the show (formerly The Show) has been rolling along for about a month now, working its way through a final season that lots of people hope will be more dramatic and musically interesting than what’s been coming out of this factory for the last couple of years. But all I’ve noticed so far is: Everything keeps getting smaller.

Remember when the hopefuls filled football stadiums for tryouts? You didn’t see that this year, and they weren’t generally filling basketball arenas, either. The individual programs are way, way shorter than they used to be, and there are far fewer of them. And I’ve played in bars bigger than the venue being used for the current round, before we finally get to the “Idol stage,” whatever that means this year.

I’m not sure if the plan is to shrink this franchise until it disappears, perhaps with a slight popping sound, but that appears to be a strategy. Even the performers seem smaller: With a couple of exceptions, this year’s crew features a lot of breathy singers who appear to feel emotions very deeply. Even the guy who’s doing his best (blonde) Billie Joe Armstrong impersonation seems to have a taste for turning everything from Billy Idol to Olivia Newton John into a Quiet Storm groove.

The pageant kid/show kid wing of the show seems particularly well-represented this year, which is not a good thing by my standards, but who are we kidding here? This show is not for me. It has survived in part for its ability to reach out to a younger audience after getting dangerously close to attracting a Depends demographic at times. I’m getting dangerously close to Depends age myself, so this development makes me grumpy at times. Mostly I think, “I didn’t realize modern music sucked quite so much.”

Thus, the show has become more lowercase than at any time in its history, which is why it’s going away. In fact, let me shrink it some more by renaming it: theshow. That’s about what it deserves now. And if it keeps getting smaller, it’s going to make that Really Big Finale seem really, really awkward.