“American Idol” ended its run the way you’d expect a pop superstar to: playing its greatest hits.
As it has for 15 seasons, Fox’s singing competition crowned a winner Thursday night — Trent Harmon — but the two-hour-plus series finale was above all a celebration of bigger, better times for the show, which dominated television for years in the aughts.
Over a decade and a half, “Idol” has been, as true stars are, self-lionizing, affecting and silly. Its farewell show was all of the above, kicking off with an army of current and former contestants singing Barry Manilow’s “One Voice,” dressed in white as if to commence high Mass at the Church of Idol.
Past “Idol” finales brought in an array of pop superstars to kneel before the show’s promotional might. This last, sentimental night, the talent was mostly homegrown. The show ran through an alphabet of former winners and also-rans — Clay Aiken, Bo Bice, David Cook, Melinda Doolittle — singing a program heavy on the show’s trademark jukebox oldies, a layer of nostalgia on nostalgia.
Each of the current judges performed, too. But the wildest applause was for the panel’s original insult comic, Simon Cowell, who strode onstage wearing a shirt unbuttoned to mid-torso, and on his face — my God, was that genuine emotion?
“Idol” took pride in its bona fides as a music-industry hitmaker, even if most of its biggest stars were forged in the first half of its run. Its first winner, Kelly Clarkson — on the verge of having a baby — prerecorded a farewell medley; the country superstar and fourth season winner, Carrie Underwood, sang the pre-results grand finale. The show also featured the stars “Idol,” or America, slighted, like the Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson, who finished seventh in Season 3.
But “Idol” was also a kind of oddball variety show. The zany audition rounds were represented by William Hung (“She Bangs”) and Larry Platt (“Pants on the Ground”). Sanjaya Malakar, whose run in Season 6 was a kind of performance art, was in the audience. Brian Dunkleman, the co-host with Ryan Seacrest for the first season, returned to joke about being the show’s Pete Best.
The finale even managed a tribute to the in-show Ford commercial videos, which may have been the truest salute to the series’ success. Whatever the show’s musical legacy, it paid off like a slot machine for Fox, and there was something almost sweet in the network taking one last tug on the handle.
Am I forgetting something? Right: the results. Back when “Idol” was a watercooler sensation, the finales would belabor the suspense over the final reveal. This finale, as for so much of the season, the present took a back seat to the past. (Arguably the season’s most memorable moment came not from a contestant but Ms. Clarkson, crying through an emotional performance of “Piece by Piece.”)
This season’s final two were themselves a kind of callback to the vocal powerhouses of the early “Idol” years: the throaty, bluesy Mr. Harmon and the regal, powerful La’Porsha Renae, who duetted on “It Takes Two,” just as Ms. Clarkson and Justin Guarini did in 2002.
But Mr. Harmon’s win continued a more recent pattern: counting him, eight of the last nine “Idol” winners have been white men, usually wielding guitars. (Five of them played a David Bowie tribute in the finale, an assembly line of six-strings.) Mr. Harmon is gifted and vocally agile, but Ms. Renae was the one with the stage presence of a star.
Of course, I can say that, and you can say I’m wrong, as America did. That argument, finally, was the best thing about “American Idol.”
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