchinson and third-place finisher Gabby Barrett. It was too short of a season and definitely an inconsistent one, and yeah that sub-50 cumulative rating will likely stick out like a sore thumb on the Seasons page forever...but, all in all, we truly enjoyed it. We'll have our season recap online over the upcoming holiday weekend, with a look ahead to what we hope will be an even better Season 17.
Updated ratings for last night's show are on the site. We left the stars bronze for now because we haven't heard from a couple of regular reviewers, but there are enough ballots in the database by now that we don't expect more than a point or two of additional movement. We'll post the final, normalized numbers this weekend as well. Though the episode rating says 50.3 on the site, it's actually 50 right on the nose -- accumulated rounding errors account for the extra 0.3 points.
Thanks as always to our most excellent team of Review Crew volunteers, who provided graded scores and insightful reviews (and often hilarious commentary) throughout the spring! We can't do WNTS without you and we're very grateful.
Overnight ratings for the Season 16 Finale are up on the site. We'll keep the comments brief for once, because there are a few yearlong goals/accomplishments still up in the air as of 12:30am EDT, and we want the later reviewers not to be influenced by anything we write. Overall it was a decent enough Finale -- two performances are well behind the others, but the top 7 are all 3-stars and above. (If you feel it was a disappointment, we understand...but, ah, Trent Harmon and LaPorsha Renae may have set the bar for all future Finales unattainably high. 
)
We'll be back tomorrow with updated ratings, though they probably won't be finalized until the middle of the week. Next weekend we'll run the season-ending normalization and put AI16 into the books with our post-season recap. Good night, all.
Final ratings are up for Carrie & Mommy night. The late voters broke the overnight tie between "I Told You So" and "I Have Nothing" in favor of...Kieran, dim the lights, here we go......"I Have Nothing"! It finished at 76, gaining a point, and relegating Maddie Poppe's two performances to second and third place. It goes without saying that we at the WNTS Offices are sick to death of IHN on AI, but considering how reliably well it scores in the hands of a good vocalist, we ...must grudgingly concede that contestants are justified in choosing it year after year. All five Mothers' Day songs stayed above 50.
The episode rating dropped a bit, finishing at 53.3 and leaving the season rating at 49.5. This is the third straight year of it being under 50 headed into the Finale, though this time around it feels (much) less of a reflection of a poor cast and (much) more a consequence of the super-short schedule. Semifinalists and undercard finalists delivered a far higher percentage of performances in 2018 than in previous years. Anyway, if our back-of-the-envelope math is correct, the Finale will need to come in at about 55 for AI16 to break par.
"God Only Knows" wound up with a s.d. of 28. Again, we have no cohesive explanation for why one performance every week seems to polarize the viewers this season. But, this time around we observe that older reviewers seemed to really like it, but younger ones were iffy about it. It may be simply that the sheer age of the song was the simple reason this time.
See you all on Sunday night for the final show of the season!
While Carrie Underwood may be the most successful American Idol winner ever, it's clear from the overnight ratings that one person trumps her big time: Mom. All five of the Mothers' Day performances broke 50, while just two of the Carrie Covers did. In fact, the first hour of the show averaged a 43 approval rating, while the second hour is at nearly 65. Add it together and it comes out to 54.4, which is second-highest on the season.
There's a tie at the top between Gabby ...Barrett's "I Have Nothing" (the first song to reach double digit renditions on AI; insert your own punch line here) and Maddie Poppe's "I Told You So"; both are at 75. Yes, there's yet another huge-s.d. performance this week; this is becoming a very eerie recurring theme which we have no explanation for. Standard deviations for the season are extremely high; AI16 is second only to AI10 in that category.
We'll be back midweek with final ratings. This season has gone by way too quickly, but we have to admit: it was nice having Idol back again, and doubly nice to hear that it's been renewed for another season. (Safest WNTS prediction ever: there will be another Disney Night theme in 2019.)
We've had a few American Idol perfect games over the years spoiled by a point or three -- Melinda Doolittle, Adam Lambert, and Candice Glover all come to mind. This year, the tables have turned in the contestants' favor for once. Congratulations to Jurnee Siani: the fourth AI finalist to complete her run on the show without giving a performance that rated below 50. Final Ratings for Prince/YYWB Night are up on the website, and "Back At One" finished at 52 (in fact, it was 52.37, rounded down).
