Idol Chatter: Coming to America ...

This morning Jaded Insider tried to recall if there were any episodes in “Idol” seasons past that amounted to a bigger train wreck than the chaos that was Neil Diamond night. Aside from the few shocker elimination episodes (Tamyra Gray from Season 1 instantly came to mind), we got nothin’. Last night was a mess. Period.

To sum it up, it was a whirlwind of cram-absolutely-everything-imaginable-into-60-minutes episode featuring a perverse order of two-song singing/judging and Paula Abdul at her peak of bizarre-o.

Come to think of it, all the judges appeared to be functioning in an alternate universe of sorts. Obviously the night’s biggest flub was Paula critiquing a song Jason Castro didn’t even sing, which led us to speculate how exactly the paper on which they wrote said critiques came to be. But in any case, aside from that, Simon called David Cook’s flashback-to-a-bad-wedding-in-1989 crapola power ballad take on “All I Really Need is You” (ohh, the oh-so-touching electric guitar searing through the background) “modern,” Syesha was talked down to, again, and so help us, if we hear David Archuletta heralded as a “prodigy” one more friggin time …

We’re still struggling with who did what and how they did and what the hell plastic/pleather logo thing was on David Cook’s jacket, but for what it’s worth, we look for Brooke (who wrote lyrics on her hand) or Syesha to get canned.

Meanwhile, this little news item was a bigger distraction for us yesterday than anything that went down on last night’s actual episode. A pillow case? Seriously?