Just days after it was predicted that American Idol's fourth season might produce lesser ratings the people have spoken up loud and clear. Nonsense was what 33.5 million people had to say. Take that Survivor and Apprentice. It was the second highest rating earned by the series, trailing only the AI2 finale between Clay Aiken and Ruben Studdard. Overall it ranks third behind the original Joe Millionaire finale in the history of Fox.

This season the format is changing as Sugar Ray frontman Mark McGrath (now of TV's Extra) will serve as a judge at least in the preliminaries. Better yet, when the field is cut to 24 it will be a dozen men and women. Those groups will compete by gender for three weeks with the bottom 2 being eliminated each week until 12 will battle it out in their traditional finals.

This will do a couple of things. First it will give the judges more control over who makes it to the finals and second it provides at least from the start an equal footing to both genders. I know last year the men were simply blown out. Perhaps the increase in the age limit to 28 is going to boost the talent level as well meaning this might in fact be the best American Idol season ever. The ratings already seem to indicate that it will be.