Another season of American Idol begins on Wednesday; perhaps you haven’t noticed.
It is surely not the occasion it used to be, when Idol strode the television world like a colossus. Now the Fox network, which cashed in on this singing competition’s enormous ratings for more than a decade, is contemplating a new season with severely tempered hopes — and a plan.
The hopes come down to arresting the bleeding that has afflicted the show in the last two seasons, with ratings declines of 30 per cent in each one.
The plan is to offer a revitalised version of Idol.
“It reminds me of those old commercials,” said Kevin Reilly, Fox Broadcasting’s entertainment chairman. “It’s not Tide. It’s the new, improved Tide. It’s not our intention to do a sort of overhaul but just to give the show a lot of fresh elements, to refind its footing.”
If not really adding up to a complete overhaul (the original host, Ryan Seacrest, remains), the fresh elements are coming in a sizable stack. They start with the weekly faces of the show, the judging panel, this season back down to three. The country artist Keith Urban is the only holdover from last year, joined by the pop superstar Jennifer Lopez (a fan favorite back after a year away) and the pianist-singer Harry Connick Jr.
The set is new, the lighting is new, the theme music is changed, and the format will undergo some significant tweaks.
Contestants at auditions will be allowed to use instruments; the slow middle rounds in which surviving contestants get sorted out will be sharply condensed into what Reilly called a “two-hour blitzkrieg”; the resulting shows will shrink to a half-hour in the second part of the season.
Then there’s the infamous sequences of wretched or hilariously bad performances: Those will be “exponentially less to almost nonexistent,” Urban said. He, Lopez and Connick all spoke out against the practice, with Connick the sharpest, saying that he had told several hopelessly poor contestants: “This is a waste of time. You just need to stop.”
The Fox executives acknowledged the impact of the competition, from The Voice, a true hit for NBC, and Fox’s own X Factor, which has generated ever-weaker ratings while apparently diluting interest in Idol. But they did not shrink from assigning principal blame for the Idol ratings plunge last season to on-air enmity between two of the judges, Mariah Carey and Nicki Minaj, which sent viewers packing.
Reilly decried the “antics going on” last season. “When it became all about the drama about the judges, that was really out of whack,” he said.
Hill said: “There are so many positive qualities about this show, why would you want conflict there at all - question mark, question mark, question mark. The show can never be about the judges.”
The new group is hardly anonymous. Lopez’s fame is on par with that of any star who has appeared on the show, and Urban and Connick both have significant followings as well as musical expertise.
But Hill, who had an important role in the judges’ selection, said the emphasis would return to the contestants, their talent and their emotions. (Reilly conceded that the overall weakness of the competition was an issue last season. “Frankly, we didn’t find the contestant who overshadowed the judges’ story,” he said. “Had we exploded a talent or two, I think that would have made a difference.”)
Lopez, who was asked back because she was part of the show during its most recent high point, said she returned for a simple reason: “They offered me, and it’s fun. I still enjoy the journey of it, that American dream. The same things that made me fall in love with it in the first season are still there for me.”
Reilly said Urban had made a positive impression last season “even though it was hard for him to get a word in edgewise.” Urban said he had enjoyed the experience and had “no hesitation at all” about coming back. “I love the spirit of the show,” he said. “For me, it’s always been about going to some town no one’s ever heard of and finding that diamond in the rough.”
Connick had been a fan since the first season, when he sat in the audience and watched Kelly Clarkson win. “It has the benefit of being a tried-and-true format but with newfound energy,” he said. “I like to think of it as an incredibly beautiful grand house that started to show its age and they shut it down and remodeled it.”
