‘American Idol XIV’ promo: Is hyping up Quentin Alexander – Harry Connick Jr. dispute wrong message?

Who knew that “American Idol” wanted to suddenly become professional wrestling? While we understand that this may sound somewhat ridiculous, that is how we feel to a certain extent after making it through the latest promo that Fox has released for Wednesday night’s show.

For some reason, almost half of the promo is spent making the argument between Quentin Alexander and Harry Connick Jr. into something violent. Meanwhile, the way that the promo is cut almost makes it out as though Quentin has some sort of malicious intent in approaching Harry at the table? There are many different charged words that we could use here to describe this promotional strategy, but we’ll go ahead and use the word “uncomfortable” instead, since there’s no truth to the idea of giving a contestant a menacing edit. Quentin was upset over his friends being in the bottom, and was just speaking his mind about it. Harry took the comments in a certain way, and then spoke his mind about it. That seems to be it. We don’t get the sense that these two are going to spend Wednesday shouting at each other rather than focusing on their jobs.

Yet, we cannot profess to being particularly surprised by any of this. Fox is a desperate network at the moment with this show: Ratings are tanking, and we would not be surprised if “American Idol” was put on hiatus for a couple of years. Selling it based off of talent hasn’t worked, so now they are trying to sell it off of drama – which makes sense in a  reality TV era that feeds off of drama… but this isn’t that kind of show.

Here’s a hint: We really doubt that a hiatus is going to work, either. It’s just not the cool, hip singing competition it used to be.

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