"The X Factor" debut showcases Stacy Francis and Chris Rene
(CBS) "The X Factor," Simon Cowell's new self-aggrandizing talent show vehicle, is like an airport novel. It has to keep you turning the pages. It has to have you on the edge of your seat, even if your seat is terribly comfortable sofa.
It has to raise your heartbeat to an elevated level and not allow it drop back to the level at which your brain becomes rational and your emotions recede to the same reading as when you wander into your local Starbucks.
So, at the show's debut Wednesday night, "The X Factor" had to give everyone something to think about, feel about and cry about.
Cowell is the man whose producers had discovered a troubled, but talented older woman called Susan Boyle. They'd turned her into a worldwide phenomenon - on another Cowell vehicle called "Britain's Got Talent."
So, knowing how well tugging at the world's heartstrings loosened the world's pursestrings, Cowell needed to find an equivalent. He found it in a single mom called Stacy Francis.
But wait, we'll come to Stacy Francis in a minute. That's how airport novels work. They keep you guessing. See? You're going to keep reading.
Let me tell you about Rachel Crow, the first ever auditioner on "The X Factor" USA. (Those who get through the auditions move on to so-called boot camp.)
Crow is 13-years-old, so you'll never see her on "American Idol."
She lives in a two-bedroom house. With five other people. She wants to win the $5 million prize offered by "The X Factor" so that - feel your pulse rising - she can get her own bathroom. This would be a very fine bathroom.
Crow, you see, is very fine 13-year-old singer. Her rendition of Duffy's "Mercy" was certainly better than most 13-year-olds could manage, especially in front of over 4,000 people.
Looking like a slightly inflated Annie from the musical, Crow offered all the sass of a nightclub singer - before that streak of unlucky relationships would reduce her to a hash-toking, hoarse-voiced depressive.
Crow's diction was splendidly idiosyncratic. She created so many novel vowels sounds that she sang the word "begging" in the manner of a BBC newsreader enunciating the name of Israel's first Prime Minister. (You surely remember Menachem Beyyyyy-gin.)
As her family nervously swayed in the wings, Crow powered her way into notoriety.
"You opened up your mouth to sing and blew us away," declared Paula Abdul, the veteran judge of everything positive.
Cowell, naturally, was ebullient. "We're going to hear a lot about you," he declared, omitting to mention that we're going to be hearing a lot about her because Simon Cowell will make sure that we're going to be hearing a lot about her. He's a wily, smiley coyote is Simon.
So the tone was set. The auditions in front of excited thousands desperate to be excited were just so very exciting. And we were only 13 minutes into the two-hour show.
As Crow's family cried, the judges all gave her a "yes." To what? To the next chapter of the airport novel, of course.
"Get ready for a new bathroom," said Cowell.
The audience cheered. We all cried. The judges sipped from their Pepsi cups.
That's one of the main differences between "American Idol" and "The X Factor." The former is Coke, the latter is Pepsi, but both primarily sugar water.
What followed was a procession of those who made it and those whose only chance was to make us laugh.
Siameze Floyd, for example, was the latter. Billed as a "hotel performer," Floyd performed as if he had persuaded room service to get him early access to several of Eli-Lilly's experimental drugs. "You are talented, but you are deluded," declared Cowell, before deciding Floyd should be in the next chapter.
People, you see, will talk about this man called Siameze - who surely has no twin.
We had to pause for novelty acts, there to make us feel sad, sorry, uncomfortable and on the verge of the giggles, because these are stories too, such as a 70-year-old man and his 83-year-old wife who were to singing what the camel is to computing.
Their rendition of "Unchained Melody" was so unchained that it was like the rabid Rottweiler that comes into your garden and tries to feast on your thigh.
As the hopefuls and the desperates wandered through the stage, Cowell's producers tried to set up a tension between the great man and L.A. Reid, perhaps America's most vaunted music executive, who was at the other end of the judging table.
And so we come to Stacy Francis.
She's 42 years old, a single mom of two little ones. She sings late at night in the bathroom when the kids are asleep. She sings Aretha Franklin or Whitney Houston. Or even Celine Dion.
Her man, whom she met in her 20s, kept telling her that she was too old or that she wasn't talented enough. Are you crying yet? Because you will be.
She started believing her man. He began to push her around. She lost faith in herself, but now is the time. The time is now. Stacy needs to pay for her kids' schooling. The man, you see, has gone.
Chapter 42. Stacy Takes the Stage.
This woman blew the house down so fiercely that the four little piggies at the judges' table and the 4,000 people in the audience merely gaped in wonder.
If her rendition of "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" doesn't move you to some positive emotion, then you are from that part of Texas where the expression of positive feeling is subject to the death penalty.
It took just one sentence of Francis' singing for the audience to take her into its arms and declare her the true heroine of this airport novel. She deserved a standing ovation. She got one, even from the judges. She'd sung as if her life had depended on it because, in her eyes, it did.
Somewhere, "American Idol" winner Scotty McCreery might have wondered what singing really was. Somewhere, McCreery should have been balling his eyes out.
"I've done this a long, long time," said Cowell. "That was one of the best auditions I have ever heard in my life."
So, a star was made. So, millions of YouTubers will be enthralled in the next 24 hours. And we were only half way through the show. We hadn't even got to the point where a man dropped his trousers and exposed himself.
Geo Godley, a 43-year-old alleged internet blogger, claimed he was classically trained. Perhaps his classics collection includes the collected works of Jenna Jameson. We should have seen it coming when he said his song was called "I'm a Stud."
Of course, the producers never expected this. Of course, they were stunned. Of course, grass is purple. But here was Godley exposing himself to Paula Abdul. This was just plain wrong. Did anyone step in to stop him? Strangely, no. Was it good TV, which led the producers to include Godley's audition in the show? Not really, but they felt compelled to include this chapter.
Of course Reid decided - after the exposure had been fully taken - that it was "upsetting" and "disgusting". Ratings are next to Godleyness. Abdul, meanwhile, was last seen going into the restroom to be sick. Oddly - or should one say Godley? - it was the men's restroom.
After a pause for penance, we had a passable Stevie Wonder-impersonator, a strangely sophisticated man/boy band called "The Anser", a truly dreadful singer and a truly dreadful and delusional singer who tried to collar Cowell and get an explanation as to why he was so critical.
The producers saved Chris Rene, a 28-year-old singing and rapping trash collector who was 70 days out of rehab for the final chapter. He sang his own song, "Young Homey," and got a standing ovation and the blessing of the judges, who counseling him to stay on the straight and narrow.
"It's always my favorite feeling in the world when I sit in this chair and I meet a star for the first time. There is something about you and what I like is the fact that maybe you need the show and maybe we need you," Cowell said.
As if to remind everyone just how fleeting success is in Simon Cowell's world, the first half of the show featured a judge called Cheryl Cole.
Entirely unknown in the U.S., Cole proved to be, as a judge, bland. Her accent, though, proved to be largely incomprehensible.
So, by the second half of the show, Cole was Old Dethroned Queen Cole and in stepped Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger.
In the end, though, a man dropped his trousers and a single mom raised her hopes.
Welcome to the latest work of Simon Cowell. You know you want to turn the page, don't you?