Clive Davis was quoted in Variety last week saying that we shouldn't expect a Whitney Houston tour, just lots of TV. "I'm sure that she will have more live engagements, butI'm more interested in her doing these (broadcast) shows," Houston's longtime mentor told the trade paper. "When she does television engagements, you're talking about reaching millions of people, not 15,000. She's really more akin to Streisand than she is a rock artist. You're not going to get Whitney Houston doing one-nighters."

Well, we get that last part, now, at least. After her Good Morning America appearance, not quite live but filmed the previous afternoon in Central Park, there are strong indications of why Whitney won't be slogging it out on the road any time soon, and they aren't all to do with the prestige factor. Her chops weren't up to even this singular occasion, much less the rigors of a cross-country trek. Houston was the first to admit as much, apologizing to the crowd for her hoarse tones, saying she'd wrecked her voice by taping a lengthy interview with Oprah the previous day. (ABC edited this mea culpa out of the GMA broadcast, lest it interfere with the promised triumphalism.)

Soon after the filming was completed Tuesday, the Daily News talked with fans at the show and ran with a story—picked up by the Drudge Report and many other outlets—that made her four-song set  sound like an out-and-out train wreck. It wasn't, quite. When the footage aired Wednesday morning, some fans wondered: Where's the carnage? Never mind that a few viewers thought they heard traces of after-the-fact Autotune or other enhancement being applied to the purportedly greatest singer in pop. Gawker ran with an anonymous source at the network claiming that her voice had been digitally sweetened for the broadcast. 

Everything comes down to expectations, right? If you think it's a miracle that Houston's voice and spirit survived at all after what she's been through, or you'd read exaggerated accounts of just how much her voice cracked, then the GMA performance probably looked and sounded pretty good. But if you wanted a Whitney who sounds even two-thirds as good as she does on her new album—which, by smartly positioning her in her lower registers, is already an album informed by diminished expectations—then it was disappointment that lay in store for you.

I think most of us are instinctively rooting for Houston, unlike some of the spoiled divas she has inspired and is often popularly pitted against. There's no glee in pointing out what was inherently wrong with Houston's Central Park performance, regardless of whether it was "fixed in post" or not: She is singing interjections more than she is the meat of these songs, letting the crowd or her backup singers do a lot of the lifting while she adds flourishes and fills. And yes, there was a bit of cracking, too; for a few moments I thought she should be singing "I'm Every Laryngitis Victim." But for the most part, it's not so much that she can't hit the notes, it's that she's being so careful about which notes and phrases she even attempts—so that every tune almost becomes an extended scat, in avoidance of a more demanding central melody.

Maybe we should "blame Oprah," as the headlines suggested Houston did. But if she and Davis are going to pin their fortunes on millions of people seeing one performance rather than tens of thousands attending dozens of shows, you've got to be hoping that one performance won't make the news for all the wrong reasons.

The immediate outlook for Houston is still fairly rosy, this misstep aside. Based on the first two days of sales, Hits magazine is estimating that her just-released album, I Look to You, could sell upwards of 250,000 its first week; that almost counts as truly boffo business in this pitiful sales climate. The word of mouth and reviews have been extremely mixed—again, all relative to expectations, I think. If you see it as just another in a string of albums for Houston, and one on which she's not trying overly hard to be a belter or a young hottie, and not even milking very many key-change-riddled ballads, then you'll see it as a winner. If you approach it relative to the three years that were spent making it, you might wonder if Clive really couldn't find any better songs (or "copyrights," as he likes to call them) for his charge while the project got dragged out. In any case, they've got the album's best tune, the Alicia Keys-penned "Million Dollar Bill," to work with as a single, and the big question mark now is whether radio is still truly willing to give her a shot.

Practically alone among new releases, I Look to You looks sure to avoid the usual massive second-week dropoff blues, thanks to next week's highly advertised exclusive Oprah interview—where, we assume, Houston will be in fine (speaking) voice, revealing all about her past troubled decade and scoring mondo points for being a survivor.

Let's just hope the next TV appearance sells albums based on musical admiration and not just our empathy.