Po-hawks.  Naughty beach photos.  Crying girls.  Falling TV ratings.  Many American Idol fans would argue that Season Six doesn't need a summary, it needs an autopsy.  Perhaps so, but we'll warn you up front: determining the cause of death of the lowest-rated season in our database isn't going to be easy.

Were the contestants all stiffs?  Actually, eight of the Final 12 finished with above-average approval ratings, tied with AI4 for the most of any season.  A lack of world-class talent?  Two words: Melinda Doolittle.  Not enough showstoppers?  AI6 had precisely as many performances rated in the 90s, three, as sainted AI5.  Too many train wrecks?  There were just three performances all year in the single digits, the fewest of any season to that point, and all by you-know-who.  Speaking of which, can we just dump the entire mess on Sanjaya Malakar's head?  It's true that if you take away the nine, uh, remarkable performances from the soft-spoken, soft-singing Seattle heartthrob, AI6 would have the highest average approval rating of the first six seasons.  But then, the same would be true if you dropped the lowest-rated finalist from almost any season.  Back to the coroner's table, Dr. Quincy.

Whatever the reasons, Season Six never quite seemed to capture America's heart.  One big problem is that the Semifinals got out of bed on the wrong foot.  Yes, we know we're mixing our metaphors, but the Top 24 Guys episode was so terribly received that one cliché just isn't enough.  The 12 boys combined for a dismal 38.7 average rating, ahead of only AI1 Group 3 and the legendary mass train wreck that was AI3 Group 2.  Nine performances checked in at 40 or lower, bottoming out with a 10 for much-promoted Sundance Head's theatrical take on Nights In White Satin.  On the plus side, Blake Lewis drew rave reviews and 5-stars with Keane's Somewhere Only We Know, while Chris Sligh and Phil Stacey delivered 4-star performances.  (Malakar, if you're wondering, debuted with a somnambulant rendition of Knocks Me Off My Feet, featuring its signature lyric, "I don't want to bore you...."  Any punch line we offered would be overkill.)

What a difference a day makes.  19-year-old Stephanie Edwards kicked off the Top 24 Girls show with an 83 for How Come U Don't Call Me Anymore?, and there were many more fireworks to come in this remarkable episode.  Doolittle and Michigan choralist LaKisha Jones fell one point shy of becoming just the second pair of contestants to reach 90 in the same night.  (Who were the first, you ask?  Hmph – and you call yourself an Idol fan.  Hover your pointer here for the answer.)  Doolittle earned 89 on Aretha Franklin's Since You've Been Gone, while Jones closed the show with an even 90 for the classic Dreamgirls torch song And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going.  Speaking of one-point near-misses, Sabrina Sloan's I Never Loved A Man came in at 79, keeping the episode by the smallest of margins from becoming just the second to have four 5-star performances.  (Oh, for heaven's sake, not again.  Here.)  17-year-old Jordin Sparks also hit 4-stars, as did Chicago's Gina Glocksen, who chose All By Myself and somehow lived to tell about it.  The other six performances weren't anything to text home about, so the average rating was just under 53 – still, it ranked as the highest-rated Semifinal episode to date.

Things settled down a bit during Top 20 Week.  The Guys' average rating jumped almost 10 points.  Lewis and Sligh again reached the 4-star plateau, joined this time by Virginia's Chris Richardson's playful cover of Jason Mraz's Geek In The Pink.  (Malakar?  Steppin' Out With My Baby, fedora, 6.  Enough said.)  The Girls followed with another strong but top-heavy night: 4-stars from Edwards, Jones, and Sloan, plus Doolittle's magnum opus.  The career backup singer delivered a master class in professional song phrasing on My Funny Valentine, earning a standing ovation from Randy and Paula, a near-speechless "That was incredible" from Simon, and a monster 94 rating from the reviewers.  (Regrettably, the talk across the Idolsphere in the subsequent week wasn't of "Valentine", but rather of some racy photographs of semifinalist Antonella Barba that had surfaced on the Internet, many of which turned out to be hoaxes.)

