Howard Stern on America’s Got Talent makes sense

NBC announced today that Howard Stern would be replacing Piers Morgan on America’s Got Talent.

This wasn’t just the right move, it was the only move. In Stern, NBC has acquired one of only two people in the English speaking world whose opinion doesn’t seem a completely calculated construction (the other, of course, is Simon Cowell).

Think I’m wrong? Consider the difficulty American Idol had in filling Simon’s chair.  AI is the biggest TV show on the planet, with enough money to fund their own snarky-judge engineering lab at UCLA Berkley, and yet they still had to abandon the search for another Simon.

AI settled — and I do mean settled — on the fading stars of two musicians to fill Simon’s chair. The show’s ratings didn’t flag, but let’s be honest, no one tunes in to hear what the judges have to say anymore.  We listen to the music, marvel at what J-Lo’s team of 61,000 stylists were able to do to her 41 year-old-skin, and occasionally laugh at Steven Tyler’s baby-talk gibberish.

But what we don’t do is wait for honesty. Real honesty went out the window when Simon left.

This isn’t the fault of AI’s producers. The only stars big enough for a huge network show have been so ground-down by decades spent telling producers and studio execs how brilliant they are, that I’m not sure anyone in Hollywood knows exactly what the truth is anymore.

(Quick side note: even David Cross, a comic who’s built part of his persona on a willingness to tell the truth, won’t name names. On a press junket for The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, he let it slip that his time spent on the second Alvin and the Chipmunks sequel was the worst he’s ever had in Hollywood.  When pressed for details, he declined.  You know you’ve been in Hollywood too long when you don’t want to piss off the producers of Alvin and the Chipmunks 3: Chip-Wrecked.)

So what does NBC get with Stern? Besides the loyal fan-base and the non-stop promotion on his radio show, they get, quite literally, the only human being on the planet Earth who is a bigger star than Simon Cowell who will also give his honest opinion of the acts performing for him.

That’s a big deal, and NBC knows it. That’s why they’re willing to move the show to New York to win Stern’s services. It’s also why they’re willing to weather the storm of Stern’s radio persona. It’ll be a lot of fun to watch NBC scramble to soothe Jay Leno’s ego the first time Howard decides he’s going to spend an hour breaking down what a phony, untalented rat he is.

More than that, though, what NBC just did was leap its also-ran American Idol clone right into rarified air of Dancing with the Stars and AI itself (and yes, I know I just used “rarified air” to describe a has-been dancing show and a karaoke contest, but writing about reality TV forces you to do that sort of thing). America’s Got Talent just became the most interesting talent show on TV, if not the most interesting show period.

I fully expect Howard to win over Middle America too. Most people who hate Stern do so because their priest or their feminist studies teacher told them they should. I’m convinced that they don’t actually listen to the show, especially now that it’s behind a pay wall.

Any fan will tell you that the key to Howard’s success was never the strippers or naked transsexuals, it was because of Howard himself. Sure there were days he talked about boobs and masturbation — okay, maybe there were entire months when all he did was talk about boobs and masturbation — but there were also hours he spent talking politics, or entertainment, or about the weirdos at his office.

The point is he never felt confined by his persona, which is a less obvious corollary to honesty. Guys who make their name on smut feel compelled to keep the smut going until all that’s left is doing play-by-play why a couple has sex in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Sure, it’s entertaining, but it’s playing towards a persona.

Howard never did that, he stayed true to himself even when that truth was off-putting to his hard-core fans. I mean, this is a guy who once did a TV special called Butt Bongo Fiesta, and now he talks about attending the North Shore Animal League’s “Dogcamedy Awards.”  Most people who got famous on the former would do everything they could to hide their participation in the latter, but not Howard.

So yeah, there are going to be people who say they hate Howard and that they’ll never watch the show again because of him, but far more people will be compelled to tune in and further compelled to come back every week to hear what Howard has to say. Remember, Americans hated Simon in his first season — he called fat people “fat” for God’s sake! — and by the time he left American Idol people were all but crowning him a National Treasure.

Finally, a few words about NBC’s huge cajones for making this move. It’s an obvious move from a talent point-of-view, but it’s a dangerous move, at least in the short run. There’s going to be a lot of ink spilled about this and a lot of organizations with the name “Family” somewhere in their title writing strongly worded letters to advertisers.

NBC is going to get heat, but not all of it will be good.

There’s a certain advantage, I think, to being in last place. It lets you take chances and experiment in a way that other networks can’t. For instance, Community is a show that any other network would have dumped by October of its first season, but NBC stuck with it for three seasons and (Reformed Neo-Buddha willing) for more after that.

Freedom’s just another word for having nothing left to lose.  Put another way, freedom means taking a chance on a guy who once threw baloney at a naked woman’s ass.

I know I’ll be watching.

Clacked by Jay Black
on Dec 15, 2011 @ 13:36 EST5EDT