SnideAsides

There were 12 acts in Week 3.

Illinois, Michigan, it's all a rich tapestry. At least the jurors have realised women are people too, even if they're white.

It's definitely not as good overall as last year, but there's some really good stuff. Even the fucking UK tried this year. I'm not interested in the winner so much this year - Ukraine will get a massive televote for obvious reasons (Russia's been banned for the same obvious reason, and their ally Belarus got kicked out of the EBU entirely a couple of years ago) and I suspect the juries will be subtly directed to tank their score so they don't have to worry about whether they can safely host next year, so we'll probably end up with a boring winner like Sweden's "Voila with a generic Scandinavian dance beat". I'm much more invested in which of the wacky entries will do best. Like I know we had quirky entries last year (and I hope they're working on a way to get Iceland's act into an interval somewhere, considering the Italians were pushing so hard for the 2020 acts who weren't chosen to come back - read, their own act who everyone was pretending was favourite but nobody actually liked - to be included last year) but this year we've got a Norwegian revisionist retelling of Little Red Riding Hood from a space wolf's perspective, an EXPLICIT "environmentalism makes me horny" allegory from Latvia, Moldova and France respectively finding yet another way to redefine what we thought it meant to be Peak Moldova and Peak France, a postmodern Serbian ode to hand sanitation, and Lithuanian Liza Minnelli. Of course that's more interesting than which sadboi ballad will scoop up enough jury votes to be dragged kicking and screaming into fourth place.

Week 5 rehearsals. I'd like to pre-emptively congratulate Illinois for qualifying.

I'm just basing that on how Eurovision works; they've never actually stated it here but I can't imagine why that would be one of the things they've changed, especially because the show isn't being aired live everywhere (the extended voting window with its weird closing time is to give the territories on the other side of the International Date Line time to watch the show, for example).

The jury aren't in the room. They watch the performances from the final dress rehearsal when ranking the acts. (The gradual ranking throughout the show is TV Magic™.)

Basically 50/50. Each state/territory makes two rankings of 1-11 (or 12) for each show: one simply by its juror, one based on the total number of viewer votes an act gets. Juror rankings only are combined to work out which white dude's ballad qualifies this week at the end of the show. After voting lines close, all of the rankings are combined to work out the three remaining qualifiers. The thing that annoys me about showing the jury scores during the show is not only does it impact who gets votes - let's be honest, very few people are going to waste time voting after the show for whoever is eleventh - is that it's simplified on screen to a basic overall 1-11 score when the ranking is actually the sum of 56 sets of 1-11 scores. We have no idea whether the scores are relatively even and it would be pretty easy for someone in 6th-8th to get into the top four with a big viewer vote, or if the top three are far far ahead and everyone else is really only fighting for fourth. It IS statistically possible for an act that did as poorly with the idiot jury as Arizona to qualify... or at least it would be if the show wasn't shooting itself in the foot every aching step of the way.

Another week, another white dude with a ballad winning the jury vote.

Week 4 rehearsals. I really wanted Arizona to do well - there was a YouTube compilation a few weeks ago that had other work from all 56 acts as a "here's what you might be able to expect" kind of thing, and they were like one of the two unknowns who felt like they could hold a candle to the really famous names - but even aside from the mediocrity the jury is rewarding, that staging is probably getting them last place in this semi. Someone pointed this out on Twitter before, but all the ballady country acts are getting really inventive staging, but literally all of the Latinx acts so far have had this pink colour scheme that looks awful on television, and Arizona is no different. I'm hoping Arizona or Nevada get the automatic qualification, but I'm fully bracing myself for it to be yet another white dude with a ballad. Sigh.

It's been like this for all five heats. First heat had most of the Midwest and the OK/AR/MS block, heat 2 was basically "can you drive here from Wyoming or West Virginia?", this week had almost literally the entire Gulf Coast plus Tennessee and South Carolina. I'm assuming that after they split up the five Headline Acts and the six territory/DC acts into different heats, the rest were divided to ensure a variety of genres etc (not that you could tell from how blandly similar most of them have been), but even then it's a bit odd, especially because Eurovision Mothership explicitly uses a World Cup-style random pot draw to stop, for instance, all of Scandinavia ending up in the same semi final. After the final heat I might try and see if I can divide them into heats in a less geographically dull fashion. If I'm still watching.

I guess this is the best place for it, so: Ozzy has just come out as bisexual. Good for him.

Heat 4: Arizona, Georgia, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Utah, Washington, Washington DC, and West Virginia. (They appear to be using WA for both Washingtons on the graphics, which is... going to be confusing.) That means Heat 5 is American Samoa, California, Guam, Idaho, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Vermont.

If it makes it that far. Ratings dropped ~30% during the show this week. 1.8m for the first hour (roughly consistent with last week), down to 1.35m for the second hour.

This week seemed overall a bit better than last week, but the problem is the acts that are worth watching again aren't the ones that are worth listening to again. The staging is getting better and this lot was infinitely better at understanding that you're not really playing to the people in the room than the first two groups were, but... like, I don't care if Texas has awesome staging if he can't hit a key let alone a note. There were a few acts I liked tonight (Delaware MUST qualify, Jewel was Jewel, and I really liked Northern Marianas but I'm not getting my hopes up), and naturally the jury ignored all of them to give yet another mediocre White Man Ballad a free pass. Sigh. The lack of genre diversity continues to be a problem with this show, but the biggest killer for me right now is the complete lack of imagination from jurors who are supposed to be leaders in the music industry. If this somehow gets another season (and it's currently basically NBC's most expensive flop since Leno-gate, so probably not), they really need to find a jury that's more diverse in taste as well as background.

