Rickey's Loss Shows the Power of Fan Support

In my regular column on Why Rickey Lost, I began to address some of the problems with the way producers handled Corey's expulsion and how that led ultimately to Rickey's untimely demise from the show. However, a full discussion of this point needs more space, so let's look at what happened this week and how it relates to the way people vote and the way this situation was handled.

In short, Rickey is a victim of Corey and the producers. Corey messed himself up by not revealing his legal woes, but he did more than that. He forced producers to come up with a quick solution to having one less contestant. They decided to do that by dragging us through an extra-large Results (or Non-Results) show, tell us who the bottom three and two were, and then leave us there.

When it happened, many of us predicted that fans of those three (Carmen, Trenyce, and Kimberley Locke) would step up to the challenge since they knew their idols were in danger because the scores from both weeks would be added together. And indeed that's what happened. (Though I must admit that after seeing Carmen's performance, I predicted even those fans stepping it up wouldn't be enough to save her - some day I'll learn.) More on that in a moment. Some might ask what else the producers could have done in this situation, given that they didn't want to lose a week from the show. Well, they could have not told us who was at the bottom. They could have found some other way to fill the time (Lord knows they should be getting good at it by now) and just said flat-out that because they were not booting anybody, they would not divulge the results of that week's votes. They could still have added them in and had a more accurate view of what the voters really wanted. But they didn't.

Let's look at the evidence for our case that fans of the bottom three overwhelmed the phone lines because they knew they were on the bubble. First, Ryan Seacrest noted that they had over 21 million calls. That's about six million more than just the week before! Why were there so many? When he first said it at the top of the show, I suspected it would turn out that last week's bottom three would be safe because the extra millions of calls likely came in their favor. It looks like I was right.

When the bottom three were announced, it was definitely no coincidence that last week's bottom two - Carmen and Trenyce, were not even in the bottom three of votes counting both this week and last. They rose from a deficit at the bottom over at least three other singers. That's one hell of a jump! And let's face it - Carmen had her worst performance ever on the show this week. Not quite as bad as Joshua's disco performance last week, but bad nevertheless. And while Trenyce was not terrible, she wasn't great, either. These performances alone definitely would not have kick-started people into calling in such huge numbers.

Similarly, while Kimberley Locke was in the bottom three, she was the first one sent back to the couch. Curiously, this was the same position she was in last week. It strikes me that this provided us with basically a situation that rewarded the contestants inversely to their placement last week. In other words, Carmen and Trenyce were in the bottom two last week, which caused so many fans to vote for them that they shot out of the bottom three altogether this week. Kim Locke was in the bottom three last week, but was sent back to the couch and therefore not in quite as much danger as Trenyce and Carmen. So she didn't get quite as many votes as they did - enough to keep her in the competition but not enough to rocket her out of the bottom three altogether as happened with the other two.

This also supports the contention that has appeared on these pages before - that it is sometimes better to be bad than mediocre. Carmen was bad and she was in danger. Trenyce was in danger and was not as good this week as Kim Locke. Kim Locke was in less danger and was also "less bad," thus she received fewer votes.

Take this to its logical conclusion - Rickey was neither in apparent danger nor was he particularly bad. Yet he was the one with the fewest number of votes.

Because fans of last week's bottom three knew they were in danger, they were devils on the speed dial. But Rickey didn't have the "advantage" of having been in the bottom three last week, so his fans didn't go into super-dialer mode. Buh-bye, Rickey.

In a way, there is some "advantage" like this gained every week. For example, next week fans of Kimberly Caldwell will know that she was once again in the bottom two this past week. So they may turn on the dialing afterburners to show their support. If fans of Kim Locke, Trenyce, and Carmen don't continue the pace they set this week, some or all of them may end up back near (or on) the bottom again.

But normally there is a risk for the contestant associated with this. Kimberly Caldwell has been almost voted off several times. Because of the way this was handled by producers, Carmen, Trenyce, and Kim Locke didn't have to face that "almost" last week - indeed, by all rights one of them should have gone then! But they didn't; they were all safe not just for that one week, but for this week as well.

Before all of the fans of these three contestants start e-mailing me and telling me how much you favor them, let me just say this - I'm not saying that any one particular singer of these three "deserved" to go. Fans certainly have the right to call for whomever they want. I have my own thoughts on this and they are not really part of this article. I further don't think that Rickey would have won American Idol, or even been in the top three or four. But I do think he would have progressed farther and know that somebody else would likely have gone this week. Hopefully, the show will never have to face another case of expelling somebody like this. But if something like it ever does happen again, I hope producers reconsider the way they handle the Results show and do not again give an unfair advantage the way they did this time.

David Bloomberg is the Editor of Foxes On Idol, and can be reached at rno@pobox.com.

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