In other news, Maddie Poppe's "Nothing Compares 2 U" picked up a couple points among the late reviewers, making it the highest-rated solo performance of the season, an 86. Gabby Barrett just missed, scoring 79 for "How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore?" See you Sunday night!
Overnight ratings for the Top 7 show are up on the site. The episode average currently stands at 46.6, which we'd have to term "disappointing" compared to the excellent 60.3 put up last week on Disney Night. We're sure this is one of the biggest week-over-week drops in the database, but we're not exactly itching to write a SQL query to find out at 12:30am on a work night.
Three performances though finished head and shoulders above the rest: Maddie Poppe's "Nothing Compares... 2 U", which is in 5-star range, followed by -- just as no doubt everyone predicted -- two country singers covering Prince. Gabby Barrett and Caleb Lee Hutchinson are in the high 70's. In fact, counting Jurnee's "Kiss", Prince produced the four highest-rated performances of the week, with only Poppe (barely) breaking 50 on her Year You Were Born song. Usually that's not a bad theme, but there were a couple of questionable song choices this time around.
Just one performance finished in one-star territory, and it will come as no surprise which it is. If it's any consolation to Catie Turner, she has some good company. Idol legends Clay Aiken and David Archuleta, who both finished second in their respective seasons and went on to successful professional singing careers, famously blanked out on their lyrics during a competition night and wound up scoring not much higher than she did this evening. It happens, though with the new accelerated AI format where contestants are sent home in bunches, the penalty for a brain cramp may be more severe now than back in the day.
Lastly, we suppose it wouldn't be a Season 16 episode without a standard deviation bumping up against 30, for a performance where one might not have expected it. We certainly didn't. In this case, the variation is solely due to a highly unusual disparity between "rankers" (folks who simply put the performances in order of preference, usually found on Idol web forums) and "raters" (folks who score each performance individually, which includes our fabled Review Crew.) The former by and large really liked it; the latter by and large really didn't. We'll see over the next few days if any sort of consensus is reached.
Final ratings for Disney Night are up on the site. Normally this means that the performances moved maybe two or three points in either direction, but this time the late voters had quite a surprise. Cade Foehner's "Kiss The Girl" dropped 9 points to finish at 53, while Catie Turner's "Once Upon A Dream" jumped 7 points to 77.
Also there was a minor adjustment to the Victory/Save show numbers from last Monday, due to a transcription error from our overworked Actuarial Dept. The upshot is that some of the higher-rated performances that night lost a point.
See you all on Sunday for one P. Rogers Nelson Night. (As longtime fans of the Purple One, our Senior Editors are approaching the show with a mixture of excitement and high dread.)
It feels rather odd to be posting overnight ratings for an episode in which the voters have already spoken, but the new American Idol keeps throwing us curves. Let's hit the highlights...
Disney Night was a hit with the reviewers, coming in with a episode rating of 60.1 (it shows as 59.9 on the site due to accumulated rounding errors). That makes it just the 11th non-Finale show to average 4-stars. Michael J. Woodard leads the way with an 80 on the nose for "Beauty and the...
Continue ReadingFinal ratings for the Final 14 Voted Into/Begging To Be Saved Into the Top 10 Episode (we still don't know what to call it) are on the website. Later viewers weren't quite as enthralled by the episode as their East Coast 'overnight' counterparts, but it still became the first episode of the season to crack 50. Dennis Lorenzo picked up one point for "This Woman's Work", which means it now stands alone as the top-rated performance of AI16.
We also have a new editorial for your perusal on the home page. Mostly it concerns the super-short Finals schedule. We'd write more, but we're afraid that the entire season would be over by the time you finished reading it.
See you this evening for the Disney Night overnight ratings!
Grab a seat. We have a lot to cover tonight.
First and foremost, we have overnight ratings for the...well, what exactly do we call it? Top 14 Redux? Wild Card? Victory Songs/Second Chance? Well, whatever it was, the early reviewers thought it was OK; the episode rating is right around 52. Dennis Lorenzo is on track for the second solo 80+ rating of the season. Ten of the 14 performances are currently at 3-stars or above, and eight of this year's Final 10 have an avera...ge contestant rating over 50. The first few performance shows were bumpy as usual, and the crazily-compressed Finals are going to be a major annoyance, but there's a decent chance we're set up for a month's worth of solid episodes. Unless all 10 choose "Let It Go" for next week's Disney Night, that is, in which case forget that we wrote this.
