I thought it to be a once-off last week and refrained from remarking about it. But it continued this week. The current 7th season of Idols on M-Net on Sundays at 17:30 has something that's too much and disturbingly detracts from the show: too overly dramatic, over-the-top music. And I'm not talking contestants - I'm talking about the producer-added, heavily-hyped musical score.
Idols is not Picard assimilated by the Borg with Riker giving the command to fire with haunting, Emmy award winning music. Idols is not Father Gabriel bravely walking with Guaraní woman and children in The Mission as soldiers openly start shooting at them with Ennio Morricone's haunting, Golden Globe award winning score. Idols is not a classic Old Spice after shave TV commercial with a surfer battling massive waves with O Fortuna from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. Idols is not Horatio Hornblower standing on the deck of the HMS Renown ... well, you get the picture.
The dramatic, producer-added score as a TV trope to heighten the perceived tension and anxiety in this reality TV talent competition is too odd and out of place and it continued in week two (of three episodes) following Idols Theatre Week at Sun City this evening.
Heavy cantatas permeate the show to foreshadow or over-emphasize events - ''cataclysmic'' audio reinforcement that the show can of course never really produce a viewer pay-off for. Yet it's in the show the whole time, and disturbingly so. What there is enough of - and what should be enough - is the drama deriving from the contestant's outward angst as the top remaining Idols contestants sing for a Top 15 (or Top 16?) place. Still it's as if the production wants to overcompensate for what Idols itself might self-consciously feel is a lack of contestant histrionics.
Idols would be better if the inappropriate and cataclysmic cantatas are toned down. The sound and dramatic tension should emanate from the music (good and bad) that the contestants themselves are making - not what is added in post production to artificially heighten the foreboding mood and sense of theatrics.
The leifmotif and what Idols viewers should be hearing, should be the (re)sound(ing) struggle of the contestants' voices and their journey as those who remain, proceed to find it. Idols is not, after all, an Old Spice commercial.
