DeGeneresly suprised

OK, before you start judging me, I am sure I’m not the only guy in the world who watches American Idol.  It’s, er, um, because I’m married and catch glimpses of the show when my wife watches it.

Anyways, I thought that this year was going to be a wreck from the departure of Paula (or the firing of.)  She was the most optimistic person on the show, doing her best to make every contestant feel good about their-selves.  It was entertaining to see Simon complain about Paula’s comments as well as his staged (or not) attempts to hit on her.  It was also fun speculating what alcoholic mystery drink was in Paula’s ‘Coca-cola’ cup.

Even with Paula’s departure, I knew the show would still be entertaining with Simon, Randy and the forth wheel (Kara?)  still on the judging panel.  I was suspecting that they brought Kara in as a step in order to give Paula the can.  The thing that almost stopped me from watching the show was the fact that they brought in Ellen DeGeneres.

She has been on as a guest judge before.  Out of all the guest judges, I did not like her at all.  She would give very little advise to the contestants, if any at all.  Then, she would side track into these joke side-story ramblings that were less than mediocre and sounded just as pleasant to me as scrapping a metal object to a chalk board.  Whenever I saw her preform her stand up comedy on TV, two words always came to my mind: fake and staged.

With all of that being said, I decided to watch Idol last night with my wife.  I must say, Ellen seems to be a good addition to the judge panel.  She seemed to gave good critique to the contests, told them when she thought they were good, and told them when she thought they were bad (which most were, by the way.)  Not only that, she did not do a lot of her two-talk joke side story thingies.  In fact, when Ryan was commenting the fact that one of the girl contestants had to miss her performance per her doctor’s request, Ryan asked Ellen if she has ever missed a show.  She said ‘American Gladiators.  I miss watching American Gladiators.  They took it off the air.  Then they brought it back and it is not as good. ‘  It actually made me chuckle a little.

So, now that I excepted Ellen being an American Idol judge and decided not to band the show, it would be interesting to see if my wife will continue watching the show next year if they bring on Howard Stern.  She told me that she would stop watching it, but we’ll see…