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Already, The Voice is just about over. Tomorrow, the field of four contestants gets wiped away and we get a winner. This show could've kept going for another three months or so if it followed a less fucked-up elimination schedule, but maybe NBC didn't realize they had an actual hit on their hands. This two-hour show was a weird one, with all the contestants teaming with their coaches for duets and also singing original songs—and original songs on televised singing competitions are never good. Structurally, the show remains a mess, and I hope some of the problems will be fixed next season. But all four remaining contestants are people who I could imagine having careers in music, and that's not something I can say about any single season of American Idol. The people behind The Voice did a pretty amazing job picking talent, if nothing else.

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​One thing about The Voice that bugs me: Way too many people getting sent home way too quickly. It's hard to develop that much of a connection to the contestants when half of them get axed once a week. So on this results show, people were, once again, just dropping like flies. Would it kill this show to stretch things out a little longer? It's not like NBC has shit else going on.

Another thing that bugs me: How do people get sent home again? The results came from some combination of coaches' scores and audience votes, but Carson Daly didn't exactly do a bang-up job explaining how it would work, or which was weighted more. At this point, it's been firmly established that the coaches love everyone, so why not leave it up to audience votes entirely? Is that such an awful idea?

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Vicci Martinez performs "Dog Days Are Over."

​I wish Game of Thrones was still on. It isn't. But hey, The Voice is still on!

On last week's show, it seemed pretty obvious which four singers would make it through and which ones wouldn't. On Team Cee Lo, for instance, it was absolutely not a surprise that Vicci Martinez would be the one voted through. The only surprise came when Vicci stood up next to the other members of her team and revealed herself to be tiny. She's Peter Dinklage height; if she'd gone home, she would've had to travel to King's Landing to become the new Hand. Probably even Cee Lo is taller. It also wasn't surprising to hear Cee Lo go into phantasmagoric funkateer detail about how much he loves each and every one of the singers on his team, though it was pretty fun. And then, when he picked friend-of-a-friend Nakia as the one guy to stick around, I'd already called it exactly. So, you know, I'm awesome. Good choices, everyone.

(Quick Nakia update: Marc Hogan, my friend and his former showgoing buddy, reports that Nakia does, in fact, have a last name, though I've already forgotten it. The shows, Marc confirms, were probably John Mayer shows, though Nakia was probably going because he was friends with the opening band or some shit.)

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​Hey, The Voice! It's still pretty good! And right now, there's pretty much nothing else on TV except for Game of Thrones!

On last night's episode, Carson Daly, you'll be happy to learn, moved on from the detestable suit-with-sneakers look he was rocking last week. Unfortunately, he swapped that thing out for a leather jacket over a shirt and tie. Will somebody teach this man how to dress like an adult? If he's going to step into the singing-show-hosting game, he has to look the part. I'm harping on this because it just demonstrates how woefully underqualified Carson is for a job that, as it turns out, must be pretty hard. Ryan Seacrest only makes it look easy; all the little things that the guy does improve his show vastly. Carson has been blessed with a relatively entertaining show; he's just not living up to it. Cee Lo could've fixed all this just by lending Carson his incredibly sparkly jacket, but I don't blame Cee Lo for wanting to hold onto that thing.

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​After the first of its live shows, some real problems have emerged with The Voice. Similar to the last season of American Idol, none of the celebrity panelists is willing to say anything remotely critical, although that reluctance at least makes more sense here because they're supposed to be coaches, and not judges. It's becoming increasingly obvious that all the other coaches can't stand Christina Aguilera and that she really doesn't have her shit together enough to be on live TV. Carson Daly sucks so bad, and I especially can't stand how he doesn't just throw to the judges after the performances; he has to say something like "That was great! Cee-Lo, wasn't that great?" And yet I still enjoyed the show way more than anything I just wrote would indicate, since it's a fresh format with a bunch of engaging people who can actually sing and since there's always the chance that we'll get to hear one of the coaches sing.

