The revamped, re-judgified 10th season of American Idol begins tonight, with a lot of questions swirling about how the show will survive the loss of Simon Cowell, how well Steven Tyler and Jennifer Lopez will do, and whether the show will ever find a really big star again. Tonight’s episode will… tell us pretty much nothing about that.
We may get some inkling of how the show is changing from the premiere, and a taste of the new judges’ style and chemistry. But the early audition rounds (traditionally some of any given season’s most popular) really have little in common with the regular run of the Idol competition. Viewers tune in for the handful of moving stories and in hopes of finding the next “Pants on the Ground” oddball whom the culture will eat up like a chew toy for a couple of weeks before getting bored. Idol’s ratings will likely trend down, as they have in recent seasons, but the audition rounds will do well or poorly for the same reasons they always do—the occasional flash of promise amid the trainwrekcs, or vice-versa.
But don’t expect to get a real sense of how well the judging panel will work from tonight. Keep in mind that the audition rounds are pretaped and are edited for entertainment value. Ellen DeGeneres came off clever and engaging in her early taped episodes—which she is—but it was only when she began judging live that it became clear that she was unconfident in her opinions and almost incapable of criticism.
In any case, as my former colleague Christopher John Farley writes at the Wall Street Journal, Idol’s real challenge is not the new panel but whether it can regain any credibility as a star-finding vehicle, since its last arguably major discovery was Chris Daughtry, who was voted off the show. I’ll be checking out the new Idol, and I’m sure we’ll all have opinions about it, but we won’t really know how this new reboot works until it performs live.