Heather Havrilesky

The festivities featured an outdoor stage in Hollywood where many of the eliminated contestants sang (reminding us, in many cases, why they were eliminated), footage of stadiums filled with screaming fans in the finalists’ home states of Georgia and North Carolina, an extended version of the usual dorky play-by-play by host Ryan Seacrest, an alarmingly amateur, horribly choreographed medley featuring this year’s “Idol” contestants, and interviews with stars attending the show. To top off all of the hoopla, Jennifer Love Hewitt was on hand, MTV-style, to chatter aimlessly with whoever would have her.

Jennifer Love Hewitt: Hawaii’s my favorite place in the entire world!

Jasmine Trias: Oh God, it’s the best!

Love Hewitt: You rock!

Sitting through the “American Idol” finale was like watching a national championship sporting event, except that the event took place the night before, and fans were gathered merely to learn who won and to celebrate the outcome — for approximately seven minutes. At least Simon Cowell could be trusted to say something outrageous in that matter-of-fact, sociopathic tone that tells you he’s not just playing it up for the cameras.

Seacrest: What’s the most difficult part about being a judge on “American Idol”?

Cowell: Uh … The most difficult judge? Most difficult part … Um, it’s not difficult for me because I’m the one on the show — without sounding conceited — who actually knows what they’re talking about.

Cowell’s vanity is justified, since his sense and sensibility were the only things viewers could count on during the third “Idol.” First there was the slightly sad popularity of William Hung, with his tone-deaf rendition of “She Bangs.” Then there was the premature dismissal of two of three extremely talented African-American women, La Toya London and Jennifer Hudson, whose powerful voices put other finalists like John Stevens and Trias to shame. Then there was the disastrous all-Gloria Estefan show, in which contestants sang painfully bad hits like “Rhythm Is Gonna Get You” and “Conga” while the audience and judges winced. While Cowell has had fewer nice things to say than ever, judge Randy Jackson has appeared to be using all of his strength to swallow back the urge to proclaim the voting racist, and even Paula Abdul seemed a little off-kilter each week, replacing her usual servings of unfocused positivity with tense, emotionally overwrought haikus that neither the audience nor her fellow judges seemed to comprehend.

But one force has kept this season together: Fantasia Barrino. A 19-year-old single mother from High Point, N.C., Barrino offered consistently stunning performances with a distinct voice that sounds like a cross between Macy Gray and Aretha Franklin.

While the other contestants were on par with the stars of high school musicals, ensemble Broadway performers and the cast of Disneyland variety shows, Fantasia revealed herself to be a superstar. On Tuesday night when DeGarmo took the stage to sing “I Believe,” the song written by former “Idol” finalist Tamyra Gray set to be the winner’s first release, the whole thing played out like a pretty impressive number by a high school show choir. When Fantasia performed the same song an hour later, the audience at the Kodak Theater rose to its feet. Even the backup gospel singers, dressed in red robes, smiled widely and came alive, thrilled to be a part of such a great performance. Fantasia was in the zone. From the softest moments of the song to its rabble-rousing chorus, when Fantasia sang “I Believe!” all of the tackiness of the phone-elected pop star evaporated and we believed right along with her.

There are plenty of good performers in the world, but probably only a handful who come alive under the spotlight, hypnotizing everyone within a square mile: Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, James Brown, Bono, Bruce Springsteen. I still remember the first time I saw Prince perform “Little Red Corvette” on “Solid Gold.” He was so intense, so unusual, his movements so self-assured and eccentric. I was maybe 8 years old, but I remember asking my older brother, “Who is that guy?” “Oh, Prince?” he said, knowingly. “Yeah, he’s pretty weird.” I knew immediately that he meant pretty weird in the extremely cool sense.

Fantasia Barrino is pretty weird. During many of her performances, she moves around in the audience, hunched over, not really connecting with the masses so much as having her own strange kind of fun with them. For all of her humility and thanking-the-good-Lord, Barrino has a swagger that other “Idol” contestants have lacked. Most of all, like all great performers, she locates the emotional center of a song and sinks her teeth into it. People have raved for weeks about her sublime rendition of “Summertime” from “Porgy and Bess.” It’s a song that’s hard to hear without imagining Billie Holiday’s purring voice, yet Barrino somehow managed to inject her own flavor of heartbreak and triumph into its strains. And when she sang “Chain of Fools” a few shows back, it was as if she had never heard Aretha’s version at all — she was a woman possessed, shaking and growling, her eyes rolling back in her head as she wailed that she was nothin’ but a fool.

