Talkback Thames, which co-produces Simon Cowell's Britain's Got Talent with his Syco, has admitted to me that the show has used Auto-Tune to make auditions sound better.

This is the third time this season that some kind of cheating has been reported in relation to one of Cowell's shows. There have been two scandals involving The UK version of  The X Factor so far:

• Gamu Nhengu, 18, sang "Walking On Sunshine" and judges--including Simon Cowell--voted Nhengu through to another round. Facebook promptly erupted, with fans screaming "Auto-tune!" and calling X Factor a scam. X Factor copped to the use of auto-tune, yes, but only in post-production, and only to provide the audience with "the most entertaining experience possible."
• Another X Factor contestant has an American record contract. Katie Waissel allegedly has a contract with a Chamberlain Records in Los Angeles under the name "Lola Fontaine."

Simon Cowell, reports Deadline, has reacted by "banning performance-enhancing software from edited pre-recorded auditions." British papers like The Telegraph do not seem satisifed:

The trouble with the auto-tune controversy is that, for perhaps the first time, The X Factor has inadvertently allowed the audience to catch a glimpse of how the machinery works. It pretends towards transparency, and trades on the illusion of being a democratic contest that allows undiscovered talent to flourish. And viewers have been prepared to take it on their own terms, as long as they put on a good show. But now they've been caught in the act. Which makes it that bit harder for audiences to suspend their disbelief.

[Deadline]

The two women began to go out of their way to link to and comment on each other's writings and communicate via Twitter, and Ms. Vargas-Cooper helped Ms. Baker—who asked The Observer not to reveal her day job, where Tumbling is frowned upon—edit some of her writing. When Ms. Baker published an essay on the Duke lacrosse fiasco on the Awl in December, her new friend was one of several commenters who took the high road in defending her against a Negative Nelly in the comments section, asserting, "ELEGANT PIECE, MS. BAKER." And the negative commenter was apparently killed by kindness: he/she staked out Ms. Baker on her personal blog to apologize: "I'm the person who wrote that dick-ish 'Nope, sorry' comment on your Awl article, and it is seriously HAUNTING me! I've never been that mean to someone on the internet, I'm super anti-confrontation and you're a pro and took it pro-ishly, but uggggh I'm sorry I'm such a dick. Really."

With all due respect to the Internet, it has not often been described as a "lovefest"; indeed, it has been better known as a forum for fire-breathing, semi-literate personal attacks. But suddenly, wide swaths of the Web have become bastions of support and earnest civility, where community-members "retweet" or "reblog" each other's bon mots, promiscuously proffer thumbs-up, help sell perfect strangers' books, drive traffic to each other's blogs and real-world events and even defend one another.

"People sometimes will get bent about something and put it on Facebook or Twitter and realize that's just not the tone anymore," said literary PR consultant Lauren Cerand, who kindly posted a comment on this reporter's Facebook wall about a previous article in this newspaper (we had never met in person). "That very cynical voice worked really well from 2003 to 2006." But "really negative people, they don't have a lot of friends." (In other words, you're more likely to think before you tweet when you can actually watch yourself losing your audience with each nasty missive!)

It's not just Internet logrollers riding the wave of positivity. Conan O'Brien signed off from NBC saying, "Please don't be cynical. I hate cynicism—it's my least favorite quality and it doesn't lead anywhere." Quite unlike aloof Madonna or spoiled Britney, pop star of the moment Lady Gaga is constantly professing what seems to be sincere, mature gratitude to her fans and creative partners on Twitter. Tom Hanks' wife, Rita Wilson, proclaimed nice "the new black" in the March Harper's Bazaar ("How often have you yawned in boredom when someone has told you about a nice person they know? What did nice do to deserve this treatment?"). Vogue, meanwhile, put Tina Fey—not beautiful, but nice-looking—on its March cover, rather than Keira Knightly or Sienna Miller. Even Bill O'Reilly seems to be softening up. "There are two kinds of political attacks," he said recently, defending President Obama from CPAC. "The personal, meant to diminish the human being, and criticism of policy, meant to persuade people the person in power is doing a bad job… The personal stuff is cheap."

PERHAPS IT'S NOT surprising that we find ourselves softer and more empathetic when so many of us are unemployed and our city's largest moneymaking industry has been publicly dressed down. The New Nice is nibbling gently at New York, a place where it was always O.K.—nay, a matter of survival—not to be nice, a.k.a. bland, submissive and/or irrelevant.

