best hope of little Americas developing in the Middle East could be Arab-produced reality TV". In 2007, Abu Dhabi TV began airing Million's Poet, a show featuring Pop Idol-style voting and elimination, but for the writing and oration of Arabic poetry. The show became popular in Arab countries, with around 18 million viewers, partly because it was able to combine the excitement of reality television with a traditional, culturally relevant topic. In April 2010, however, the show also became a subject of political controversy, when Hissa Hilal, a 43-year-old female Saudi competitor, read out a poem criticizing her country's Muslim clerics. Both critics and the public reacted favorably to Hilal's poetry; she received the highest scores from the judges throughout the competition and came in third place overall. In India, in the summer of 2007, coverage of the third season of Indian Idol focused on the breaking down of cultural and socioeconomic barriers as the public rallied around the show's top two contestants. The Chinese singing competition Super Girl (a local imitation of Pop Idol) has similarly been cited for its political and cultural impact. After the finale of the show's 2005 season drew an audience of around 400 million people, and eight million text-message votes, the state-run English-language newspaper Beijing Today ran the front-page headline: "Is Super Girl a Force for Democracy?" The Chinese government criticized the show, citing both its democratic nature and its excessive vulgarity, or "worldliness", and in 2006 banned it outright. It was later reintroduced in 2009, before being banned again in 2011. Super Girl has also been criticized by non-government commentators for creating seemingly impossible ideals that may be harmful to Chinese youth. In Indonesia, reality television shows have surpassed soap operas as the most-watched broadcast programs. One popular program, Jika Aku Menjadi ("If I Were"), follows young, middle-class people as they are temporarily placed into lower-class life, where they learn to appreciate their circumstances back home by experiencing daily life for the less fortunate. Critics have claimed that this and similar programs in Indonesia reinforce traditionally Western ideals of materialism and consumerism. However, Eko Nugroho, reality-show producer and president of Dreamlight World Media, insists that these reality shows are not promoting American lifestyles but rather reaching people through their universal desires. Reality television has also received criticism in Britain and the United States for its ideological relationship with surveillance societies and consumerism. Writing