Poor DeGarmo, with her shiny pantsuits and bad hair, looks like a miniature car-rental agent onstage next to Barrino. It’s incredible that anyone saw this as a competition at all. While DeGarmo pastes on her best “Up With People” face and belts out her numbers like a teenage Little Orphan Annie, Barrino inhabits the stage like the world is hers for the taking. To be fair, the contestants sing some of the most difficult pop ballads around — many of them roam far from the average singer’s range. But Barrino always seems to trust her voice, so much that she’s free to play with each song, free to dance around as she feels moved to do so, free to unleash an emotional storm on the audience.

Unlike former winners Kelly Clarkson and Ruben Studdard who, for all of their talent, would never be in the spotlight without a show like “American Idol,” Barrino is a natural star and a fantastic performer who richly deserves every bit of the fame and fortune that she’ll get from this experience. Whether or not “American Idol” goes down in history as an absurdly fluffy, escapist diversion from these dark times, Fantasia Barrino has a gift that could make her bigger and brighter than the pop cultural supernova that created her.

To all of Salon’s readers: You’re some of the most engaged and outspoken readers on the Web, and my writing has benefited from both your criticism and your encouragement. I genuinely appreciate your support over the years. Please feel free to drop me a line via Twitter, keep up with my latest work through my website, the rabbit blog, and look for my memoir, “Disaster Preparedness,” on Dec. 30 from Riverhead Books.

Few writers ever get the chance to enjoy a job that’s as creatively fulfilling as this one, or to write for an audience as smart and as insightful as Salon’s. Although it’s time for me to move on to new challenges, I will look back fondly on my years at Salon and feel grateful for them.

While the old familiar faces of late night don’t do much more than make us chuckle ourselves to sleep at night, one man has been calmly and quietly upping his game: Jimmy Kimmel. Despite his distance from the action, it was Kimmel who took some of the most direct shots at Leno during the late night wars. In addition to imitating Leno on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and then appearing on Leno’s show and insulting him to his face, Kimmel has been more outspoken than Conan himself about Leno’s sneaky strategy to take back “The Tonight Show” (although Bill Carter’s new book, “The War for Late Night,” seems to suggest that Leno wasn’t quite so calculating as Kimmel and others seem to assume). When asked in an interview with GQ this month what he learned from the late night dust-up, Kimmel replied: “The lesson is, it pays to be sneaky. I think that’s the main thing I learned. That, and don’t trust Jay Leno.”

It’s this frank talk that sets Jimmy Kimmel apart from his peers. Throw in the sharpest and funniest opening monologue on late night, an incredible knack for improv, and liberal use of off-kilter gimmicks and skits, and it’s no wonder that Kimmel has risen to the rank of late night king. Whether he’s launching a multitiered attack on Facebook idiocy with his National Unfriend Day, finding creative new ways to insult Matt Damon, or shooting an entire episode during a power outage using only his webcam, Kimmel has always had that combination of swagger and imagination that separates the good talk show hosts from the great ones. Like Johnny Carson and Letterman in his heyday, Kimmel has the bluster and the quick wit to make every moment watching him on the air feel dynamic and exciting.

That’s no small feat, of course, but it’s what real late night heroism demands. Kimmel tackles pop culture with more sharp wit and weirdo flair than any of the other late night hosts, whether he’s addressing the new Spider-Man musical (“I’ve been working on a superhero show myself, it’s called ‘Aquaman on Ice.’ Aquaman on skates, trying desperately to speak to his friends who are trapped under the layer of ice. That’s a musical!”), rumors that Snoop Dogg will play at Prince William’s bachelor party (“I’m excited for His Highness, and by His Highness, I mean both of them”), airline security pat-downs (“We freak out if a TSA agent touches us on the outside of our pants, but Black Friday, we will hump each other’s heads to get at Walmart to save 8 bucks on a PSP”), or even the plans to have Lindsay Lohan appear on “Dancing With the Stars” (“I would love to see her vomit on Len Goodman”).

When he’s interviewing guests, Kimmel is arguably better on his feet and more ready with unexpected quips than any other host. On a recent episode when Ben Affleck waxed sympathetic about hard economic times in America, Kimmel soon hinted that no one wants to hear a megastar fake emotion for the little people.