Then again, when examined more closely, there's a reassuring venality to all this e-caring-and-sharing. "All of New York really runs from this idea of the favor economy," pointed out Ms. Cerand, the PR consultant, who recently attracted funding for Girls Write Now, a charity she's involved with, by responding to a tweet. "Can I do a favor now for this person so they'll do one for me later? Some people feel that's really stressful and that everyone's operating, but I feel like that the ambition, for most people, is to be happy and successful, and from a Buddhist perspective that's something to be supported."

And speaking of the "favor economy": Even the Oscars are becoming an inclusive, populist extravaganza this year with 10 Best Picture nominees—including Sandra Bullock's warm-fuzzy-fest The Blind Side—plus Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin sharing—sharing—host duties. Also consider the mellowing of Simon Cowell, who has recently taken to hugging deposed American Idol contestants and encouraging them to keep at it. The actress Gwyneth Paltrow neatly summed up the new outlook, responding to criticisms of her treacly weekly email newsletter, Goop, in USA Today. "I think part of the problem is people get a hit of energy when they are negative about something, and it is a very detrimental way for them to get that hit of energy," said the mother of two. "They do not understand why they do not have a happy life. … I just feel sorry for them."

While the quest for a happy life has become a bona fide intellectual project in America (see sidebar), the rare outburst of mean feels like a shock to the system. When novelist Alice Hoffman took to Twitter last June to furiously attack a reviewer in The Boston Globe as a "moron" and an "idiot," it was almost refreshing to see the medium being used to its full, uncensored communicative potential. It felt authentic. (Ms. Hoffman has since erased her account.)

Ms. Hoffman, of course, is a Bostonian; and Dan Baum, who tartly tweeted about his experiences writing for David Remnick to a collective media gasp, lives in Boulder, Colo. New Yorkers, perhaps, understand better than most the value of personal branding, which, on an ever less anonymous and more community-based Internet, means we're producing a steady stream of searchable utterances attached to our name (or avatar), that ultimately defines the size and nature of our circle of influence.

ONE MIGHT ARGUE that products like Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook are designed to manipulate us into niceness.

"There's a lot of incentive and positive reinforcement when you use Tumblr," said David Karp, proprietor of the platform. To "like" someone's post is to click on a heart-shaped symbol—an easy, "friction-less" gesture, he said—but there is no way to express the opposite if you find the post vaguely illiterate. (Similarly, on Facebook, there is no thumbs-down symbol.) There is however plenty to gain in terms of followers for your own blog if you opt to re-post people's posts and add your own witty, positive commentary. Unlike many vicious Web commenters, users of these social-media platforms can be de-friended, unfollowed, ignored and potentially silenced by the platform itself. (Internet users have taken to using these tactics on people behaving badly in real life, too: When Kanye West recently stole the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Awards to say Beyoncé should have won, Facebook news feeds exploded with tsk-tsks from New Yorkers who surely agreed with him in theory.)

"Part of what's going on is that the act of typing seems public no matter what it's going into," said David Carr, the New York Times media columnist, who tweets about the Olympics and regularly praises his colleagues' work. "So even if it's an email, you have to assume that through some circumstance, it somehow might be public."

But it's not just the fear of losing our megaphone or an electronic "paper trail" that keeps us nice: Unlike on YouTube, whose commenters are made to feel like "third-class citizens" by their position on the page, the size of their font, their alienation from the main content and the incoherence of the hundreds of their fellow commenters, Mr. Karp pointed out that Twitter and Tumblr give everyone the same chance to be heard, and to interact directly with people who, offline, have more power.

This doesn't stop provocateurs like Michael Wolff from sending out purposely mean tweets like this one, in response to a missive publicizing David Brooks' appearance on Charlie Rose: "Or, for more pleasure, kill yourself." But Mr. Wolff, a relatively new tweeter, had 1,670 followers at press time; the Times' Mr. Carr has almost 250,000.

Cultural critic Lee Siegel, a regular contributor to the Daily Beast and The New Republic, described the mutually congratulatory behavior as a "cultural style," not an empathetic shift. "The pressure to please and be popular is what I don't like about this stuff," he said. "That is more lethal to journalism than a bunch of anonymous loons screaming insults."

