NEW YORK — As The Voice ends its third season, tell us if this scenario sounds familiar.
A give-it-your-all reality competition becomes a national fascination. Other shows mimic its formula — and eventually another show becomes the nation’s reality spectacle of choice. It outpaces its predecessor and makes many of us forget just how original the original once seemed.
We aren’t just talking about American Idol, but also Mark Burnett’s Survivor, the show that may be most responsible for launching the reality genre in the US. Just as The Voice has surpassed Idol, Idol once overcame Survivor.
Survivor debuted in 2000, two years later came Idol, which went on to rule US television for eight years, dwarfing its predecessor and everything else in the ratings.
Idol owed its success partly to the brutal honesty of Simon Cowell, who was every bit as shrewd as Survivor’s first-season winner, Richard Hatch.
Viewers also tuned in for the watch-through-your fingers performances of aspiring stars like civil-engineering student William Hung.
In the 2011-12 TV season, Idol got competition from The Voice, which unlike Idol didn’t succeed by playing rough. The singing competition, which closed its third season in the US on Tuesday night, took a more encouraging approach (subbing in “coaches” for “judges”).
In the process, it replaced Idol on the list of Emmy contenders for Outstanding Reality-Competition Program last year, leaving the original singing show out of the category where it had been a staple for nine consecutive years. The Voice has finally bumped Idol as the top singing show — though neither sing-off now scores the outsized ratings Idol once did.
To hear Burnett tell it, The Voice owes its success to being “a kinder show.”
No matter how much of a role they truly play, the judges behind the table — or coaches in the spinning chairs — always get the credit or blame for a show’s success or slide. It’s true that Idol began to lose its bulletproof status when Cowell departed for X Factor. And though his new show earns respectable ratings, they lag those of Idol and The Voice. On the other hand, Cowell may have miscalculated when he decided to turn his X Factor, which debuted in 2011, into a higher-stakes, tougher Idol.
So, do musical competition shows need to get nicer? Or nastier? The much-hyped Idol rivalry this year between Nicki Minaj and Mariah Carey didn’t produce as much ratings heat as Fox may have hoped for. And the lower X Factor ratings despite the much-hyped addition of Britney Spears in Season Two suggests that big names can’t guarantee better numbers.
Is it possible that the shows really are, as the judges and producers always insist, really about the contestants? If so, no one’s going to to blame those contestants for singing shows’ slide. More likely, some viewers think they’ve seen it all. Reuters
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