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The Voice is now a month or so in. It's a massive hit. It's the show NBC's putting on after the Super Bowl. It's out of American Idol's shadow. And it's a week away from becoming a live show and really launching into its season. It has arrived. So someone should really say something about Christina Aguilera's boobs at this point, right? Because goddamn she is proud of those things. They're a constant distracting presence on this show, always barely concealed by whatever she's wearing, always threatening to bust loose and run amok. If nothing else, they're a reason to keep watching once the show goes live next week.

The best reason to keep watching, though, is still the show itself, because it's a fun and inventive and just generally pretty good reality show that knows how to get the best out of its participants. This week was the last of the totally absorbing battle weeks, and I'll miss them.

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Michael Becker/FOX

​A deeply frustrating season of American Idol is over now, having discovered exactly zero future stars, and last night we got the massive glitzathon finale, an annual event that reliably has little or nothing to do with the rest of the season. Scotty McCreery barely even looked surprised to win the thing, and he only wisely half-bothered to sing "I Love You This Big," his dog-ass first single. Still, this turned out to be a shockingly fun results show, especially given how boring the last few weeks have been. Scotty could have a career, or he could not; it doesn't even really matter. What matters is the show managed to pull its shit together for its final night of the season.

At the outset, we got a montage of the judges saying tortuously nice things about Scotty and Lauren Alaina, something they've been dutifully doing all season. When that was over, Ryan Seacrest told us that the season racked up damn near a billion votes, so someone at AT&T is swimming through a giant bank of texting fees, just like Scrooge McDuck. Seacrest wore a classic, well-tailored black tuxedo; Randy Jackson wore an ass-ugly clown tuxedo; Steven Tyler wore a bunch of chains around his neck and just looked real extra Geico Caveman. This was a big night!

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​On the same night that American Idol rumbles on to its inevitable conclusion, it's pretty great to switch the channel over an hour later and catch one of these zippy, not-too-serious battle-round episodes of The Voice. This show has its problems, and it's still very early on, but right now it's just whupping Idol's ass across the board. It's not Breaking Bad or anything, but The Voice makes for some fun reality TV, and it's showing up right around the time that Idol has just about lost all concept of "fun"--or maybe the frustrating-ass results just make it look that way. Either way, I actually look forward to seeing The Voice, whereas a sense of ambient dread has surrounded my Idol recaps for at least the last few weeks.

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Michael Becker/FOX

​Oh boy, here we go. I can't possibly overemphasize how not excited I was to watch this Idol finale: Two perfectly decent singers who stick entirely within their genre--the exact same genre, even--and who both ran out of interesting tricks and wrinkles weeks ago. TMZ had a story yesterday evening that Lauren Alaina's voice was dead and that Idol producers were frantically scrambling to find Haley Reinhart, giving me about five seconds of hope that something unpredictable might happen, but no. At the very outset of the show, Ryan Seacrest introduced a dumpy and smug-looking doctor who said that Lauren had blown out a vocal chord but that she should be OK. I don't remember the last time I wished that hard for a child's ill health.

Just before we met that doctor, the camera found David Archuleta in the crowd, and I wonder if that kid wishes he could try out for Idol again. He does know something about endless, foregone-conclusion, death-march finales.

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​So we lost Haley Reinhart this week. Fuck you, America. That's all I really have to say about that. I don't know why twangy teenagers are bulldozing everyone else this year, but it's going to make for a truly boring one-note final show. Has American Idol ever had a less interesting final two than Scotty McCreery and Lauren Alaina? Even the Taylor Hicks season had Katharine McPhee, who was pretty good. Scotty's obviously going to win this thing; that's been pretty clear from about week four. But I could've really used a couple more Haley performances in my life. Haley looked pissed. I sympathize. Unfortunately, she departed with "Bennie and the Jets," probably my least favorite of her performances all season. She also neglected to scream her final note directly in Casey Abrams' face and reciprocate his gesture from a few weeks back.

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