'Idol' develops mean streak in season 5

LOS ANGELES -- Considering it's the biggest kid on the block, "American Idol" is becoming quite the bully.\nFox's talent contest has regularly made an art of mocking the untalented who expose their dreams of stardom on TV, but the show's fifth year has the stench of a mean season.\nVulnerable contestants are coming in for more ridicule; bounced contestants are unleashing more extended and expletive-laden attacks on the judges and, we are warned, the future will demonstrate how vicious singers can be when they really want to win.\n"We now have contestants who will not let anything get in their way of victory," host Ryan Seacrest told The Associated Press before the show returned. "Some contestants have thrown each other under the bus this season."\nMuch is at stake. Producers FremantleMedia North America, Inc. and 19 Entertainment, who again have delivered the No. 1-rated show to Fox (last week's premiere drew a record 35.5 million viewers), are under pressure to keep the format a lucrative draw.\n"Shows have to reinvent themselves to stay fresh and invigorated for all these years," said analyst Shari Anne Brill of New York-based Carat USA.\nWeight and sexuality are favorite targets, as in previous seasons and just like around the typical school yard. But there is new venom in everybody's blood, and emotional fragility be damned.\nThis especially cheap insult came from a man who also knows how to wittily target the performance, not the person. He once compared a singer to a "waiter in a ghastly Spanish nightclub," and said a yodeled song was "a cross between a rodeo and 'La Cage Aux Folles.'"\nCut and print it; that's the kind of humiliation that sells.\nCowell and host Ryan Seacrest are known for their faintly gay-mocking banter, but the limits have become so stretched that the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation contacted Fox to voice concerns regarding the show's treatment of "sexual orientation and gender expression."\n"The real offense here was in the producer's decision to add insult to injury by turning a contestant's gender expression into the butt of a joke," spokesman Damon Romine said in a statement posted on the group's Web site.