SING FOR THE LAUGHS, SING FOR THE TEARS: Big changes announced for Idol -- guest mentors out, permanent mentor record executive Jimmy Iovine is in; theme weeks forcing folks out of their wheelhouse are out, and stay-within-your-box-and-make-the-box-awesome with decade-based theme weeks is what's in.
Add the previously mentioned Bieber Rule, and I don't know if this will make for a better show, but it will certainly be a different one. Also, there's two new judges.
I'm out. I can't stand Randy, any good will I had towards J-Lo was destroyed by "The Backup Plan" being my inflight movie last weekend and Steven Tyler will likely be unintelligible. Unless it's a great group of contestants, there's no way they can make up for no Simon. I'll miss the conversations here and the survivor pool we had among my group of friends, but it just doesn't seem like it will be any fun to watch.
ReplyDeleteThey should have kept Kara and dumped Randy, who serves no purpose on the show. At least Kara offered cogent critiques and had written recent hits. I'm also not a big fan of changing to decade themes. It seemed to me the performances were often better when the theme week was narrow (e.g. Elton John week, Bon Jovi week) and that the contestants often struggled when they could choose something like any No. 1 Billboard hit of all time.
ReplyDeleteErr, am I the only one seeing "Seacrest" early in the WaPo article, but "Seabiscuit" from mid story to the end?
ReplyDeleteNo? And no one in the comments says anything?
ReplyDelete'Seabiscuit' is what the blog writer Lisa de Moraes calls Seacrest when she writes her 'we watch so you don't have to' recaps of Idol, which are a regular feature.
ReplyDeleteThey should have dumped both of them.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if I'm in or out. I tend to find Steven Tyler to be a combination of unintelligible and hard to look at. JLo was, I thought, pretty good as a mentor for Idol in Season 6, so I'm not against her. And Randy is, at best, a waste of space. If they had kept one judge from last year's panel, I would have voted for it to be Kara, as hard as that is to imagine.
ReplyDeleteAnd last year was, overall, pretty painful. The production was bad, the themes were horrendous, and I thought that much of the top 12 was pretty weak, including the winner. [I mean, I know that the panel said that hitting notes wasn't important for him. But you know? It was important to me.]
But there is always the possibility that they have better contestants. So, we'll see. The boyfriend insists he's out, given the winner last year.
Ah. In-joke, not copy editors giving up and letting the machines take over. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteNigel Lythgoe is back isn't he? If so I'll continue to catch up with what I can via YouTube and these comments/recaps. It is always entertaining from a distance.
ReplyDelete