Finally, the producers of Fox "American Idol" have discovered the Internet and Facebook, which will be part of the voting process as this 10th season moves into the semifinals tonight at 7 on Channel 6.
Milwaukee's sole semifinalist, Naima Adedapo, won't sing until Wednesday night, when the 12 female singers perform for viewer votes. The males sing tonight in a 90-minute episode. On Thursday, finalists will be picked in a two-hour episode.
In addition to the traditional phone voting, on-line voting details will be available at americanidol.com.
"Idol" moves into a key phase starting tonight, focusing on a small enough group of singers to begin to connect with the audience.
While the ratings have been off a bit from last year, the move to a regular Thursday night slot has been a success for Fox. Last Thursday's show, when the last of the 24 semifinalists were revealed, pulled in around 21.5 million people, according to Nielsen Media Research numbers.
On to Naima: Along with being a singer, Adedapo, has been a dancer with the Ko-Thi Dance Company, and dance alumnus of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Peck School of the Arts. As her "Idol" audition tape showed, she was a summer worker at Summerfest, where her duties included cleaning bathrooms.
The 26-year-old Adedapo made it into the competition at last year's Milwaukee auditions.
She's the daughter of Adekola Adedapo, a Milwaukee jazz performer since the 1970s.
Naima got the word on last Wednesday night's show that she was the first singer picked for the semifinals. She was crying before she got the word.
"You question yourself and everything you've done," she told judges Randy Jackson, Steven Tyler and Jennifer Lopez.
"You've made it through," Tyler told her. "No more crying today," said Lopez. "Tears of joy," said Jackson, "stay strong."
This video shows Adedapo getting the word (about two and a half minutes in:
On TV: Gov. Scott Walker will deliver his budget address at 4 this afternoon, which will disrupt a bit of TV and radio. Channel 12 is moving Oprah Winfrey to 3 p.m. for today only.
- Sunday's Oscar telecast averaged 37.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen overnights. That's about 10 percent less than the 2010 crowd. Among viewers 18-49, important to advertisers, the rating was down 12 percent.
- Speaking of ratings, The New York Times has dug into the numbers for the new Oprah Winfrey Network and found that after two months on the year, ratings are 10 percent lower than the low-rated channel it replaced, Discovery Health Channel.
- MTV News is quoting David Cross as being less than optimistic that an "Arrested Development" movie will ever be made. "I'll believe it when I see it," he said at the Independent Spirit Awards.
- Speaking of Cross, IFC has picked up a second season of his wacky comedy, "The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret." The six-episode season will start airing in October.
- Showtime has ordered second seasons of "Episodes" and "Shameless."
Hard to watch, hard to look away: It looks like Charlie Sheen is self-destructing right before hour eyes in interviews with ABC and NBC. The ABC interview is being packaged into a one-hour program at 9 tonight on Channel 12.
CNN didn't get an interview, but invited psychologist Jeff Gardier to make the following diagnosis based on video:
"This is a guy who not only has a substance abuse issue, but he is also in the middle of a breakdown. He's in an acute manic phase ... Either he is going to end up in a rehab or psychiatric hospital."
Sheen's publicist quit on Monday, E! Online's Marc Malkin says CBS is talking to John Stamos to replace him as a new character on "Two and a Half Men."
Meanwhile, Sheen sat down with TMZ for yet another unsettling interview:
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.