Affleck: I don’t think there’s anybody in the United States that hasn’t been affected (by the recession) in some way or another.

Kimmel: Oprah hasn’t been affected at all.

On another recent episode, Kimmel took an otherwise bland interview with Kate Bosworth and livened it up. (And let’s face it, the real test of good late-night hosting lies in finding some way to spice up interviews with dull, self-involved young actors and actresses. In addition to Kimmel, only Letterman and Craig Ferguson manage it with any regularity.)

Bosworth: (on her Korean co-star) He literally is the Brad Pitt of Korea. It’s pretty wild.

Kimmel: Really? ‘Cause I was told I was the Brad Pitt of Korea. That’s disappointing. I feel like I was lied to. (pause) He’s the Brad Pitt of Korea. And so does that mean he adopts a whole bunch of white kids, or how does that work?

He even managed to save an interview with Paris Hilton from the bowels of hell:

Hilton: (on her current boyfriend) Right now, I’m just so happy. He’s my best friend.

Kimmel: Wait a minute, now. I saw a television show in which you picked a best friend and he wasn’t it. Are you telling me that was not your real BFF?

Later, when Hilton called her new perfume “my tenth fragrance,” Kimmel countered, “That seems like too many fragrances to me.”

This is where the fans of Jimmy Fallon, who have been rallying lately to crown their contagiously giddy leader the supreme ruler of late night, really must admit defeat. While Fallon’s antics try our patience in all the right ways (Zach Galifianakis’ recent appearance, followed by a skit the very finest flavor of stupid, marked a recent high point), Fallon is a pretty bland interviewer, sometimes resembling Chris Farley’s guffawing yes-man talk show host of “SNL” legend. Nonetheless, Fallon is undoubtedly in the groove lately, with such sure-footed oddball gimmicks and quirky enthusiasm that it makes you wonder if “The Chris Farley Show” itself wouldn’t have morphed into something deliciously strange, if given enough time. And let’s face it, anyone who makes Helen Mirren play beer pong deserves at least an honorable mention, if not an Emmy.

While he might be the best Neil Young impersonator on late night (or anywhere else), Fallon has none of the subtle snideness that made Carson, Letterman and now Kimmel masters of the craft. Sure, the kind folks down at the local elementary school’s bake sale might find such a tone distasteful, but the rest of us, who’ve been marinating in a toxic mix of “The Love Boat,” People magazine and celebreality shows for years now, need a healthy dollop of scorn to make the celebrity promotional appearance go down a little more smoothly.

Fans of Craig Ferguson will point out that he shares the requisite doubting tone in his interviews, and also scores very high for sheer courage of conviction. And it’s true that to watch half a second of Ferguson’s show is to love him, from his googly-eyed knowing looks to his perverse but genius rambling asides. His self-effacing charms make his perhaps the most unpredictable and unruly of the late night shows. However enchantingly strange Ferguson’s monologues and interviews may be, they just don’t stack up to Kimmel’s.

And like Letterman, Kimmel carries the torch of bemoaning his network overlords, lamenting the dumb stuff ABC makes him promote. The imbedded advertising — Bud Light signs on the stage, Old Navy promotions at the start of the show, constant appearances by “Dancing With the Stars” contestants — isn’t all that easy to ignore, but Kimmel makes the best of it. He’s taken to calling himself “the three-headed dog the stars must pass on their way to no-dancing hell,” and after that show’s big finale, he told his audience, “I tell you something, I had a good morning. I woke up this morning, and for about three minutes, couldn’t remember who won “Dancing With the Stars” this year. It felt great, it really did.”

But Kimmel should wake up feeling great every morning. After all, who would’ve thought that this guy would be the big winner of the late night debacle of 2010? When you flip from Conan to Leno to Letterman, or stay up for Carson Daly or Fallon or Ferguson, even though you might appreciate Ferguson’s bizarro self-deprecating digressions or Fallon’s raw enthusiasm, Kimmel is the only host who will make you laugh out loud more than a few times per episode. He’s got the sharpest monologue, the most interesting digressions and skits, and the best interviewing skills. Now that the dust has cleared, “The Tonight Show” doesn’t look like a prize worth squabbling over, because, with or without the Cheesecake Factory backdrop, Jimmy Kimmel is the new Johnny Carson.

