‘Idol’ warms to challenges
Fox shifts gears in Season 14 as stalwart series hopes to recapture its former glory
American Idol could use a new star to brighten its future.
The legendary but aging Fox singing competition, which opens Season 14 with Nashville auditions on Wednesday (8 p.m. ET/ PT), pales in comparison to the glory days when it was TV’s No. 1 show and introduced Americans to future stars such as Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Hudson and Daughtry.
Despite putting together a well-received judging panel last year after the Mariah Carey-Nicki Minaj squabbles of 2013, Season 13 suffered a 20% ratings drop for the third consecutive year. It trailed NBC’s singing show, The
Voice, for the first time in both overall viewing and advertisercoveted young adults, and it produced nothing close to its longtime goal: finding a superstar. It’s losing one of its original sponsors, Coca-Cola, and will cut back to one night a week later in the season, eliminating the lowerrated results show.
For the new season, Idol appears to be embracing the star-finding birthright that goes back to Clarkson in 2002’s first season, with changes designed to yield high-quality and engaging contestants audiences will embrace. For the past two seasons, the contestants haven’t captured the public’s imagination, Fox Networks Group chief Peter Rice said this summer.
THE RIGHT STUFF
“In the auditions, (we were) looking for kids that are more ready for what this is,” says judge Harry Connick Jr., who rejoins fellow panelists Jennifer Lopez and Keith Urban and host Ryan Seacrest. “There were a lot of talented kids last year (who) didn’t do that well on the show, whether it’s because of nerves or lack of experience. We tried to find kids that would be more ready for the American Idol experience. ... If you’re going to be an entertainer, you have to be able to perform on cue.”
Although many of the singers, who range from 15 to 28, are “definitely rough, some of it boils to straight-up personality,” he says. “I can think of a few kids that are just goofballs and they love to have fun. We didn’t have a whole lot of that last year, kids that give you unexpected answers.”
Changes, including a new mentor and an early public performance in December by the top 48 singers, are designed to find and cultivate the best performers and prepare them for recording careers, an area where Idol has faltered recently after achieving a level of success unmatched by its music-show competitors here.
Scott Borchetta, a music executive who has worked closely with superstar Taylor Swift, will take over the mentoring role from Randy Jackson, an original judge whose departure from the show removes one more connection to
Idol’s glory days. His goal is to start grooming the performers early in the show’s run and have the eventual winner ready to embark on a successful music career.
Previous mentor and recording executive Jimmy Iovine “was terrific, and Randy was terrific, but for these kids to see the guy who took Taylor Swift from a 16-yearold and helped turn her into a world figure is like having Michelangelo walk into a sculpting class,” says David Hill, a Fox executive and Idol executive producer.
Idol’s essential appeal has been finding fresh talent and letting viewers watch it blossom on the show, Hill says. Borchetta, who has been involved in Season 14 since the Hollywood Week tapings, echoes that philosophy.
“We want more than just the best singer. We want the best artist. ... If we can shift the psychology, which we’ve already started, to ‘Hey, just coming to Hollywood, that’s not the victory,’ (then) somebody’s going to win this and have a real opportunity to change their life.”
Producers have been open to change, the record-label executive says — a necessity in a genre where things that worked 13 years ago (like mocking poor performances) don’t necessarily work now. “You can’t just put on some of the crazy artists just for shock factor. In the beginning, it was such a shock that people tuned in. Now, it feels mean-spirited, so they’ve stopped doing it.”
One of those changes, the contestant concert held at the Los Angeles House of Blues before judges whittled the field to 24, achieved its goal, Connick says.
“That was very specifically designed to see them in a situation in between being alone in an audition room and being on that huge Idol stage. It was to see them in a small environment, packed with people, to see how they looked in front of an audience,” he says.
“We learned a lot. In my mind, I knew who was going to crush it — and they crashed and burned. And the ones that I thought were going to come in second, they destroyed it. It was immensely helpful to us.”
Stopping the ratings loss will not be easy. Idol, which peaked at more than 30 million viewers per episode in Season 5, has been on a steep fall in recent years. Last season, Idol averaged just 12 million viewers, only about half the number from three years earlier.
Although Season 13 of Idol remained the most-watched show on Fox, which is weathering an overall slump, and tied with freshman hit Sleepy Hollow as the network’s top shows in advertiser-coveted young adults, it trailed NBC’s The Voice, which hasn’t produced a recording artist anywhere near the stature of Clarkson or Underwood since its premiere in 2011. But it has engaged viewers with its blind-audition format and a stable of star coaches, including this season’s Adam Levine, Blake Shelton, Pharrell and Gwen Stefani.
Voice winners, such as Cassadee Pope and Danielle Bradbery, have had post-show success, but none are household names. For the Season 7 finale last month, finalists each performed an original song, in the hope that having a song immediately available for fans would give the eventual winner a career boost when interest was likely to be highest. Winner Craig Wayne Boyd’s single, My Baby’s Got a Smile on Her Face,
opened at No. 1 on Billboard’s “hot country” chart.
“When somebody wins, the marketplace has been invested in these people for so long. ... Now, for the first time, we have product for people to go out there and get,” Voice host and producer Carson Daly said after Boyd’s victory. That, he adds, “is unprecedented for us as a show.”
‘FATIGUE FACTOR’
For Idol, ratings losses are a result of “age, and part of it is competition,” which also has included Fox’s X Factor (canceled in early 2014 after three seasons) and ABC’s Rising Star, which premiered to weak ratings last summer, says Brad Adgate of ad firm Horizon Media. “The Voice has been the most viable competitor ( Idol) has faced.”
The elimination of the results show, a weaker hour filled mostly with pageantry and non-competitive performances before a contestant is sent home in the final minutes, could help the franchise, which faces “a fatigue factor” and the loss of attendant buzz (as well as the Coke fizz) after such a long run, Adgate says.
Borchetta, whose firm helped reinvigorate the careers of stars such as Reba McEntire and Tim McGraw, sees an opportunity with a longtime top show.
Despite Idol’s declining ratings, Borchetta embraces the broadcast-network showcase and its millions of viewers, along with its search-for-a-superstar roots. In music, “we fight so hard to get those TV moments. Now, they’re saying, ‘You get a TV moment every week.’ That’s so exciting, because if we do it right, we will have the next American Idol,” he says. “We will get the next Kelly Clarkson or Carrie Underwood.”