Second, our beleagured Actuarial Dept. has finally caught up with its backlog of ballots from the past three weeks. The ratings you see for the Semifinals shows ought to be stable, at least until our usual end-of-season normalization. Thanks to all our regular reviewers for their excellent contributions, as always. (We actually have a slight uptick from AI15!) There is no way we could produce accurate ratings without you.
Third, we can't produce inaccurate ratings without you, either! We speak, of course, of the second Duets episode from last Monday. With all of 31 reviews in the books, we can give you the ordinals. The actual WAG ratings, such as they are, will be revealed during Camp Should-A-Been this summer. Give a round of applause to Jurnee and Lea Michele, who actually got within shouting distance of 90. The episode rating was 50.5, which is way higher than the first Duets show. The ordinals:
1. Jurnee/Lea Michele, "Run to You"
2. Ada Vox/Lea Michele, "Defying Gravity"
3. Mara Justine/Rachel Platten, "Fight Song"
4. Maddie Poppe/Colbie Caillat, "Bubbly"
5. Marcio Donaldson/Allen Stone, "What's Going On"
6. Caleb Lee Hutchinson/Bebe Rexha, "Meant To Be"
----------------- 50 -------------------
7. Effie Passero/Cam, "Diane"
8. Shannon O'Hara/Cam, "Burning House"
9. Garrett Jacobs/Colbie Caillat, "Lucky"
10. Amelia Harris/Bebe Rixha, "Me Myself & I"
11. Alyssa Raghu/Banners, "Yellow"
12. Ron Bultongez/Banners, "Someone To You"
Thanks again to all -- we'll get tonight's ratings finalized by this weekend.
Overnight ratings are up on the website, and it appears we have our first solo 5-star performance of the season: Maddie Poppe's alt-country version of "Homeward Bound" is at 83. Michael J. Woodard has a chance to join her; he's a hair over 78 as of now. Eight of the 14 performances broke 50, but three 1-star ratings has the episode rating hovering around 48 at the moment.
Oh, and we might have our second 30+ standard deviation of the season already...and no, this time it's... NOT who you think!
Thanks for the quick response from the WNTS community on our two questions from earlier. It's pretty much unanimous to call tonight's episode the first night of the Finals rather than the third week of the Semifinals, if only because otherwise we'll have just three Finals episodes this season. And, several folks politely made it clear that Ada Vox is a stage persona only and that Adam Sanders identifies as a male. We'll see if we can add a "Stage Persona" field to the database for Ada (and for Normund Gentile many moons ago) so that our site search box will comply when people search for them.
We'll be back tomorrow with updated ratings, plus the overnights for the WildCard/Finals/Semifinals/Results/Whatever show airing tomorrow night.
The Top 14 show just finished airing here on the East Coast. We've got the songs updated in the database, and we'll get Overnight ratings out later tonight, probably a little after midnight EDT.
If you submit ratings tonight, we'd also like your thoughts on two burning issues of AI16.
#1 - Should we list a particular contestant as Adam Sanders, Male, or as Ada Vox, Female? We want to be sensitive to the LGBT community, but we hope our readers understand that said sensitivit...y does *not* extend to rewriting/debugging two quadrillion database scripts and views to account for a third gender. Our position is that Adam was put through on the Male half of the draw, and unless he himself asks us to change his listing, we'll keep it as it is.
#2 - Seeing as how tomorrow night's show is essentially a Wild Card round, should we consider tonight's show as a Finals or a Semifinals? This show had voting, full arrangements, and took place on the main (and sharply redesigned) Idol stage...but it's a little discomfiting that it will be followed immediately by a (presumably non-voting) competition among contestants who did not get through on America's vote. For now, we're listing it as the first night of the Finals.
Thanks!
Folks: As always, thanks for your patience these first two weeks of a new season. By waiting until reviews of two shows (three, actually) are in the books, we can do a much better job aligning ratings across seasons.
Speaking of which, ratings for the first two SOLO shows are on the website. None of the 24 performances reached 80, though seven in 4-star territory isn't bad. All 10 contestants who scored 50 or higher made it through to the Finals.