I feel like Aldo's been cast as the designated early-boot returnee. No way they're going to boot someone like Julie or Sashi in the first couple of weeks, and Aldo was a forgettable thirteenth-placer from a season barely anybody watched. He didn't even get to be the focus of his elimination episode the first time around because that was the night they brought all the eliminated players back to try and return to the competition.

I'm so confused by Hydra. The clues were clearly pointing to it being a Three Amigos reunion, and two of the voices I could definitely buy as Martin Short and Steve Martin (especially with the banjo added to the backing track), but then why is the third voice so obviously Penn Jillette? Was Chevy unavailable? Where is Teller?

The Void is a furry.

Yeah, I don't know whether it's a sound mixing issue or the singers trying to work around the small studio or what, but out of 22 songs so far I've properly liked... one? Which didn't qualify last week? And because the jurors are mostly pretty similar Grammy execs and commercial radio DJs and songwriters, who explicitly have "hit potential" as part of their judging criteria, anything that's not mainstream is dead in the water. Like, if you're going to brag about the diversity of genres (oh, look! Country! And... a slightly different type of country!) but apparently not going to have metal and disco and jazz and reggae and musical theatre songs competing, at least give us jurors with those sensibilities to make the qualifiers less predictable.

It's basically a giant trade bloc similar to the EU these days (with an Olympics knockoff that seems to alternate between the UK and Australia now, because they can't even con Canada and NZ into hosting it any more and they're too big and wasteful for anyone else in the Commonwealth to justify paying for). The Commonwealth is distinct from the Empire though, even if the Queen is the head of it. It's not quite open to any country - you basically have to be a former colony or a former colony of a former colony (eg, Sāmoa and Namibia are there because they declared independence from New Zealand and South Africa respectively) to get in - but only 15 of the 54 Commonwealth countries (a bunch of teeny-tiny island nations in the Caribbean and Pacific, plus Australia, NZ, Canada, PNG, Belize, and the UK itself) actually have the Queen as their head of state. In conclusion, the current Caribbean tone of "fuck the monarchy, what's it ever done for US?" is spectacular. Good points well made.

Heat 2 rehearsals (minus Ohio, because Macy Gray must've pulled a Bolton and got a later rehearsal time): Unless Macy turns it the fuck OUT, Kentucky is getting the jury spot.

I feel like you're drastically overestimating how much the world gives a metric shit about America, to be honest. Like, I'm a reasonably well-educated person from one of the most pro-US countries outside the US, and I could not confidently point to a map of American states and tell you which one is New York, let alone Iowa, Minnesota, Connecticut, Indiana, et cetera. Alaska and Hawaii are obvious, and California, Texas, and Florida are pretty easy to guess, but the rest? Not a fucking clue, and even in those states I couldn't tell you which major city is which. And that's just the basic geography, we're not even talking about things like the cheese hats yet. (Please don't explain them to me, it's much funnier this way.) Heat 2 entries: Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, New York, Ohio, Oregon, U.S. Virgin Islands, Virginia.

I mean, it's not like it's been particularly accessible in the US until very recently. Like, I wouldn't expect the average Belgian to have ever sat down to watch the Superbowl, for example. Sure, you could probably expect people who've spent a lot of time in Europe (or Australia) to know what it is, but when the proportion of Americans with passports is infamously low compared to the rest of the developed world, that's not going to be a massive number. I don't mind that they toned down the Eurovision, I just wish they toned down the NBC. It's a miracle none of these people were "while you were away"-ed, especially with how bad the pacing is. Like, they barely got the jury qualifier announcement in the last ten seconds, and it's only going to get even worse in coming weeks when you've got to reveal the previous week's public vote qualifiers and do a full Live Via Satellite tour of the country during the final. I didn't mind the "Snoop reads facts" filler, but they really need to cut like fifteen seconds (at least) out of each intro package and cut out Kelly's green room pop quizzes entirely.

It's been stated in interviews that the groups are being shown out of taping order. So THAT episode might be the first one recorded, but because they've been showing this group every week (presumably to fool people into thinking it's safe to come back, not that it's worked so far), we haven't seen it yet. Count me in as another one not particularly enamoured with the casting this season. I'm Australian and have never heard of this athlete even though local media goes nuts about every single Aussie who makes it big in the US, and the other reveal here was peak "hey, it's that guy!"

Yeah, they're definitely going for the "best of the best" vibe of Eurovision. I don't think there's many household names (it's basically just those four I mentioned and Bolton, so even though none of them are really that current - Jewel and Macy have both been demoted to appearing on versions of The Masked Singer within the last year, for example - I wouldn't be too shocked if they end up split into one heat each, just like I'm expecting the territories to be split up), but almost all of them have recording deals or TikTok fame already or have worked with big stars or so forth.

Macy Gray, Jewel, Sisqo, and The Crystal Method are representing Ohio, Alaska, Maryland, and Nevada. I think the thing to remember is these are all legitimate recording acts who are already in the industry to various degrees; it's not like they raided Youtubers who were edited out of The Voice when none of the judges picked them. Puerto Rico: Possibly? I don't think it's an actual rule that they have to sing in English - again, this is based on Eurovision, which kept "you must sing in your own language" as a rule until Ireland and the UK kept winning every year (added context: one of this show's executive producers, Christer Bjorkman, represented his native Sweden right at the start of this era) - but also I don't think there's many other acts that might sing in other languages? Like maybe the territories and Hawaii, but from the mainland I don't think there's any First Nations acts. Arizona's got a Latina folk duo who seem likely to sing in Spanish, but that's about it.