Later, in an email, he continued: "It's as if the gene that detects insincerity had been removed from us. Or is it that we are all playing this new complicated game of insincerity? I thought we revolted against King George so that we could stop paying taxes to England and to liberate ourselves from obnoxious British insincerity." He suggested Mr. Carr "stop following himself on Twitter and get back to work." Meow!

It's clear that Internice has its limits. "If Peggy Noonan writes something in The Wall Street Journal that's absurd, ha-ha, it's always fun to make fun of Peggy Noonan," said Ms. Baker, the blogger. "But if I know that person is someone I follow, or they follow me, or I like them, I just think twice. I'm not going to write something just to be provocative or get a cheap laugh." She did that once, she said, when she'd only been on Tumblr for two weeks and had yet to learn the customs, but her sarcastic blog post just ended up making her feel horrible. "It just made me think, O.K., I can do better than this," she said.

mbryan@observer.com

The fashionable 50-something self-professed "music junkie"—whose past ad campaigns have featured rockers Perry Farrell and Scott Weiland—will join a group of "special guest judges" in weeding out the most talented performers from a pool of up-and-coming, unsigned bands who upload a video performance of original music to the site.

“Music is the heart and soul of this brand," Mr. Varvatos said in a statement. "Hosting this contest on the internet allows bands from all four corners of the globe to participate.”

In September, finalists will be flown to New York City to perform live at Mr. Varvatos' barely one-year-old boutique at 315 Bowery, the hallowed site of the defunct CBGB rock club, during Fashion Week.

In an interview with The Observer last April, Mr. Varvatos discussed the controversy surrounding his decision to open a fancy retail shop in the legendary club space—the grand opening attracted a bevy of anti-gentrification protesters—and his intention to funnel store profits into an "artist development fund" that would bankroll monthly live music performances there.

"There's something pretty cool about that," the designer said at the time.

It started last year during the reign of David Cook. I think I thought I was being ironic. This is how the show gets you—like, oh look how silly this all is! I can’t believe how into this show people are! But this year, I looked around and saw that I was watching “The Idol” all alone in my apartment, no one there on the couch beside me to laugh at Ryan Seacrest, and I had the epiphany that there was absolutely no irony whatsoever left for me to hide behind. 

The good news is that when you decide to give up and join the rest of America in loving American Idol, you start to discover just how much is out there for you. And hey, how often can us Jewish homo-loving commie New Yorkers feel so in step with the rest of the country? There’s a kabillion articles and random Web sites (including DialIdol, which predicts who is going home based on some sort of scientific study of busy signals, and boasts a 97 percent accuracy rate for last year!) and Entertainment Weekly’s totally awesome exhaustive coverage. For me, there is no better thing in the world than the Television Without Pity recaps, which never fail to help me think about just what is good or bad or just plain bananas about this show. Jacob Clifton is just about my favorite person on the planet these days thanks to his incredible posts—here is a recent example when he attempted to make sense of this season’s biggest enigma, contestant Adam Lampert and his rendition of “Ring of Fire” last week:

“It's sort of like what if that movie Queen Of The Damned were not only real, but interested in slipping you a roofie and selling you on the black market. He screeches out some kind of artsy orgasm and nearly pulls his shirt up over his head, and then just starts wailing like some forgotten homosexual Greek myth about sailors that never come home. It's... Totally awesome. Of course. I feel weird and crazy, and entertained. Those sudden register shifts used to freak me out with Jeff Buckley too, like, "And now I am a lady... And now I am a dude again." I can't imagine how uncomfortable that must have been for lots and lots of people."

Okay? How could anyone not want to watch something that could inspire all that? So, this is where I'm at and my cooler-than-thou friends with their real lives and hopes and dreams are a little disappointed in me. I don't care. I'm glad that big oil-rig dude went home last night! I hope Simon continues to draw little moustaches on Paula! And mostly I'm rooting for that dramatic weirdo, or that little redhead with the big pipes, to win. I suggest watching. You'll see!

To demonstrate the show’s renewed commitment to rewarding talent rather than mocking attention-seekers, Idol is also cutting an audition week to make room for a second Hollywood-round episode. Though, as Idol executive producer Ken Warwick assures us, Simon Cowell and co. won’t pull any punches when it comes to those infamous auditions. "If the judges are mean, the judges are mean.” Otherwise, why have judges at all?