In Top 16 Week, the Guys' schizophrenic season continued – a 42.3 average rating and only two above-average performances, again by Lewis and Sligh.  They advanced to the Final 12 along with Richardson, Stacey, and another career backup singer, Brandon Rogers.  The last slot came down to the underachieving Head and the under-everything Malakar, who'd reached 2-stars for the first time with Waiting On The World To Change.  In a decision that would have considerable portent on the remainder of the season, even if no one quite realized it at the time, the AI electorate chose Malakar.  On the Girls' side, Doolittle joined Clay Aiken in one of Idol's most exclusive clubs: contestants delivering back-to-back 90+ performances.  She earned a 91 rating for Peggy Lee's I'm A Woman, and observe what feat she would have accomplished had her Top 24 Week performance scored just one point higher.  Joining her in the Final 12: Jones, Sparks, Edwards, the musically fearless Glocksen (who'd tackled All By Myself, Heart, and Evanescence thus far), and...Sloan?  No, Sabrina's magic had surprisingly run out with the voters; they instead advanced Texas's Haley Scarnato.

Rogers opened the Diana Ross-themed Final 12 episode with, fittingly, a 12, forgetting the lyrics of You Can't Hurry Love and putting the Idolsphere in a bad mood before the first commercial break.  Doolittle and Jones later delivered 5-star performances of Home and God Bless The Child, respectively, while Malakar brought up the rear with his second 6 in three weeks, this time for a punchless and nearly tuneless Ain't No Mountain High Enough.  He and Rogers were the Bottom 2 the next night, with the latter sent home and the former left to ponder what he could do to catch America's eye.

British Invasion Week was highlighted by Sparks's breakout performance: an 88 for her appropriately overwrought I (Who Have Nothing).  Doolittle entered uncharted territory with her fifth straight 5-star performance, Lewis and Jones hit 4-stars, and Scarnato reached 3-stars for the first and last time with Tell Him.  But it was Malakar who stole the show with perhaps the most memorable 2-star performance in Idol history.  Dashing furiously across the stage and through the audience, his hair flying in every direction, and interposed with bizarre cut shots of a 13-year-old girl bawling uncontrollably in the crowd, his You Really Got Me was more Fellini than The Kinks.  Even many of the Web reviewers who hated it sort of liked it, and Sanjayamania was born.  Almost as an afterthought, Edwards was eliminated.

The Final 10 Week's theme was Songs That Inspired Gwen Stefani, whatever that meant.  Doolittle's amazing 5-star streak was snapped when she earned "only" a 77 for Heaven Knows, while rocker Glocksen had the night's highest rated performance, a 5-star cover of The Pretenders' I'll Stand By You.  The Police had an up-and-down night: Stacey got rave reviews for Every Breath You Take, while early favorite Sligh got a plane ticket home for Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic.  And what did Malakar do for an encore?  Bathwater, po-hawk, 13...once again, enough said.

American Classics Week, mentored by the great Anthony Benedetto, was led by Doolittle's spirited I Got Rhythm at 89.  Sparks reached 4-stars, but the other seven Idols all fell into the 2-star and 3-star range, prompting many Web reviewers to dismiss the show as "good but forgettable."  Glocksen was the odd woman out.  Next came Latin Week, prompting many Web reviewers to pine openly for "good but forgettable" episodes.  The average rating was under 43, with Lewis's I Need To Know the only performance to reach 4-stars – even Doolittle fell below 60 for the first time.  Malakar closed the show with his own magnum opus...well, relatively speaking.  Besame Mucho drew a modest 48 rating but earned him widespread praise even among his harshest critics for being the only contestant to take the theme seriously.  The comely Scarnato, whose hemlines were the only thing retreating faster than her approval ratings, was voted off.

Normality, or some reasonable facsimile thereof, returned on Country Week, mentored by Martina McBride.  Doolittle's Trouble Is A Woman and Sparks's A Broken Wing both earned 5-stars, while Stacey reached 4-stars.  Malakar gave America Something To Talk About, all right: his third single-digit approval rating, tying John Stevens's uncoveted record, not to mention his fifth of 1-star, giving him that honor all by himself.  The teen's extended run had become a weekly media circus, but on this night a far less lighthearted controversy erupted.  After his performance of Mayberry, Richardson made a sympathetic shout-out to his home state in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre a day earlier, prompting an annoyed response (and an ill-timed eye roll) from Simon, who was trying to deliver his critique.  The former earned a 17 for his nasally vocals; the latter, a stinging public rebuke from fans and detractors of the show everywhere.  In all the hubbub, guess who was voted off?  Sanjaya Malakar's Flying Circus had finally folded its tents.

