Let's talk about 'American Idol' spoilers

Who is Cardin McKinney and why are there blogs and websites dedicated to her? Why are "insiders" with "reliable information" on forums predicting that she's the next American Idol winner?

[Warning... This article doesn't contain any spoilers, but it talks about spoilers. If knowing the existence of spoilers is likely to spoil things for you, then stop reading.]

The short answer is that Cardin McKinney is a 20-year-old singer from Nashville-via-Alabama. If you journey over to her MySpace page, she's got a nice husky voice and she's darned attractive. She's also apparently a contestant on this season's Idol, though neither her audition nor her audition city have made it to air yet.

Support for this contestant, who hasn't even made a blip on the radars of the 30 million fans whose viewing consists solely of watching Idol on TV, is so strong on some message boards that a Cardin backlash has already begun. An alleged contestant who hasn't appeared on national TV, hasn't had to deal with an awkwardly incompatible theme night, hasn't faced the week-to-week scrutiny of the judges is already facing fierce debate on whether or not she's overrated.

American Idol has become a little weird.

For several years, FOX and the show's producers have done a good job of keeping a handle on the unique tightrope that American Idol has to walk. On one hand, the show is meant to be all about live-ness. The winners are chosen by the American People voting with reliably arbitrary weirdness on a week-to-week criteria known only to them. Every week's decision offers the potential for a surprise, either in the Bottom Three or the elimination and even prognostication sites like DialIdol, sites I frequent myself, haven't taken the edge off of an occasional shocker.

That being said, as much as American Idol is about live-ness from mid-February on, FOX gets its best ratings of the season out over the increasingly prolonged audition episodes that fill six-to-eight weeks of chilly winter programming, episodes that were filmed months ago.

It used to be that with the usual non-disclosure agreements and general media silence, FOX could air the auditions and the Hollywood round and the results were kept under wraps. This year, though, a poster on IdolForums.com put up a list of the Top 50 back in December, a list culled from a mixture of online sleuthing, word-of-mouth and circumstantial evidence. As American Idol reporting goes, it's a fine piece of investigative journalism.

While I'm treating my own recaps of the show like just a normal viewer at home, I confess that I've glanced at the spoilers and I know that even though we've only seen two episodes, several of my favorites were cut in the Hollywood round. I also know that as of midweek, it's expected that the Top 24 will have been notified and given how many ships have already been sunk by loose Idol lips, reports will probably be all over web within hours.

We had a bit of a breach on the previous post, titled Telling apart your Week One 'Idol' blondes. A commenter named SirMac, a regular on IdolForums, sarcastically said that a YouTubed primer of similar contestants sent to Hollywood was pointless because at least half of them had already been eliminated in yet-to-air episodes.

That made me feel like clarifying the policy of this blog and this site when it comes to reality TV spoilers.

Once something has aired on the East Coast, it's fair play. If you're on the West Coast, that isn't a huge hardship. You just want to avoid this blog in the couple hours between airings, because if there's a live elimination, we're going to report on it live. At that point, it's news and we're a news site.

I'm treating the auditions and Hollywood material in the same way I treat any taped reality show, from Hell's Kitchen to Survivor. While there may be reports online that spoil variable amounts of the results, the vast vast vast majority of viewers prefer to let the results come to them on a week to week basis, rather than rushing online to have them spoiler. There are plenty of sites out there for that, but this won't be one.

That doesn't mean I don't read the spoiler sites and I haven't decided if I'm going to want to see the Top 24 when it's leaked, much less if I'll do a blog post on it here. If I do decide to blog on it, it'll be surrounded by more "SPOILER" warnings than you can possibly handle.

But I want to get the temperature in the room. If you're an Idol fan, are you checking the spoiler sites? Are you curious? Or do you like pretending that this part of Idol is unfolding in front of you?

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