NASHVILLE STAR 5: Angela Hacker has a rasp like a chair scraping backward.

But the chief is being too modest: Armed and Famous — must I be its eulogist? — was a show in the best tradition of reality. Its premise (celebs making busts in underclass USA) had that classic we-came-up-with-it-when-we-were-high quality, and every episode was stuffed with accidental Life. Here were the unpurged images of America, and the great lines. Emile the wife beater, railing at his swollen spouse from the back seat of La Toya Jackson’s police cruiser: “I never hit you! No! I pushed you and held you, yes . . . ” Officer Jack Osbourne, son of Ozzy, observing a woman in handcuffs as she took a desperate, wheezing drag off her husband’s cigarette: “It was like a baby bird feeding from its mother.” Always amusing, too, was the way the arrestees, from beneath their various welts, Taserings, and clouds of meth, would manage to recognize their celebrity apprehenders. One shirtless miscreant, pounced upon by Officer Erik Estrada, tauntingly called him “Mr. Emilio Estevez.” Muncie, Muncie, you fairyland of disgrace, we’re gonna miss you.

Besides, last week’s American Idol was a bore, a whole hour without any singing, just the judges saying no or yes to a long parade of contestants. Cowell teased them with drawn-out double negatives — “You haven’t . . . failed,” “We have decided not . . . to exclude you” — and there was plentiful use of that industrial swooshing sound so beloved of the show’s producers, the noise of someone’s hopes being vacuumed into the abyss, but the suspense was mild at best. Chris Sligh is still in it, the man who said he’d entered the competition because he “wanted to make David Hasselhoff cry.” Sligh, as Jody Rosen has noted in Slate, is “American Idol’s first ironist: if he wins it’ll be like Stephen Colbert becoming president.”

No ironists of any sort are involved in the production of Nashville Star 5 (USA Network, Thursdays, 10 pm). This is proper red-state stuff, pumped straight from the beating heart of the nation: “Get ready, America!”, “If America gives him a chance . . . and I think America will,” “Anything you want to say to America right now?”, “I agree with America.” This being country music, it is expected of each contestant that he or she come hauling some great luggage of experience: tears, strife, an operation, an overcoming. “I like your story, man,” say the judges. In Episode #5, Zac Hacker stole the show with a slow-beating, grief-stained number about his daddy called “If It Wasn’t for the Whisky”: “Daddy had a weakness/He kep’ it on a shelf.” The producers kept a camera on Hacker Sr., the flawed patriarch himself, as he sat in the audience. “He tried to teach me wrong from right/With the backside of his hand.” Mr. Hacker was wearing a black leather jacket with fringed sleeves, and his face was wrenched into a sort of triumphal half-snarl. The camera, shooting upward from knee level, caught the grandeur of his belly and his massed neck flesh. He reared and wallowed in his seat, transported by emotion, and as the song finished — “If it wasn’t for the whisky/Daddy would’ve bin a goo-ood man” — he hoisted himself aloft and gave his son a trembling pair of devil horns. Wild stuff. But wildest of all is Zac’s sister, Angela Hacker, who is also competing and will surely take the prize: she has a rasp in her voice like a chair scraping backward before a bar fight.

Ego Trip’s The (White) Rapper Show (VH1, Mondays, 10 pm) is becoming essential viewing, a laboratory of race relations. Last week, white rappers Jus Rhyme (political) and John Brown (king of the suburbs) had dinner with rap/reggaetón heavyweight N.O.R.E on top of the Empire State Building. Jus arrived for the evening with a black bandana covering one eye and a baseball hat piratically tilted on top. He perched parrot-like on the edge of his seat and squawked about how he worked “with the youth” but would take one drink “out of respect for y’all.” John Brown, whose face never loses its brooding, childlike heaviness, informed his host that he was working with a label called Ghetto Revival. N.O.R.E winced, stroked his chin, and brought the proceedings to a speedy close, fearing perhaps that another five minutes in the company of these clowns would oblige him to throw them over the side of the building.

All right. Next week: more of the same, but better, louder, greasier. Stay tuned.