This is only my third year driving myself across West Los Angeles from the EW LA bureau offices to CBS Television City, parking at the nearby mall, trundling up to Stage 36, and settling into the American Idol Thunderdome for an hour (or two) of rotating Idol logos, warm-up comics, flat-screen monitors, standing spectators, brushed steel, blue neon, lighting packages, judge bickering and, oh yeah, musical performances by potential Kelly Clarksons (or Sanjaya Malakars). But it certainly wasn’t a surprise for me that yesterday was the start of three months of on the scene, here’s-what-you-didn’t-see-on-TV Idol reports. Apparently, though, the fact that there was a live television show to put on at precisely 5 p.m. Pacific Time kinda snuck up on the folks at Fox and CBS Studios. The studio pages were still shuffling in audience members, and set PAs still fixing up the set, with just nine minutes to go before showtime. The seats were incorrectly labeled, making finding section G, Row 6, Seat 6 a super fun challenge. And come showtime, there somehow still weren’t enough bodies to fill the seats, which meant my fellow row-mates — including Season 7 favorite Chikezie (pictured, inset) and Season 6…contestant Phil I-can’t-remember-his-last-name-oh-that’s-right-it’s Stacey — and I had to "fill out" the row by sitting astride two seats each. Maybe everybody was thrown by the early switch to daylight saving time?

Most shocking of all: No Cory the Warm-Up Comic! (For those of you new to Idol and/or these write-ups, Cory is — or, perhaps, was — the regular Idol warm-up "comedian" notorious among those of us paid to cover the Idol stage each week for the simple fact that he does the exact same warm-up routine for every single show. Two years ago, I broke down and gave a detailed account of this routine, which you can read here — if you dare.) Suffice it to say, Cory’s become such a fixture of my Idol experience that his absence from the first finalist show of the season was a bit like the shock of a Paula Abdul capable of speaking in complete, cogent, insightful sentences. But just a bit.

As for the rest of the show, from my seat it was the most satisfying start to Idol‘s final rounds I’ve experienced since I started covering this pop-culture steamroller in season six. This could be due to my drastically lowered expectations for the season — I only counted a single fan-made sign before the show started ("Anoop Dog: Chapel Thrill! Represent!"), which played right into my fear that we’ve barely had time to get invested in any of the contestants this season. But as the show neared its close, my row-mate Chikezie put it as well as anyone: "This is a great night!" After the jump, I’ll give you the full breakdown of the evening, including why so much of Jorge’s performance was shot from the waist up, whether Adam Lambert (pictured) came over better live and in-person or live-on-the-East-Coast and on your TV, and how the audience knew it was Megan’s brother’s birthday well before home viewers did. Also: More commentary from Chikezie!

addCredit(“Michael Becker/American Idol/Getty Images”)

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