I know, I should be excited about last night’s episode of American Idol. After all, “groups” night is usually one of the best of the show. The drama! The politics! The choreography! But tonight’s episode just left me feeling flat.

First of all, what was the deal with the group with two girls and one guy? At first, I thought “wow – this is really neat that the groups aren’t all guys or all girls this year.” But they were. Why was this one guy in a group with two girls? Did they choose this group? Or was this the group made up of people who didn’t have a group (you all went to middle school, you know what I mean)? I just didn’t get it. The guy seemed nice enough, and I was glad that Simon recognized that he had been through quite the 24 hours – reason enough to move to the next round.

The only other real “drama” for the night was those darn twins. As I sift through my junk mail, and shred all those credit card offers, I always wonder who on earth would go through my trash to get this information. Now we know. Just listen to the two of them talk, then think “these are the people who get busted for identity theft.” Kind of puts it all into place, doesn’t it? I probably understood about half of what they were saying, and I’m guessing that they understood just about that much as well. Did one of the brothers really go into a rant and pull out of the competition because he didn’t understand that Simon had told his brother that he made it to the next round? And did they really let him back into the competition? Wow. Still don’t understand what the judges see in these two knuckleheads.

For the most part, it seemed like the groups got along well, which eliminated a lot of the good tv. And the drama that they did show, well, it seemed like it was manufactured by the producers. Like the ridiculous “Brokeback Mountain” parody of the three cowboys. First of all, could someone please tell me when people tire of making “Brokeback Mountain” jokes? Because I’m tired of them. And while they sounded horrible, I give huge credit to the older of the cowboys who comforted Garett (the little guy who sings for his turkey). That might be the first truly touching moment of this season. I wish I remembered to write this kid’s name down before I deleted the episode from tivo – he’s a stand up guy, and we need more people like this in the competition.

Then, we had the “a capella” day of singing. And for some reason that I still can’t figure out, we saw about three minutes of this. There’s been so much talk of how this is the first time that the Olympics are going up against American Idol, and yet Fox decides to only show three minutes of footage? They can stretch a results show into an hour, yet when they actually have people singing, we don’t see it. Go figure.

So the big twist is that three of the four rooms are going on to the next round. And it looks like the final cuts were made recently, which means that the judges have gotten a sense of which singers the public likes. Who knows if that will make a difference or not, but it does mean that they can avoid some of the problems that they’ve had in past seasons, where fan favorites don’t make it past the final cut. Should be interesting…