We also have ordinals for... the first duet show, if you're interested. We'll publish the actual numbers (which are exceedingly dicey considering they're based on about 35 reviews and rankings) during Camp Should-A-Been this summer. But, we can at least give a shout out to Dennis Lorenzo: his duet with Allen Stone did edge its way into 5-stars. The ordinals:
1. Dennis Lorenzo/Allen Stone
2. Cade Foehner/Bishop Briggs
3. Gabby Barrett/Sugarland
4. Michael J. Woodard/Pat Monahan
------------ 50 -----------
5. Michelle Sussett/Luis Fonsi
6. Dominique/Aloe Blacc
7. Catie Turner/Andy Grammer
8. Layla Spring/Sugarland
9. Brandon Diaz/Luis Fonsi
10. Jonny Brens/Andy Grammer
11. Trevor McBane/Bishop Briggs
12. Kay Kay/Pat Monahan
We'll get ordinals for tonight's Duet show on the site by this weekend.
41 reviews isn't a lot, but the standard deviations are unusually low so far, and it's really late here, so it's probably safe to put out "overnight ordinals". We doubt the West Coast and DVR viewers are going to shake the order up too much.
4 STARS
Ada Vox (5 stars is in play)
Jurnee...
Maddie
Marcio
3 STARS
Mara
Caleb (currently 50 on the nose)
2 STARS (BUT ALL WITHIN A FEW POINTS OF 40)
Effie
Shannon
Alyssa
2 STARS PART II (ALL WITHIN A FEW POINTS OF 20)
Amelia
Ron
1 STAR
Garrett
The average is a hair under 47, which is quite good for a Semifinals night, particularly with three of twelve performances scoring under 25. The only performance we've actually watched so far is Maddie Poppe's, because our Statistics Dept. had to see the song choice to believe it. Going into Duets Night, it looks like there are six clear leaders for the seven available Finals spots. We'll get final ratings for both Solo shows on the site by Wednesday night. Thanks everyone!
The WNTS Actuarial Dept. was out most of the night and so missed tonight's show entirely. We do have plenty of ballots waiting for us so we'll get those tallied ASAP. We fondly hope we missed a good show!
Folks: We've updated the database just now to include a ton of S16 demographics data, courtesy of longtime correspondent Tomas whom we thank immensely. But...the DB also displays tonight's eliminations. If you haven't seen the duets show yet and don't want to be spoiled, avoid the site until you're ready.
Meanwhile, we have enough reviews in the books to put out "overnights" of sorts for the Group One Solo ratings. Again, we're going to wait until after next week's show t...o publish actual numbers, but so far the ordinals are:
FOUR STARS
Cade, Jonny, Michael
THREE STARS
Gabby, Kay Kay
TWO STARS
Everybody else!
...so yeah, no 5-star gems but no 1-star disasters either. The typical review went, "The talent is there, but there were lots of opening night jitters and a few awful song choices." Which means S16 has picked up pretty much exactly where the first 15 seasons left off. You gotta hand it to AI: reliability is its middle name.
Anyway, the episode rating is right around 43, which again is about par for the course for a first-night semifinal show. Looks like only four performances will finish above 50, but all four singers advanced, so that's a decent start.
Thanks to everyone who sent in reviews as always!
We've updated the website database for the first (well, second) time in two years. S16 has its own page along with each of the Top 24 contestants. We have pretty much zero information about the contestants, but we're sure that'll get filled in over the next few months.
As for the Top 24 rounds, those will be non-voting (ugh) shows consisting of a solo and a duet performance apiece. Here's how they'll work with regards to WNTS:
- We'd like to get reviews and ratings after a...ll four shows, but especially for the solo performances.
- We'll only post episode pages for the two solo nights, just as we did in S15. The duet approval ratings, which will almost surely be extremely suspect due to lack of data, will have to wait until CSAB.
- We'll score the two (or four) episodes as a group, meaning that approval ratings won't be posted until after the fourth and final semifinal show. That keeps the volatility down in the early going. We'll post very rough scores and ordinals on the Facebook page after each night, of course, so as not to keep you in the dark. If you would like to avail yourself of the opportunity to do the same, and not send any scores until the second week of the semis, feel free.
- In any event, the WNTS staff would like to ask our readers not to spoil for us who makes the Top 14. We know that's already been decided, but we've studiously avoided it. Thanks!
