Aloft in the 'Idol' world

Not that he's ever met Brown. The closest he'd ever come was seeing her on TV sing ''The Star Spangled Banner" at a Patriots exhibition game. But the Andover High School senior is an ''Idol" junkie, Web-savvy and full of practical ideas: Post links to flattering Ayla news stories on general ''Idol" sites. Play up the sympathy vote if judges go negative. And, of course, vote prodigiously. On Tuesday night, he figures, he logged 500 calls to Brown's designated 1-800 number, hoping to ensure that the 17-year-old stranger won't be voted off the entertainment juggernaut tonight.

This is the strange trajectory of an ''American Idol" contender: One minute, you're shopping at the Wrentham Village Premium Outlets, and the next you have a fan base and websites in your honor. Your high school is fielding calls from ''Access Hollywood." A 20-year-old in Las Vegas is using your name as his e-mail address.

It's very big, and a tad out-of-place for Massachusetts, better known for exporting wind-surfing Brahmins than reality TV divas (''Boston Rob" of ''Survivor" notwithstanding). But it was bound to happen; ''Idol" is in its fifth season as TV's biggest and most interactive phenomenon, with more than 30 million viewers, 10 percent more than last year. The show regularly trounced the recent Winter Olympics in ratings; last Thursday's episode, which contained about 10 seconds of voting results and 45 minutes of filler, beat the Olympics, ''Survivor," and the ''Dancing with the Stars" finale.

Brown's fans -- the ones schooled in ''Idol" history, at least -- know that the contest isn't won on singing alone. This is reality TV, where back stories are milked for maximum drama and editing creates flashy narrative arcs. Viewers vote for the package: in Brown's case, a basketball star at exclusive Noble and Greenough private school in Dedham whose father is a state senator, whose mother is an anchor on WCVB-TV.

It is not a bad sign that, when Brown belts out diva-worthy ballads, judges Randy Jackson and Paula Abdul keep saying they're ''pleasantly surprised."

And on Tuesday night, when Brown told judge Simon Cowell that she once got ''C's" in school, Devine, watching in Andover, was cheered.

In a late-night e-mail Tuesday night he explained: Cowell ''said she is a very hard worker and her pre-performance clip showed that she is not the 'perfect privileged girly-girl' some people perceive her as," Devine wrote as he helped to manage the website www.ayla-brown.org. Fate helped, too, Devine said: ''Usually when you perform near the end [of an episode] people will remember the performance better."

Still, a little grass-roots organizing couldn't hurt. Travis Yee, a Las Vegas college student who created ayla-brown.org, has contacted Brown's relatives and collected video of her past performances at other events, the better to improve Brown's presence on the Web.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts Federation of Young Republicans chair Karl Burns, who volunteered for Brown's father's 2004 state Senate campaign, has embarked on an Ayla get-out-the-vote drive the way he'd approach a political race. There are four finalists from North Carolina, he muses; that might split the regional vote. He's trying to establish weekly ''Ayla parties" -- cellphones welcome -- at local bars.

''It's leveraging personal networks, leveraging regionality," Burns said. ''We'll probably have to go on Craigslist, strategically place her name in a lot of places."

Brown's father, Republican state Senator Scott Brown, watches it all, bemused. ''It is," he said from his State House office this week, ''just a TV show."

His daughter auditioned on a whim at Gillette Stadium last summer, with no particular expectations, he said. Now, he fields daily questions about the ''Idol" process, scans Ayla websites to make sure they're positive (so far, 90 percent are, he said) and faces speculation about whether ''Idol" will affect his potential bid for lieutenant governor. He takes press calls while following the contest's strict rules: He's allowed to say he's proud of his daughter, but he's not allowed to hint at what song she might sing.

Fox spokespeople offered limited comment this week, citing the show's crazed production schedule: It airs three times this week, and tonight, four contestants -- two male, two female -- will be eliminated. The eventual winner won't be crowned until May.

The pressure is high, because so is the payoff; original ''Idol" winner Kelly Clarkson just won two Grammys, while 2005 champion Carrie Underwood's debut album has topped the country charts for 11 straight weeks. And TV observers say the show's appeal has much to say for fan empowerment -- and an audience that's cheerily complicit about being played.

''It's creating a nationwide focus group to market-test a product," said University of Iowa professor Mark Andrejevic, the author of ''Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched." ''We take a certain amount of pleasure in saying, 'Hey, we're not just going to wait around for you guys to decide who the celebrities are going to be.' "

Whether Brown has a legitimate shot at the fifth ''Idol" crown is a matter of national speculation.

M. J. Santilli, 48, a Brookline network engineer who runs an ''American Idol" blog at www.mjsbigblog.com, believes producers prop up the winners early on and manipulate the public into voting their way. She predicted Underwood's ascendance last year, since judge Cowell seemed in her corner early on.

This year, based on the judges' most abundant praise, Santilli predicts a win for prettyboy crooner Ace Brown -- and thinks Kellie Pickler, a North Carolina waitress with a poetically hard-luck past, is a likely runner-up.

Ayla Brown is at a disadvantage, Santilli said, given her happy childhood and her college basketball scholarship. ''Idol" winners tend to ''look like they struggled," Santilli said. ''She looks like the girl who has everything. People actually like to see people like that fail."

That's a risk, Scott Brown knows, of putting yourself in front of the public: Not everyone will be kind. So his strategy, parentally, is to put the experience in perspective.

''I e-mailed her the other night and said, listen, in my last election, I got 52 percent of the vote and 48 percent didn't vote for me," he said. ''If you're at 90-10, you're ahead of the game."

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com