American Idol continues tonight after ending last week by mowing down all three competitors from the region – Jordan Dorsey, Jovany Barreto and Lauren Turner. Dorsey was promising during the preliminary weeks, but he sealed his fate with the unlikely song choice “OMG” by Usher.

Neither Baretto nor Turner were voted into the top five men and women respectively by the viewers, and only Barreto got a chance to sing for a chance to have the judges keep him in the competition. Jennifer Lopez has since said that she wanted to keep him, but after he reprised a Marc Anthony song, he was passed over in favor of Stefano Langone.

Turner certainly performed well enough to stay in the competition, as did Barreto. If they weren’t kept by the judges, my take is that they realized that very good performances by Barreto and Turner weren’t enough to get viewers’ attention, so there was no point in keeping them around. They might be good singers, but the public didn’t respond to them, so the odds are that they’d never sell like Kelly Clarkson or Carrie Underwood, and the final goal of Idol is to create that sort of star – one it has failed at in recent years and is out to rectify this season.