And so we have it, the return of Mr Cowell. For all the furore and madness sounding the Return of the Gedi it looks, from the media’s perspective like it was too many bells and whistles and not enough of what people want.  And when we had the Neilson ratings the public voted with their eyes…. and there weren’t too many of them! It seems X Factor’s ‘sensational’ beginning had two million viewers less than Modern Family which is about right as they are more Rock Star than X Factor will ever be. Worse of all was that the last series of American Idol with the Lopez/Tyler addition culled an audience of over twice that of X Factor. Urrrgh, the horror of it all but more than that, how will Simon handle failure in the first time in over a decade. Even by his own admission an audience of less than  20 million would be considered a failure so an audience of around 12 million is looking pretty grim right now especially when the curiosity factor alone should have been a ratings winner.

So what now? Next week’s show will be lambs to the slaughter if they don’t show a rapid increase in viewers but the reality is where will that audience come from? If they didn’t want the first why would they watch the second?

We live in age where people’s attention is minimal. Everything moves so quickly that in some people’s minds Simon might be last years thing. Once you fall from grace it becomes doubly hard to regain your throne again, at least not quickly. It’s going to be a very difficult time for the boy Cowell and very damaging to his image. Moving away from American Idol was right but I think the real winners were American Idol. They changed and Simon didn’t. They revamped the show and it worked, they didn’t replace Simon they replaced the whole look and feel. Simon and Paula sat side by side is ten years old, we’ve seen it all before.

There’s more but I’m waiting until tomorrow’s show…

September 28, 2011 - Posted in News By: tonym

Tags: American Idol, Simon Cowell, X Factor