The Gutter Version

Popstars is back on RTL II—the channel that originally produced it, shunted it off to ProSieben when the format grew embarrassing, and has now apparently run out of better ideas. The first half of the premiere hurts. Not in the way real failure is painful, but in the way a cheap fluorescent tube hurts at two in the morning: sustained, low-level, and entirely avoidable.

Deutschland sucht den Superstar—whatever you think of Dieter Bohlen, and there’s plenty to think—at least commits to the spectacle. There’s a functioning machinery behind the cruelty, a certain grim polish to the whole operation. Popstars is the knockoff, the market-stall imitation, and the judging panel is where that gap becomes impossible to pretend away.

Detlef "D!" Soost has the interpersonal warmth of drain cleaner. He talks over everyone, steers every exchange back to himself, and receives a nervous amateur’s audition like a personal insult. The man has never encountered a moment he couldn’t make worse by taking it more seriously. I’ve been predicting a stress-induced cardiac event at some point this season and I’m standing by that forecast.

Nina Hagen I love unconditionally—she’s too far gone for this world in exactly the right way—but she keeps telling people whose voices have clearly given up that they’d be perfectly fine in a choir somewhere, and that isn’t kindness, it’s irresponsibility dressed as compassion. She redeemed herself tonight by going to bat for a seventeen-year-old named Melanie from Frankfurt against the united indifference of her male colleagues. That was enough. She stays on the right side of the list.

Dieter Falk is probably the most musically literate person in the room. You would never guess it from watching the show.

Teenstar disappeared into the void of cancelled television where bad ideas go to be forgotten. Popstars should follow it there, and soon.