American Idol: The woman behind the curtain -- a conversation with Cecile Frot-Coutaz

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As the sun rises over North America Thursday, the continent will awaken to find itself in a terrifying new entertainment landscape –- a world without Melinda Doolittle.

By mid-morning Thursday, every TV morning show and radio call-in program will be ablaze with incendiary debates on what this means for the show, for entertainment, and for the nation. Some will call it the death of the franchise; others will say its business as usual. Many more will point out that winning isn’t even the point any more (see Chris Daughtry vs. Taylor Hicks).

The show which inspires more obsessive-compulsive dissection (see my previous 47 or so columns this season) than any the history of television has just thrown blood into its followers’ shark tank.

But behind the curtain, the woman at the helm of this circus feels your pain, and understands exactly how the show plays into your most obsessive tendencies. It all begins during the auditions, says Cecile Frot-Coutaz, ‘Idol’’s Executive Producer and CEO of FremantleMedia North America which along with Simon Fuller’s 19 Productions oversees the ‘Idol’ industrial complex.

She explains, “What’s different with this formula is with the audition phase as the viewer you get to play the A&R person. You’re in your couch at home and you see them walk in like they would walk into your office if you were that big music mogul and you get to say, ‘Yeah, he was bad. Yeah, he was good.’ It gets people invested early on in the process. As a viewer you can start rooting for Carrie Underwood or Kellie Pickler from that very early stage. So that by the time you get to the performance shows, you feel that they’re yours in some ways and you have a connection with them and you’ve established a relationship with that character from the moment they were a nobody and they walked into that room.”

And thus by the time a Melinda has made it to the top three you are presumably in a near frenzy of suspense rooting for this little wanna-be you discovered in the middle of nowhere to grab the brass ring of stardom.

Speaking in her office at the Burbank Fremantle headquarters the day before the final three performances, Frot-Coutaz, for someone sitting at the eye of entertainment media’s greatest running typhoon, presents an astonishingly pleasant, thoughtful and open demeanor. A French émigré to the U.S., she offers a picture sans rough edges of a Gallic Audrey Hepburn, more than the expected table-pounding Hollywood chieftain.

And with three contestants left, she seems entirely unruffled by concerns about the season.

“Every year is different,” she says. “There’s years where it’s obvious a contestant will stand out –- like the Carrie Underwood year. And there’s years when it’s less obvious. The first year was really not obvious at all. We thought Justin Guarini was going to win it. This year, I think, was more of a journey.

‘If you rewind the clock 12 weeks or 15 weeks I probably would have said, ‘Well, it’s going to be between LaKisha and Melinda.’ And now one of them is gone already and two people have emerged, making a lot of progress every week and really growing, which I think is what the show is about.”

As with many in the ‘Idol’ orbit, the universe’s most-watched show represents only a part of Frot-Coutaz’s empire.

For her, presiding over Fremantle’s North American operations means keeping tabs on a stable of properties, both created and acquired by the company, stretching from some of television’s most venerable old warhorses to today’s boundary-pushing reality shows.

On her plate the day we spoke, she tells: in addition to planning for the ‘Idol’ finals and beginning laying ground on Season 7, they’re setting up boot camp for “America’s Got Talent,” as well as dealing with some “issues with some contestants” that came up over the weekend; meeting about “American Inventor,” which begins shooting in three weeks, the format of which is still being tweaked; auditioning new hosts for ‘Price Is Right’ to replace Bob Barker whose retirement looms a month away; and tending to overall business affairs (the Fremantle North American empire includes everything from ‘American Idol’ Summer Camp to a ‘Price Is Right’ slot machine business).

Ironically, as ‘American Idol’ feels like and is seen as the most American of programs, the show’s entire package –- format, logo, theme music –- is part of a worldwide brand tended to by Fremantle. The company exists at the forefront of a global television marketplace, developing franchises in individual markets (‘Idol,’ of course, was first developed in Britain) for export and replication around the globe.

“We’re all about creating formats or acquiring formats and producing them in as many countries as possible. We’re probably one of only two content companies that operate on a worldwide basis,” Frot-Coutaz declares.

‘Idol’ currently airs in “30 markets. And it’s succeeded in every one. It’s never failed. Now, some places did better than others but it’s never failed.”

Asked what gives a show universal appeal, Frot-Coutaz illustrates the universal verities with a non-’Idol’ exemplar.

“‘America’s Got Talent’ has traveled incredibly well in a very short period of time. One reason is everybody, every country has, you know, a variety of talent, every country has its share of jugglers, magicians, dance groups, bands, ventriloquists, you name it. And whether I’m French, Polish, American, British, Australian, German –- those will be entertaining to me. And the bad ones will be as entertaining as the good ones. And those are universal characteristics, so when you get that pitch, you can see how that has mass appeal. And more importantly it also has a format. So there’s a kind of recipe book that you can apply.”

Like most of the other ‘Idol’ producers, Frot-Coutaz believes that transparency and choice are crucial to Idol’s success -- the audience’s belief that this is their show and everything is out in the open. She thus expresses chagrin on the subject of conspiracy theories surrounding the show’s voting system. As the mechanisms have never been fully displayed to the public, it raises eyebrows among the most suspicious of viewers.

Speaking at length about the voting system, Frot-Coutaz ran through how the process works. “It’s not mysterious really. Where do I start?” she sighs. She explains that the toll-free numbers are managed by AT&T, which has agreements with the local exchanges that put the calls through. Another company, Telescope, tabulates the raw data, analyzes them by area code and turns them into results.

She continues, “But if at any point anything looks different or that we may have questions about, we have the ability to go back to AT&T and to the labs and say, ‘We’d like to see all the minute-by-minute data on area code, whatever, 201.’ And they can dig into the data and sort of give us that level of detail.”

Asked what would draw her attention, she explains, “Occasionally we’ve had situations where two people at the bottom were very close, so, when that happens you want to go back and just make sure all the phone lines work properly everywhere so that you know, the result is the results. It’s more about evaluating the results than anything else. You just want to make sure.

“We’ve had a few situations that were a bit hairy. The show goes out at 6 p.m. live on Wednesday and by the time the phone lines close, it’s actually like 2 or 3 in the morning. It’s actually quite a decent amount of time to do some data analysis if we need to. And the AT&T guys, you know, they’re great; it’s what they do all day long. They’re very quick.”

Much discussed in ‘Idol’ pundit circles is the practice of automated or “power” voting, facilitated by websites such as DialIdol, which provide tools for repeat dial. Equally discussed is a line of small print in ‘Idol’s’ official explanation of voting procedures that states that the producers retain the right to disqualify votes if they see evidence of power voting.

Some in the ‘Idol’ conspiracy community have pointed to this as a possible way producers might fix the results. However, Frot-Coutaz states for the record that while the show has the ability to spot and quickly disqualify power voting where it may occur, “It turns out that’s never happened. Think about it -– there’s millions of votes per contestant. So, when something goes, that’s hundreds of thousands of votes usually between two contestants. So to make a difference you need to have a lot of more of these power-dialers than people claim there are.”

Looking from on high at the success of her empire, Frot-Coutaz names a score of reasons that contribute to the ‘Idol’/Fremantle juggernaut, top among being the strength and talent of the people who put the shows together. But ultimately, looking at how well things have worked out for her since landing on America’s shores she modestly quotes her countryman Napoleon Bonaparte saying most of all, he wanted “generals who had good luck.”

And as another season draws to a climactic close on American Idol, it looks as through Cecile Frot-Coutaz’s luck is going to hold out a fair while longer.

(Photo by Michael Robinson Chavez / LAT)