I'm a Rock Star, Get Me Out of Here!

So I watched that new Rockstar: INXS (or INXS: Rock Star or something like that) show last night. The format is, of course, instantly familiar. A bunch of poseurs sing. The fraud-ience screams. One person is eliminated each week. The winner is the new lead singer for INXS. Standard stuff. Equally obviously, I could not help but compare the show to American Idol, and I must say that the comparison yielded some surprising results.

On the one hand, this INXS thing is obviously superior. The contestants can actually sing and are aged and talented enough to know how to do reasonably interesting things with the songs they perform. And, of course, it helps that the singers are backed by a live band and that this show, through some sort of Mark Burnett genie magic, has a MUCH better catalogue of songs than AI. Furthermore, it is an immense relief to see the contestants reveal their personalities through their singing rather than through shudder-inducing montages about their poverty-ridden childhoods or eternally supportive/eternally unsupportive grandparents/fathers.

On the other hand, the soulless hosting of Brooke Burke and the more-worthless-than-used-kleenexes "judging" by Dave Navarro and the ancient INXS bandmembers made me long (yes, long) for Seacrest, Cowell, Abdul, and Jackson. I can't believe I just typed that. I HATE the Seacrest preening, the Cowell faux-bitchiness, the Abdul nonsense, and [shudder] the Jackson "Dawgs." But the stuff here was even more terrible. Might it be possible that I've misjudged this whole thing and that reality show hosting and judging is more difficult than I imagined?

Regardless, it's too early to tell which show is more annoying. Probably AI, but we'll see how earnestly the INXS "rockers" believe in their own rock-ness. That could tip the scales.