Paparazzi have been mobbing the Broadway performances of All My Sons, which stars Katie Holmes. Meanwhile, the anti-Scientology group Anonymous, which has been protesting outside the theater since previews, has been quarantined down the street. [OK!]

Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal and Stephen Gyllenhaal, parents to Maggie and Jake, are getting divorced. [TMZ]

The final will of party promoter and gossip chronicler Baird Jones, who died in February, has been located in the basement of his East Village apartment building. He left his entire estate to artist Stephen D. Hooper. [P6]

Seems American Idol's Simon Cowell literally drove one of the show's contestants crazy. [US Weekly]

Previews of Christian Siriano's forthcoming maternity line! [The Cut]

Because the network's upfront presentation--held at sweltering temperature, deafening volume and interminable length in the Armory Thursday afternoon--was an unqualified dud. It started with network president Peter Liguori promising everyone he'd "keep in short" and ended two and a half hours later, with a third of the audience having ducked out early, to the achy groans of those who remained.

In between, Fox, which ranks first among 18-49 year olds and therefore shouldn't have much to say, revealed a schedule with six new shows and 16 returning. The two men in charge of Fox Sports spent 20 agonizing minutes joking about how one couldn't pronounce the word "Tostitos." Kiefer Sutherland expressed his wish to buy everyone in the room a drink. Brad Garrett joked about institutionalizing Paula Abdul and sodomizing Ryan Seacrest. Seacrest, live via satellite from Los Angeles, asked the female American Idol finalist if she had slept with anyone on the show. And at the dawn of Hour Three, Simon Cowell, worth every penny of his $36 million annual salary, finally acknowledged the stultification under way.

"Let me sum this up for you Peter," Cowell said from the stage. "This is the most bored-looking audience I've ever seen in my life."

The audience erupted in applause.

Asked at the after-party how he thought he'd fared, an extremely tan, extremely tall Liguori talked about all the "energy" emanating from the stage. "They laughed at the comedies," he said, "they clapped for the dramas."

And they left for the finale. The presentation was a half-hour away from over, but as American Idol winner Carrie Underwood took the stage to sing a droopy country ballad, ad execs began to tiptoe out. By the time Liguori launched into an analysis of Fox's Wednesday night lineup, hundreds were outside, braving a downpour, climbing into buses and hailing cabs.

Meanwhile, inside the Armory, Liguori was concluding the last presentation of Upfront Week with an easy prophecy. After thanking everyone for coming, he said the day had been a thrill so far, "and it's only going to get more and more exciting from here."

--Rebecca Dana

It may have been a watershed moment-not just for Fox's cheesy talent contest, going strong with 29 million viewers in its third season, but for a culture awash in mediocrity convinced that it's genius. Mr. Rea's rage and disbelief at receiving criticism is all too familiar, now that the most coddled generation in American history has come of age.

Like everyone from Paris Hilton, whose attorneys confidently announced in the middle of her sex-tape fiasco that "Hilton is a model and actress [and] is at the beginning of what she had hoped would be a long and prosperous career," to George W. Bush, the President who wears his below-average credentials like a badge of honor, Mr. Rea is suffering from what one might call Too Much Positive Reinforcement: The belief, against all available evidence, that one is meant for Special Things.

TMPR has now officially reached epidemic proportions. How else to explain the legions of the talent-free who wait in line for days for a chance to show their stuff to Mr. Cowell and company-then are stunned to be told they don't make the grade? After decades of upper-middle-class parenting designed to shield Junior from all possible failure, and from any honest judgement of his talents, it's no wonder we need television shows like American Idol and its fellow showcase for TMPR victims, The Apprentice . These shows are delivering the spanking-sorry, the time-out -that our culture of bloated self-evaluation is subconsciously craving. Their success signals that we may be reaching the end of a long national delusion. There is simply not room enough at the top these days for everyone raised to believe they belong there-and, deep down, we all know it.

