Carly Smithson: In Memoriam

I should probably preface my writeup of American Idol‘s results episode by saying that I watched it while on a cross-country flight, which meant that a) I didn’t have a peanut gallery to bounce my observations off until much later and b) I had to keep any bon mots to myself, since the woman sitting next to me got visibly weirded out when I gasped at the banishment of Syesha Mercado, and not Brooke White, to the Bottom Two Stools. (She was watching Animal Planet with the sound off, so maybe I caused her to think that a tiger was actually sitting in 8E.) And after Carly joined her in the losers’ club–even after that cutaway where Jason Castro was caught yawning backstage!–I was expecting Syesha to get dispatched quickly, what with her suffering the curse of being not all that bad and first on a trainwrecky night.

But it wasn’t to be, and Carly got sent off in an anticlimactic, awkward way that didn’t even close out with her doing one last, rousing version of “Superstar” from Jesus Christ Superstar. Maybe she doomed herself by saying that she’d go all-out and have fun over the coming weeks of the competition; American Idol never rewards such “I’ll Stick Around”-dervied hubris in kind. But even after all the crap surrounding her time on the show–the major-label record deal that I read about when writing about music was still just a vague dream of mine, the “NO U R FAT” sign she posted on her fridge back then, the tattoos, the husband with the face tattoo, the increasingly visible desperation every time she talked about how she just wanted to make it–I grew to actually root for Carly somewhat.

In a way she seemed like a great big Cautionary Tale for David Archuleta and his dad; she was the groomed-from-birth girl whose teenage quest for stardom fizzled after a series of ill-fated moves by the people who should have been looking out for her (and maybe/probably by herself, too). (For some reason I feel like her career and Jordin Sparks’ recent travails should both send Archuleta running for a set of hills located somewhere bereft of cameras, and given that dude looked like a deer in the headlights for most of the evening, perhaps he’s starting to feel the same way.) Will tonight be her last chance at making it? Even with the definition of that two-word phrase becoming more and more nebulous, and dare I say damning, by the day, it’s doubtful; between the fragmentation of the musical landscape, the fact that I still have her version of “Superstar” in my head (and not in the annoying Flo Rida way), and her seemingly Broadway-ready voice I suspect that she’ll have some sort of a career over the coming years, one that won’t involve her living in a house equipped with cameras that run 24/7.

Also, how did Brooke White not go home? Keeping her around at this point = making the inevitable meltdown all the more of an utterly uncomfortable live-TV moment.

[Photo: AmericanIdol.com, since taking a picture of that little, DVR-free TV was a completely fruitless exercise]