“OK, have a great weekend!” I replied.

Old people are a little checked out, it’s true. But we’re amiably comatose. This friendly state of autopilot is the only way we’ve found to manage our dashed dreams, our growing contempt for the culture, our creeping disappointments, our fibromyalgia. We grind our teeth at night and have vivid dreams about screwing cheerleaders. We resent the unflattering shape of matchstick jeans and daydream about gigantic claw-foot bathtubs we can’t afford. Our elbows hurt and our hair always looks bad and we secretly think all electropop sounds like Kraftwerk.

Recognizing the defeat in each other’s eyes, we smile warmly and say things like, “Of course! We’d love to,” and “Fantastic! I can’t wait!” because we recognize that everyone is flawed and just barely able to accept their own mediocrity or tolerate the frustrations of advancing age. The least we can do is be nice about it.

Youngish (under 35) skeptics will tell you that the men of “Men of a Certain Age” (premieres Dec. 6 on TNT) don’t talk like men at all, they talk like post-menopausal book club members. This show isn’t made for those youngish people, though. It’s made for the oldish (over 35) among us, who recognize the self-doubting, second-guessing, pot-bellied guys on their TV screen as a painfully palpable embodiments of the humiliations and tiny little ego victories of middle age.

The charms of “Men of a Certain Age,” like the charms of growing old, are lost on the common whippersnapper. While youngish people tend to reevaluate and reappraise their oldest friendships constantly, questioning whether this or that old friend is up to speed with just how advanced and mature and evolved the new “me” is, old people recognize that they haven’t actually advanced or matured or evolved much over the years. Thus do they humbly turn to each other, all rumpled feathers and matted fur, and sigh deeply. Less important than how far you’ve come, to old friends, is how far you haven’t come — and also, where you were before you got old. The fundamental importance of old friendships, plus that peculiar flavor of shared, comfy nastiness that bounces around between old friends — these make up the soft center of “Men of a Certain Age.” We grow old, we fail, we reproach the gods and grimace in pain, and then we meet to eat pie and complain at the same diner each week.

“Everybody’s like, ‘Oh, don’t give up on your dream, Terry!’” Terry (Scott Bakula) tells lifelong friends Joe (Ray Romano) and Owen (Andre Braugher) of his acting career. “What would’ve been so bad if I had, huh? We’re at this place in our lives, we’ve come all this way, and I’ve got nothing to show for it. You’ve got something — families, careers …”

“Families suck,” Joe replies. This harshness, which of course we don’t expect and don’t believe entirely (even from a divorced guy with an anxious teen son and a moody teen daughter), is what balances out the vulnerability of “Men of a Certain Age.” As hand-holdy as the talk can get, these guys are still just guys.

And if you think their confessional, supportive tone with each other comes out of left field, tell that to the wood fence contractor who volunteered to me last week that he’d been “journaling a lot” about his dad’s death, or the plumber who, apropos of nothing, discussed the struggles of raising teenagers. Middle-aged strangers tell each other emotional stuff out of the blue, and middle-aged friends tell each other everything. (The only exception may be certain varieties of hipster intellectual, who could literally chat about Sufjan Stevens’ latest album on their deathbeds instead of confessing the hopes, fears and regrets of their final hours.)

But the utter lack of hipness of “Men of a Certain Age,” the total lack of concern for what’s deemed cool and what isn’t, the complete disregard for matching the breakneck pace, the action, the swooning romances, the spitty outbursts, the shiny thrills of other TV shows, is exactly what makes this drama so lovable. Where other dramas would pack in more zaniness and intrigue in every available second of airtime, “Men of a Certain Age” rolls out the familiar, the ordinary, and locates poetic folds and sweet pockets of emotion therein: Joe’s employees are two pure-intentioned teenagers who are genuinely confused by his old-guy ways, and one slow-moving old Spanish-speaking guy, Carlos, who sleeps on the job but Joe still can’t stand to fire him (he lays him off then hires him back at the end of the first season). Owen works at a car dealership owned by his dad, a thoroughly mundane job that Owen dislikes most of the time, but also occasionally excels at. When he breaks away to work for another dealership at the start of the second season, his father is angry, but his respect and investment in his son finally start to emerge out of the fog of his constant hectoring. Even Terry, with his acting career, has encounters with the film industry that will strike anyone who’s actually worked production as hauntingly authentic, less focused as they are on stars and perks and glamour than on a steady flow of deeply humiliating interactions with the most unsavory sorts of egomaniacs imaginable. The big promises and untrustworthy allegiances Terry forms with one director (who refers to him, tellingly, as “T-bag”), only to have the rug pulled out from under him on a whim, echo some essential Hollywood experience that’s rarely portrayed with quite as much clarity and empathy.