To the show's everlasting credit, American Idol took a break from its cheesy fantasy world and opened its eyes, and the rest of America's, to the pain and poverty of the real one.  The first Idol Gives Back fundraising episode raised over $70 million for a variety of charities worldwide.  The video clip of Simon and Ryan in the AIDS-inflicted villages of sub-Saharan Africa is not one that many viewers will soon forget.  The night's official theme was Life Anthems, and we'll note only that Doolittle and Sparks became just the second pair of Idols to both post 5-star approval ratings in back-to-back episodes.  (*sigh*...Here.)  No one was eliminated on the next night's star-studded results show, just as many bloggers and forumists predicted.

So the AI6 Final Five actually numbered six – well, what else did you expect from this surreal season?  Doolittle, Jones, Lewis, Richardson, Sparks and Stacey, a sextet not exactly known for their headbanging personalities, next took on the high-energy rock of Bon Jovi Night.  The Idolsphere's forecast overwhelmingly called for cloudy skies with a 90% chance of train wreckage.  So naturally, the much-maligned Idols turned in the third-highest-rated episode (63.7) of the first six seasons!  Doolittle reached 5-stars yet again, Stacey and Jones just missed, and Lewis delivered a performance for the annals.  His heavily beatboxed, dance-rock take on You Give Love A Bad Name rated out to an 85 with a gargantuan standard deviation of 27 (but the positive reviews outnumbered the neutrals and negatives by better than 3-to-1.)  To most reviewers, the only thumbs-down performance was by, of all people, Sparks; her 13 for Livin' On A Prayer marked a 69-point drop from the previous week and her first dip below 50 all season.  After the evening's votes were added to those from the previous week, Stacey and Richardson were sent home.

Just when AI6 seemed to be gaining a little traction, it spun out again.  The Dow Jones Idolstrial Average plummetted over 20 points on two-song Bee Gees Week, closing at 41.7.  Just two performances, one by Doolittle and one by Sparks, reached 4-stars, or even 50 for that matter.  Lewis just missed breaking Sparks's one-week-old record for the largest ratings drop from one performance to the next when his first number, You Should Be Dancing, came in at 17, a 68-point fall from "Bad Name".  Even Doolittle wasn't immune; she delivered her only below-average rated performance of the campaign, Love You Inside Out.  (Somewhere in Oakland, LaToya London was screaming "I told you so!" at her TV.)  Jones, who'd sung Stayin' Alive, didn't, leaving Doolittle, Lewis and Sparks to battle for the two spots in the Finale.

Right on schedule, the AI6 yo-yo rose again.  The Final 3 Episode became just the sixth to post an average rating in the 60s, with Doolittle's Nutbush City Limits becoming her tenth and final performance to earn 5-stars.  Sparks and Doolittle each turned in a 4-star reprisal of an earlier performance, while Lewis went with three new songs, including Maroon 5's This Love.  In the days leading up to the episode, many bloggers predicted that Lewis's and Sparks's fans would vote like wildfire to push their favorite into the Finale alongside the front-running Doolittle, so much so that Doolittle herself might be left out.  The judges' anxious comments throughout the episode suggested that they too sensed the danger.  And, like one of those Shakespearean tragedies in which everyone alive already knows the ending but your English teacher makes you read it anyway...that's exactly what transpired.

The absence of Doolittle in the AI6 Finale was the last straw for many fans and critics, but "Blake vs. Jordin" went on as scheduled.  And, to their credit, the duo did a pretty good job, turning in one of the higher-rated Finales led by strong reprises of A Broken Wing and You Give Love A Bad Name.  As usual, the Idolsphere's decision came down to the American Idol Original Winners' Song™, this time selected from a nationwide contest that the producers no doubt hoped would hold down the annual blistering criticism aimed at them.  Failure.  Lewis's attempt at This Is My Now can best be described as "understandably halfhearted", while the emotive ballad was right in Sparks's wheelhouse.  Twenty-four hours later, 17-year-old Jordin Sparks became the sixth and youngest winner of American Idol.