These days, with ’American Idol’ and all the other reality shows, young people become famous overnight, and that can be very difficult to handle, the way photographers follow you around and study your every move.

Manilow contrasts the slow, apprenticeship-like path to celebrity typical of earlier pop careers with the accelerated fame produced by reality television. The quote frames “overnight” stardom as psychologically and socially destabilizing: sudden visibility invites constant surveillance, paparazzi attention, and public judgment before a young performer has developed coping skills or a stable sense of self. Implicitly, he suggests that fame is not merely success but a condition with costs—loss of privacy, pressure to perform an image, and the difficulty of making mistakes under scrutiny. The remark also critiques a media ecosystem that treats people as consumable spectacles, “studying your every move” as if celebrity were a public property.