Case in point: our President and his Democratic rivals-all classic victims of Too Much Positive Reinforcement. George W. Bush, for example: Through years of poor school marks, alcohol abuse and business failures, Mr. Bush coasted through, both he and his parents oblivious to any shortcomings. Last October, Barbara Bush said on Larry King Live , "A lot of people, mostly the press, ask if George W. was a rascal when he was growing up. And the answer is, of course not. He was a perfect child." Mrs. Bush was even further surprised to learn that Democrats were-gasp-saying nasty things about their Republican rival. "It gets a little old when 10 grown men run around the country not talking about what they're going to do, but knocking my precious, courageous, brilliant son," she said on the show.

Then there's Howard Dean's much-publicized WWE Smackdown press conference-the "How could anyone say no to me?" rant. Slouching poll results were swept aside like yesterday's bad report card; Mr. Dean went into New Hampshire saying, "We really are going to win this nomination, aren't we?" Voters ran through the options: Shake your head no and give him a little blanket and hot tea? Slap him upside the head? Or, perhaps, sic Mr. Cowell on him.

We've become so inured to the idea that a person's self-assessment need not be changed by a little thing like repeated and utter failure that no one was the least surprised when Joe Lieberman took so long to throw in the towel. Before New Hampshire, he said, "The people of New Hampshire put me in the ring, and that's where we're going to stay." Jon Stewart on The Daily Show put it best: "When did our elections become the Special Olympics? You're not all winners. Not everybody gets a hug. You guys got crushed."

Manhattan these days may just be Ground Zero for the TMPR epidemic. With two-and now three-generations of privileged parents "correcting" the sternness (or imagined sternness) of their own upbringing by telling their children they can do anything they put their minds to, upper-middle-class kids now routinely think they have no weaknesses, and that they have every right-not just every chance-to succeed. Bring on Manhattan-if I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere!

"Kids will come in wanting to be a staff writer at Esquire right out of college," said Eliot Kaplan, editorial talent director for Hearst Magazines. "I had this girl come in from this failed dot-com one day-that was her only experience. I interviewed her and asked her how much money she wanted, and she said $300,000. I couldn't help it-I laughed in her face." Mr. Kaplan added: "We're happy to bring them back to earth."

But the trip back down to earth is coming later and later. "When I was at Andover in the 1940's, one in every third kid would not make it," said Dr. Paul McHugh, head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. "Now in a school like that and even colleges, it's really hard to fail out. They pick you up, prep you, dust you off."

It's the work world that increasingly functions as the personal reality-check service for TMPR victims. "Imminent failure has been postponed for lots of people until they hit the bricks of having to work," as Dr. McHugh put it. "Competition for a paying job changes things, because it's no longer daddy's tuition money that keeps you going," he added.

Of course, even late-stage TMPR sufferers have an inkling somewhere inside that they are not the next Leonardo da Vinci-maybe not even the next Leonardo DiCaprio. A nonstop stream of parental praise is now seen by psychologists as a parenting strategy guaranteed to backfire. "Kids will see through it," said Ann Pleshette Murphy, parenting correspondent for ABC's Good Morning America and a columnist for Family Circle . "If you're full of baloney when you're praising them to the hills, they begin to distrust your praise. They begin to think that they're the center of the universe and they can always get what they want. But I think down deep they know that's not true. It creates a false sense of who they are, and it can really erode your relationship with your kid." The final insult, according to Ms. Murphy: "They'll blame you when reality hits."

My Mother, My Secretary

It all begins with what one Upper East Side pediatrician, Dr. Ralph López, who specializes in adolescents, calls "overindulged child syndrome." "One of my pet peeves is to hear parents praising a child's accomplishments as if they're professionals," he said. "A child who draws very well is a great artist, a child who dances very well is a great dancer. That implies that they are able to replicate every good performance. Instead, I'd like to hear parents praise the event, what they did. That's a very different compliment; it doesn't fill the child with expectations of being a great artist," he added. "You've built up the popinjay to the point where they don't have the credentials and skill to prove it."

Today parents can't bring themselves to do anything as forceful as refusing to give kids Halloween candy, which Larry David did on a recent Curb Your Enthusiasm episode, nor can they be as hilariously indifferent as Malcolm's parents are in Malcolm in the Middle . They just lather on the praise, layer after layer. After a while, neither they nor the young "popinjay" remember what's underneath.

"If kids expect a lot of external praise, that's an unrealistic expectation in the real world," said Dr. Angela Seracini, director of the Disruptive Behavior Disorders Clinic in Pediatric Psychiatry at the Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital of New York–Presbyterian. "I've seen it in personal life, that certain people expect that other people are always going to be noticing them, and if it doesn't happen they get disappointed."

