Simon says: Blame the lighting

Simon Cowell told USA Today what many of us realized last week: that Tuesday's show was a little (ok, more than that) disappointing. Where were all the great performances we were waiting for? According to Simon, it wasn't the contestants fault:

"Last Tuesday's show didn't quite gel. There were some audio issues. The lighting felt too light, too daytime," the Idol judge says. "We know what went wrong and what we're going to do to fix it."

The problem was the LIGHTING??.. really?? If only the lights were down a little, we wouldn't SEE how bad Stevie Wright was?? OK, so no excuses tonight please. Just wow us. But we do agree with Cowell on one point.. while we love Kara, the addition of an extra judge is making the feedback painfully long.

"I'd almost fallen asleep at one point because it was taking so long to get to me," Cowell said of waiting for his turn to speak. "So we're going to have to speed things up a little bit."

But we can't imagine that Simon is ever able to wait his turn.