It was the feel good moment of the year -- until the end of the show, when insurance salesman and aspiring opera singer Neal E. Boyd (below) appeared. His childhood story was as touching as Jonathan’s. “It was just my mother, my brother and I,” Neal softly explained, noting that, even though they were poor, he never realized it because there was so much love in his family. And then he sang Nessun Dorma with so much heart that the audience and the judges leapt to their feet and seemed to float above the floor. Hundreds of hearts were soaring in that moment -- right there on NBC! Even Piers Morgan got off his ass.
I can absolutely see Jonathan and Neal on the final show of the season. There won’t be a dry eye in the audience.
There were a few of the weirdos on hand for which this show is known, including a young man whose lone talent seemed to be the ability to stick out his tongue and lick his nose and a set of aggressively talentless twins from Romania who refer to themselves as Indiggo and positively murdered New York, New York. (They were so fantastically terrible and so relentless in their self-promotion that Piers and Sharon voted them through to the Las Vegas semi-finals.) But there were other marvels, too, including Jonathan, a dancing trombone player with talent and energy to spare, and Kaitlyn, an adorable four-year-old girl who charmed everyone with her teeny tiny (and totally on-key) rendition of Somewhere Out There.
Talent is off to a very promising start this summer -- so promising, in fact, that it wouldn’t surprise me at all if NBC next year were to move it from summer to spring. Look at what summer starters Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and Dancing with the Stars did for ABC, or what Survivor did for CBS. And let’s not forget that Fox first ran American Idol as a summer show.
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