Tonight's "Idol Gives Back" fundraiser stretched on for two hours tonight and bled into the 9 p.m. news, but it did include the usual "American Idol" axing.
Simon Cowell reported that the two-hour show raised $15 million for various charities. By the time he reported that, the show had passed the two-hour mark. It didn't end until 9:25.
But viewers did vote after Tuesday's performance show and they sent home mop-topped Tim Urban, a 20-year-old from Duncanville, Texas. He was a last-minute addition to the finals after another singer was disqualified.
Despite chronic criticism from the judges, the mediocre singer survived weeks longer than expected -- likely thanks to the little girl vote.
Joining this week's bottom three were Aaron Kelly, 17, of Sonestown, Pa. and Casey James, 27, of Fort Worth, Texas, who will be back next week.
This week's results leave six finalists standing in the competition for a recording contract.
As has become usual, nowhere near the bottom three was Crystal Bowersox.
Here is the video of the "Idol" frontrunner's Tuesday night performance of "People Get Ready."
It's being talked about as possibly the best single performance in the nine seasons of Fox's singing competition:
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
