It may be hard to believe, but American Idol has been on air for a full decade. Debuting during the summer of 2002, the TV talent show became a surprise ratings hit, and almost single-handedly made FOX one of the top three television networks. Despite countless spin-offs and copycats (American Juniors, X Factor, Rock Star: INXS, Nashville Star, Can You Duet, The Voice, etc.), the original series still has a hold on pop culture even into its 11th season.

With its changing roster of celebrity guests and judges, one thing is clear: its all about the contestants. But what have all of those singers been up to lately? So, starting with season one, let’s look back at who made the top five and see what they’re doing now.

“It was just impossible to explain. How do you explain God? How do you explain love?” When she left Hollywood back in 1963, Mother Prioress Dolores Hart remembers, her friends and colleagues were perplexed. And yet, she knew then, when she was a 24-year-old rising movie star, that she was doing the right thing. As recalled by the Oscar-nominated short documentary, God Is the Bigger Elvis, she had appeared in a couple of films with Elvis Presley, 1957’s Loving You and 1958’s King Creole. She had money and fame, a bright career future, and a fiancé, but still, she became a Benedictine nun at the Abbey of Regina Laudis in western Connecticut. The film tells the story simply: Over a series of glamour shots, the Mother Prioress recalls her unexpected opportunity to play opposite Elvis (after she appeared in 1947’s Forever Amber as a child), and then her efforts to find satisfaction in the earthly pleasures that followed. She appeared in movies with Brando and Beatty, Jeff Chandler and George Hamilton, and yet, she found herself yearning for another sort of life. The film includes as well interviews with Dolores Hart’s fellow nuns, who all describe the perfect harmony of their cloistered experience at the Abbey. They eat in silence, they laugh at jokes and toast with wine. The Mother Prioress tends to her parrot Toby and dedicates herself to contemplation and instruction, praying and hearing confessions. “My role is to help the person find hope,” she says, “If you can find hope, you might find faith.”

Scout Finch appeals to everyone. Wise and immature, tomboyish and vulnerable, she’s recognizable even to people who didn’t grow up in segregated Alabama, who didn’t have a scary next-door neighbor and who didn’t have an awesome dad like Atticus. The continuing resonance of Scout’s story is the subject of Hey, Boo: Harper Lee & To Kill a Mockingbird. Airing on PBS’ American Masters, the documentary features a series of interviewees, many quite famous, who describe their sense of likeness and commitment to Scout (James McBride: “She sees the world through child’s eyes with an adult’s understanding,” Oprah Winfrey: “I fell in love with Scout, I wanted to be Scout. I thought I was Scout”). Harper Lee is less available. She retreated from public life soon after the famous film based on her only book was made. She remains rather perfectly the writer whose intentions aren’t performed, for an interviewer who’s asking or an audience who’s projecting. Even as people speculate, imagining both questions and answers for her. Her 99-year-old sister Alice, still a lawyer in the firm their father helped to found, explains Lee’s absence as a choice. “As time went on, she said that reporters began to take too many liberties with what she was saying, so she just wanted out… She felt like she gave enough.” Hey, Boo isn’t asking more of her. But it can’t quite leave her alone, either. 

See PopMatters’ review.

Watch Harper Lee: Hey, Boo on PBS. See more from American Masters.

Sherri Shepherd is a woman of oh so many interests and talents, with a resume even bigger than her bubbly personality. She began her career as a stand up comic and part-time legal secretary, which soon transformed into a full-time position as a sitcom actress. Never one to be pigeonholed, she now willingly shares her opinions on the popular talk show The View, that is when she’s not reprising her role as the brilliantly hilarious Angie Jordan on NBC’s 30 Rock or or working on books like her 2009 effort Permission Slips: Every Woman’s Guide to Giving Herself a Break. A fixture on the red carpet, she recently held court at the Oscars, and also held a supporting role in the Katherine Heigl thriller One for the Money. Rather than be confined to only the world of acting, she will soon make a play for conquering the physical world, when she confronts the competition on Dancing with the Stars.

“Sing Sing,” narrates Laurence Fishburne, “What breaks a man here, it’s what every man loses and what each man serves: time.” Such emphasis on time is made plain in ESPN’s title for José Morales’s film, 26 Years: The Dewey Bozella Story. In 1983, Bozella was convicted for a murder he didn’t commit, based on suspect evidence (“Nothing had my fingerprints on it, nothing”) and unbelievable testimonies by two convicts who were then released. Posed in carefully arranged frames—a sharply angled view of a prison cell, interview rooms where bars cast long shadows—Bozella remembers, “Members of the jury broke down crying when they read the verdict. I said to them, ‘It’s too late, you sent me away for the rest of my life.’” In prison, Bozella found boxing (owing to a guard’s effort to focus inmates’ anger) and also, his wife Trena (who was visiting her brother when they met). As years passed, he wrote each week to the Innocence Project, who finally took the case in 2007, bringing in a “powerful New York law firm,” who discovered exculpatory evidence in a prosecutor’s file cabinet that had never been shown to the defense.