America Needs Talent

A look at the most popular show on television— America’s Got Talent—explains why the U.S. needs its immigrants. Most often, they’re doing this country a favor

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The most popular show on television in the United States right now is America’s Got Talent. If you’ve never seen it (which is hard to imagine), it’s a talent show and talent competition, essentially the same as Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour, a popular show in the early days of television and the program that gave us the useful phrase “amateur hour”—applied as a metaphor for incompetence, although this is nearly the opposite of what the word “amateur,” which simply connotes a love of some activity, originally meant. It is now directed sarcastically at almost anything people do.

The winner each year on A.G.T., as it’s called, gets $1 million and a stint headlining at one of the Las Vegas casinos. But the publicity value of being a winner on A.G.T. is worth at least the same sort of number. By now, even appearing on A.G.T. is a surefire career starter. And I don’t want to pile a lot of sermonizing on top of this innocent cultural icon. It is less than harmless. If you haven’t seen it, or any of its spin-offs, you’ll find it somewhere on the spectrum between riveting and boring, depending on your taste, but above all harmless.

To do well on A.G.T., it helps to have some conventional talent, such as being a great singer or dancer. But the winner tends to have some special backstory, such as extreme youth (being a three-year-old magician would be good) or overcoming a handicap (like a blind hip-hop artist). The talent on display may indeed be inspiring, but the inspiration contains a large dose of admiration for the courage and grit of the performer rather than for the talent itself. A woman in her 20s who sings like Barbra Streisand at her peak will lose out to, oh, a woman in her 90s who can still belt them out, sort of. This speaks well of America. Despite its title, what the show demonstrates is that there are more important things than talent.