The big "American Idol" screw-up.

Jacob at Television Without Pity gives last night's "American Idol" an F. An F! I've seen some low grades over there, but I can't remember seeing an F before. Ha, ha! Let's see. First there's this:

Some idiot in the booth screwed up the phone numbers for three singers in the bottom-third during review, so instead of results Wednesday, we're getting rehashes of tonight, with "live elements," meaning Seacrest pantsing around, and the results show will be on Thursday. My O.C. night. I kind of hope that person is executed.

Then there's the damned theme: "Billboard #1 Hits, which means the kids only had 930 songs to choose from. Harsh!" So a big criticism is the crap the contestants picked to sing when they had (theoretically) so much to choose from. Then there's Carrie's hair:

Her hair is insane. INSANE. She looks electrocuted. She doesn't sound that bad, of course, but dude, the hair is really distracting. She's at the seashore poking her face through a wooden standup of Olivia Newton-John at the end of Grease.

The movie reference I thought of was Tina Turner in "Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome" -- you know, where she shaved the whole front third of her hair for that weird, receding hairline effect.

Actually, Jacob seems to like the performances -- except Constantine -- a lot more than I did. So why the F? Just the nutty hair and Scott hurling his glasses aside were entertaining enough to get the grade up to at least a D, I would think. But maybe that phone number screw-up is just so abysmal that it's got to be graded a failure.

If you're wondering where the mistake was made: at the end of the show, during the recap, where the phone number appears in large and small print, for the last three contestants, the large-print number was correct, but the small print number was a different contestant's number. The three disadvantaged contestants were Mikalah, Anwar, and Jessica. The three contestants whose numbers got an additional display were Anthony, Carrie, and Scott. Jeez, you'd think if there was one thing they'd do absolutely correctly it would be displaying the numbers. How can we trust them to count the numbers right?

UPDATE: I just had to correct my own numbers -- I'd written "two" instead of "three." How can I criticize them for getting numbers wrong when I'm getting numbers wrong?