America's Got Talent is back on our screens, the first time since Susan Boyle made its cousin Britain's Got Talent an international internet sensation.
Rapper-comic Nick Cannon, the new AGT host, following Regis Philbin and Jerry Springer, nudges things along with mutterings and raised eyebrows; he is not particularly funny, but he is mostly rather sweet.
Unlike American Idol, whose Simon Cowell is the "creator" of this patented and internationally franchised inflation of something that has been going on in community centres, high school auditoriums and church basements for ages, AGT defines talent as broadly as possible and welcomes, if often only to smack them down, performers of all shapes and ages: It likes the very young (children are always asked their ages, usually by judge Sharon Osbourne), the up-from-the-streets, the family band, the dream that won't die - contestants are a mix of karaoke singers, hobbyists looking to take it to the next level, frustrated professionals seeking a larger venue and people who just need you to see that thing they do.
It is a kind of human Antiques Roadshow, in which talents and desires are brought out from the attic for expert appraisal and possible reward.
Not everyone likes what they hear.
On one recent show, which covered auditions in New York, Seattle and Chicago, we saw a man put sharp things up his nose, a man rotate his feet 180 degrees (even more unsettling than the man with the things up his nose), a couple twirl erotically on a hoop and a man sing satirically about being in love with judge David Hasselhoff - songwriting was his avowed talent, not singing - alongside the more usual singers, comics, choirs and dance crews.
Many are allowed on stage specifically to fail.
These shows run on a sort of cognitive dissonance.
The point of the Boyle phenomenon is not her singing but that her singing was unexpected, given the drably dressed, thick-set middle-aged person from which it issued: She represents the ultimate expression of the "Got Talent" brand.
Last year's ATG winner, Neal E. Boyd, was similarly an unlikely star, a very large insurance salesman from a small town in the Midwest with a thing for opera.
Like American Idol, America's Got Talent also embraces a narrative of amateurism triumphant.
That 2009 Idol runner-up Adam Lambert already had a relatively hale career was not exactly a secret, but it fought uncomfortably with the idea that these shows are venues in which raw talent is "discovered" and groomed, and finally let out into the world in the way a butterfly leaves its chrysalis.
I like this show even as I am sometimes put off by the aggressiveness of its uplift on the one hand and the occasional nastiness of the judges on the other - and by crowds encouraged to boo and fold their arms X-style to indicate displeasure.
It is hard not to like the show, if you give it any time - something will come along to impress you or tug at your heart.
• America's Got Talent screens Sundays at 8.45pm on PRIME.