But the big impact of this drama comes in its quietest moments: Joe and his son, Albert (Braedon Lemasters), are driving home from the movie theater after Albert has had an anxiety attack and insists that they leave. Suddenly, Albert wants to know if Joe is embarrassed by him. “Embarrassed? No, man. Never,” Joe says, his eyes starting to well up a little. “You’re my hero. I mean that. You’re doing great, man. I’m proud of you.” It’s simple dialogue, nothing fancy, nothing too clever or provocative, but that’s what gets you in the throat sometimes.

Like the oldish and crumpled and vaguely resentful among us, “Men of a Certain Age” casts aside sophistication and witty banter for the comfort of what’s real — even when what’s real is disappointments, missed connections and inadequate attempts to reassure. In accepting our frailty, we locate our souls.

You’re doing great, “Men of a Certain Age.” We’re proud of you.

Oh, and have a great weekend! 

The answer to that question, of course, is zero. Or as Lebowitz herself puts it when speaking to a roomful of young people, “There are too many books, the books are terrible, and it’s because you have been taught to have self-esteem.” This is Lebowitz’s distinct talent: making elitist contempt sound charming.

Toni Morrison, a friend of Lebowitz’s, puts it a little differently. “You seem to me almost always right,” she tells Lebowitz. “But never fair.”

“That’s why,” Lebowitz responds. “I’m always right because I’m never fair.”

Most of us secretly wish that we could be as right and as unfair as she is. But the world has changed a lot since “Metropolitan Life” was first published in 1974. Being unfair isn’t nearly as acceptable as it used to be. Today, people demand prose that is polite, respectful, nonjudgmental, and that never employs terms, phrases, suggestions or hints that could offend any segment of the population. People demand prose that isn’t prose, in other words.

Contrast that with almost any assertion made by Lebowitz in “Metropolitan Life” or “Social Studies”: Jews make good stand-up comedians. Sports are “dangerous and tiring activities performed by people with whom I share nothing except the right to trial by jury.” Communism is unpleasant because “I do not work well with others and I do not wish to learn to do so.” Children “tend to be sticky” and “respond inadequately to sardonic humor and veiled threats.”

“Public Speaking” (premieres 10 p.m. Monday, Nov. 22, on HBO) is also packed with Lebowitz’s clever observations, the most gratifying of which may be her reflections on the ways our culture has changed since her books were first published. “An audience with a high level of connoisseurship is as important to the culture as artists. That audience died in five minutes,” she says, referring to the AIDS epidemic. These days, Lebowitz says, “everything has to be broader, more blatant, more on the nose.” The problem? “Too much democracy in the culture, not enough democracy in the society.”

Lebowitz’s real strength, though, lies in explaining the different social classes to each other, either in her books or in Scorsese’s film. In “Social Studies” she includes a “Glossary of Words Used By Poorer People” including meatloaf (“A gloriously rough kind of pate”) and overworked (“an overwhelming feeling of fatigue, exhaustion, weariness. Similar to jet lag”), and outlines the trivializing effects of the international jet-setter (“What, after all, is London to a man who thinks of the whole Middle East as just another bad neighborhood and the coast of South Africa as simply the beach?”).

In “Public Speaking,” it’s clear that, although Lebowitz might mingle with elites, her underlying affections lie with the common man — as unsuitable as she might find his pants or his penchant for installing wall-to-wall carpeting in bathrooms. When the topic of how New York City has changed over the past two decades arises, Lebowitz says, “When a place is too expensive, only people with lots of money can live there. That’s the problem. You can like people with money, hate people with money. But you cannot say that an entire city with people with lots of money is fascinating. It isn’t.”

Even if her writers block continues for another three decades, Lebowitz herself remains undeniably fascinating. Scorsese’s documentary offers us a long overdue taste of her unique, queasily accurate perspectives on our culture — always right, never fair and never disappointing.