Ryan Seacrest interviewed Idol producer Ken Warwick on his radio program today. Ken says the “new rule” that will be introduced tonight came about to solve a “problem that’s been around since Season 1.” Ken says they tried the rule out in the French version of Idol first.
According to the Wikipedia entry for Nouvelle Star, in the last series, the judges were able to exercise a one time veto on an eliminated contestant at any point in the competition. The judges used their veto during the first week, sparing a contestant named Kristov, who was eventually eliminated 3 weeks later.
Here’s how the new rule worked in France: The judge get a veto power, it means that they can save one contestant during the whole season. It works the following way, after the contestant(s) was eliminated, the judges have a meeting and decide if he is worth saving or not. If they decide he deserved it they give him another chance and the following week they start the show with the same contestants.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Will judges get veto power?
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Are we judging song choices or singing?
From MSNBC
It came up over and over again last week on American Idol. Instead of critiquing the singers' voices, Simon Cowell and his fellow judges fell back and blamed the song choice. "I really like you, but I absolutely hated that song," Simon told welder Matt Breitzke Wednesday night. "Completely the inappropriate song for you, but you do have great legs," he said to Jeanine Vailes, sounding more than a little like a creepy old man.
I think criticizing song choice can be fair if the singer has gone way out on a limb and picked something that they just can't handle. You need to know your own limitations -- it's hard to argue with that -- and many of these singers don't. But even then, it should be only part of the critique. Too often, it seems like the judges get lazy and blame the song instead of really dissecting the performance of the song, even if they didn't like the choice. A friend of mine thinks that 99 percent of the time when the judges harp on "bad song choice" they really mean "bad genre choice."
They've already pigeonholed the singers into different boxes -- oil rig roughneck Michael Sarver looks like a country guy, even though he hasn't sung country on the show. Don't get out of your pre-assigned box, people! If Simon decides R&B is your genre, don't try a pop song (Jasmine Murray was dinged for this Wednesday night).
Read the complete story here. Do you agree? Tell us what you think.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Kara good, mansion bad
Fox executive Mike Darnell on changes to American Idol and its ratings, from the Los Angeles Times
"Darnell argues that this season's "Idol" changes -- including adding fourth judge Kara DioGuardi, trimming the time for auditions, doubling the time devoted to the Hollywood rounds and even adding a "judges' mansion" in Wednesday's episode -- were necessary to avoid a feeling of stasis that could alienate core fans."
We love Kara and definitely wanted to see less of the bad auditions (yes, they were occasionally funny, but enough is enough.) But how the hell did the judges mansion add anything?? Are you kidding us?
"We were hearing that the audition shows, even though they were highly rated, were feeling a bit on the stretched side to keep them going for four weeks," he added. "The stories were a little too long. Maybe we were concentrating on having too many. If a person wasn't going forward, we'd still make a story on them. Maybe that should have been a 30-second story or 45-second story instead of a minute-and-a-half or two-minute story.
So this is why they've spent so much time on Michael -- to develop a story on someone they thought would stick around for a while!
Hollywood is where the core viewers really start to attach to people. As a result, the producers have had more time this season to develop back stories on the Top 36 contestants. "I've never felt better about people knowing who's going into these middle rounds. That's what drives the show -- an attachment to the kids drives attachment to the show."
Is it just us, or do you feel like most of the Top 36 are a mystery. All the TV time has focused on just a few of them (can we say unfair advantage when it comes time to vote). We'd rather know everyone or no one equally ... well, except for Michael who should have his TV time doubled.
"Through five weeks, Season 8 of "Idol" has slipped 8% compared with last season to 26.8 million total viewers and is down 14% in the advertiser-friendly demographic adults ages 18 to 49, according to data from Nielsen Media Research. In fact, among adults under age 50, this is the lowest-rated "Idol" (10.6 rating for the Tuesday episodes) since the first season back in summer 2002 (4.9 rating)."
But everyone is Southeast Texas is watching, and that's millions ...err, thousands... hmm.. hundreds of viewers.
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