TMPR parents pump up their child's self-esteem into an enormous vacuum, so the kid feels pretty great, but has done nothing in particular to feel great about. Psychologists have been trying to address that one for a while now: "People are making the point that self-esteem is a result-not a cause-of a good performance," said Dr. McHugh.

"The self-esteem movement gained a lot of momentum just in the last decade, where it was a big deal in schools and in the workplace to praise people for their efforts," Ms. Murphy said. "There were all these happy-face signs and good jobs and they would get trophies for everything. This is what a lot of experts are saying has gotten berserk."

Meanwhile, our popular culture looks like a TMPR triage area. When kids hear from Mom and Dad that they're bound to be the next Donald Trump, it's no wonder they experience not just disappointment but total shock when the Donald tells them they won't be. Ms. Murphy, and her husband, Stephen Murphy, who is the C.E.O. of Rodale publishing, said they always talk about the entitlement new applicants to jobs in their field now have. "There's a whole generation of young people who think they can make top dollar when they walk in the door-and they don't want to do certain things," she said. "There is definitely a sense I get that this entitlement is pretty pervasive, especially in a city like New York. In areas where there is a reality of having to work your way up the ladder, that being willing to put in your time isn't there any more."

It's easy to see why many Manhattan children see the adults around them as an army marshaled for the cause of their own greater glory. As Evan Flamenbaum, an educational therapist who works with Manhattan school kids, pointed out, even early in the school years, "Kids are being managed like young C.E.O.'s." That includes an entire support staff: "Now having a tutor is worn like a golden accessory," Mr. Flamenbaum said. "Everybody's getting the best one, everyone's getting the college counselor. Now it's like, 'What! You're not going to a therapist?' Every kid's got a shrink, every kid's got a host of tutors, every kid's packaged for school. It's like the result of this baby-boomer, very selfish, touchy-feely mentality, an immature mentality in itself." The only antidote-and for many, it will be experienced as a psychic earthquake-is to spend some time elsewhere: "When you get out of your precious New York City bubble," Mr. Flamenbaum said, "they're not going to care how much money you have, or who your parents are."

If the teacher doesn't give you an A, have Daddy pay! If you can't get into Yale, put a check in the mail! "The extreme obnoxious example is the child who has a fit when she doesn't get an A, and the parents go to the school and raise hell about the teacher's unfairness and the grade gets changed," Ms. Murphy said. "You've done that child a huge disservice." Mr. Flamenbaum added: "If Mommy and Daddy are people who have lots of power and money, you don't know how to deal with difficult situations because they're dealt with for you."

The logical extension of this kind of upbringing comes in the workplace, which TMPR sufferers approach as if it were akin to summer camp-yet another "enrichment experience" paid for by their parents. Grunt work is not a concept that resonates with them: If Daddy's a partner at Goldman Sachs, don't you have the same authority? "If you're going to the private schools, there's a certain level of success your parents have accomplished and one of the problems that comes up is a lot of stuff is done for you-there are resources, tutors, accommodations made because the school will bend for you, there are concessions made by teachers who want to help the kids," said Dr. López. "Kids get a sense that those accomplishments are theirs. The kid who's doing O.K. in school has some learning issues, but Mom or Dad are doing secretarial background work-that kid is going to fall on his tail end in college because Mom or Dad is doing the secretarial work so well it goes unnoticed," he added. "Parents help kids so much. They say, 'You are terrific'-no matter what. If the kid does badly, parents will say, 'Nobody in the class got it, must be a bad teacher.' I tell parents, 'If you are your kid's secretary, I need you fired by third year.' And then I've watched them in college, and all of the sudden they graduate, they're wearing suits for the first time, and they don't even know how to do an insurance submission because all of that has been done for them. They don't even have bank accounts. I have one mom, she sent her kid off to boarding school and she would go up there to do his laundry. I said, 'You're joking.' She said, 'But he has so many things to do.'

"To me, if you're in a boarding school, you do your own laundry," Dr. López continued. "If a kid has an inner-directed style, 'I gotta do it because it needs to be done,' that kid will thrive and go and do well in the workforce. The opposite is the kid who doesn't have that confidence and goes to a certain school and hides and parties-redo Animal House and you become Bluto." The conclusion, he said, is obvious: "Kids who have had too much reinforcement don't do as well in the workplace."

