Quarterfinals reviews

The Top 40 has been narrowed to the Top 20. WNTS has released their approval ratings, and while justice was more or less served, there were a few bad calls by the judges, according to those polled.

The women had two contestants out of place, according to the WNTS ranking, both of which I suppose I agree with:

Bloggers polled by WhatNotToSing would have favored Juliana Chahayed and Isabelle to have advanced, and Janelle Arthur and Tenna Torres to have been cut (the Isabelle cut is perplexing). None of the contestants benefited from the way the women were partitioned into groups, although the average for the second show was somewhat higher than the first (51.4 versus 46.5).

The men had more out-of-place advancement. David Willis, who I thought did well, was cut, as were JDA and Bryant Tradeo. In their places went Lazaro Arbos, Charlie Askew, and Elijah Liu. Lazaro is a sort of obvious call, since he’s got a sob story and he wasn’t awful. Askew and Liu were not chosen based on the performances they gave, or the judges have some strange criteria. Based on the groupings, JDA may have stood a better chance of making it had he been included in the second group rather than the first.

Judged head to head, WNTS voters would have sent through 11 women and 9 men. Women who actually advanced hold about a 10 point lead, though that is certainly no indicator of how the contest will play out. In any case, since next week will also be divided by gender, such head-to-heads are not yet relevant.

I think there were some missed opportunities in the selection. Shubha Vedula and Gurpreet Singh Sarin may have had bad nights, but they had strong personalities and a potential lock on demographic groups. I thiink they would have fared better than Zoanette Johnson (whom I am very skeptical of) or Paul Jolley. I may have to eat crow on the former, but there have been goof performers like Zoanette on the show before, and they never have made it past the semifinals.