'Delusional Behavior'

Among the most excruciating of American Idol 's excruciating moments are those in which parents greet their booted babies, offering reassurance that the judges were dead wrong . "You're amazing, they don't know what they're talking about," the parents coo. In an age when parents are not able to confront their kids' shortcomings, it sometimes seems like Mr. Cowell is the only one who will.

"Every single one of these people genuinely believed they were the best singers in America," said Mr. Cowell with a laugh on a recent show. "We have thousands of contestants who think they're fantastic, but in every year, it's always the same. We'll find only one or two really good people. That's a horrible statistic." Randy Jackson, another of the three judges, along with Paula Abdul, added, "It's delusional behavior. Everybody thinks they're better than they are." More than the hopes of seeing genuine talent, it's the drama of recalibration viewers tune in for. When contestants enter the judging room with dreams of their first platinum record and Us Weekly cover, the viewers are titillated: Here comes Simon Cowell!

On one episode this season, a frumpy, bespectacled Midwesterner sat between Mr. Jackson and Mr. Cowell, singing "I Was Meant for You," while tentatively stroking their shoulders. A few minutes into the performance, Mr. Cowell stopped her and said, "I don't think you were meant for us," to which she coyly replied, "What do you want?"

"Someone who can sing in tune," said Mr. Cowell.

Mr. Cowell's biting lines make the viewer feel oddly cozy inside. It's a wave of relief to hear him tell it like it is. Besides, any hurt he inflicts will be over quickly-what fuels the show's fire is the rejects' determination not to give up, not to believe anything negative they hear. Because while Mr. Cowell is convincing, one harsh line isn't going to undo a lifetime of TMPR.

After the judging, the cameras catch up with the contestants, who argue through their tears, "I know I can sing! My friends love listening to me!" Slumping in the elevator, they shout, "Don't tell me I'm not working hard enough!" Or they croak to the host, Ryan Seacrest, "I was too much-I was too good." The best are those who, like Mr. Rea, the water-thrower, refuse to leave the room, thinking of any half-brained excuse they can muster. "I missed a few notes, but I can do better," one scrawny, tonally challenged contestant whined. "I'd say you missed 99 out of 100," responded Mr. Cowell.

Mr. Trump's ripostes on The Apprentice are equally gratifying. At the end of the Feb. 5 episode, Mr. Trump sat at the table with his colleagues and the losing team, debriefing them. "You're surprised to be beaten, aren't you?" he said to the manager of the team. She nodded, and launched into an ode-to-myself speech, before asking what she could have done better. "What could you have done better? Used common sense," he replied bluntly. Later in the episode, he asked another member of the team whether she thought the manager had failed. "You're not putting me on the hot seat?" she said, as if in shock. "That's what life is all about," replied Mr. Trump.

Dr. Lauren Levine, a Manhattan psychologist, agreed that these shows are "speaking to some need in the general public." And kids seem to be responding to seeing actual criticism on screen, if not yet at home. The truth hurts-so good. After 30 years of being told we are beautiful, we're ready for our dress-down. The culture is primed for some brutal honesty, some real judgment. Kids want to see other kids being yelled at, and parents want to see others doing the yelling.

"Kids being born now are coming into a different world," said Mr. Flamenbaum. "I think it's starting to happen now-parents are going to be a little more capable of playing a traditional parenting role: 'I'm in charge, it's O.K. if you don't like it.' It's O.K. to not get along with your kids right now. Kids don't make good decisions!" So will parents look to Larry David as their role model? "Shows like Curb your Enthusiasm and American Idol show that kids are craving for directed feedback. Kids are still kids, they still want to be told what to do," said Mr. Flamenbaum.

Gene Gardino, the head counselor at a Manhattan private school, said that kids tell him all the time that they'd like their parents to let them know what they're doing wrong, but they don't want their parents to be blunt and mean about it. That's the trick that post-TMPR parents will have to learn to master. For now, vicarious thrills will have to do: "I think it's a lot better coming from Trump than coming from their own parents," Mr. Gardino said. As Mr. López put it: "They may watch these programs because they like to see the pathos of humanity. It's brutal honesty-for someone else."