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The One:Making a Star
sstephanie40
Posts: 672 Forum Member
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This is scheduled on ABC in the US from 16/7/06. Anyone know anything about it? All I've read is that Sharon Osbourne has turned down the judges role for it. I believe it's format is like the UK's Fame Academy. I've also posted this in the TV section too.
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http://www.thefutoncritic.com/listings.aspx?id=20060630abc01
Like our Fame Academy.
And what did you think????
Well, I say I saw it, what I actually did was flick through it. It had some major flaws in it.
1) They didn't show any audition material at all. I wasn't expecting week after week of people being crap like in Pop Idol, but even Fame Academy showed 30 seconds of each contestant at the auditions. So we were left with the contestants being hurled at us with little background. They did put pieces together about the contestants but it was the usual crap like "It's all I've ever wanted to do - this is my chance".
2) It was two hours long. It can be a pain that X Factor contestants only get 90 seconds but at least the show keeps moving. This gave them most of the song but it wasn't necessary.
3) The judges were nice to everyone, in fact they were completely over the top with praise. The audience is used to the kind of perfection seen in American Idol. These contestants are quite raw, and have been doing the clubs for a couple of years, so they aren't perfect. So the fawning judges will have turned off many viewers.
4) As they think they are all rock stars, many of them put in ridiculously over the top versions of the covers they were doing. There's always this "need" for people to make the "songs their own", even if there is only one way to sing it. Many of the performances were painful as a result.
5) They didn't show the academy as being so much of a school as in our version. I suppose they can't have a silly Richard Park headmaster figure because Americans won't identify with that, but they could have done something. In fact they didn't show much of the academy in the first episode at all, even though they had been living in it for a few days at least. I think they were saving it for the results show, which is a whole hour to fill the next day.
6) The host was a very shouty Canadian, who apparently does serious telly in Canada, so everyone in Canada likes him, but no-one in the US knows who he is.. (The show was also being shown in Canada, which annoyed some people because it's on the public channel CBC, and a current affairs programme was bumped to a later slot to accomodate it. It would be like BBC bumping Panorama for Just The Two Of Us.)
7) They didn't play on twist that the judges and the contestants would save members of the bottom three. That is biggest difference between it and American Idol, but many viewers would have been unaware that that's what would have been happening.
8) They publicised it as "The show Fox (the network that shows American Idol) doesn't want you to see!", so when it got bad ratings, Fox were able to poke fun at ABC.
This all added up to the worst debut rating for a reality TV program on a major network ever. It got about 3m viewers, which is peanuts. American Idol gets more than ten times that. I don't know that it's fair to divide the rating by 5 to allow for the US having five times the population of the UK, but 0.6m for a program on BBC1 would never be tolerated. Even Davina didn't do that badly.
Anyway, after two of the ten weeks, it's been cancelled. They haven't said if there will really be a winner who gets a record contract, and if so, how the winner will be decided. Now ABC has a big hole in its schedule to fill, and CBC has egg on its face for simulcasting it. CBC can at least put its current affairs programme back where it should be.
Meanwhile, Simon Cowell's "Gong Show"-esque talent show "American's Got Talent" is the highest rated show in US TV, getting even more than CSI. Inexplicably, he's got Piers Morgan (yes the former editor of the Mirror - is it payback for not running stories about him?!) as one of the judges, along with singer Brandy and most amusingly of all, David Hasselhoff. The acts are of course, in the main, appalling. These weeks heat winners were a rapping granny and an 11 year old who tries to sing like an adult, a bit like that horrible footage of Britney Spears that is trotted out when she does a chat show, and she does her best to try to look like she's not seen it for years. It'll be on ITV soon, but it looks like Cowell will replace Hasselhoff with himself. He'd have done the US one but he's got an exclusive contract with Fox, and this show is on NBC. He's still earning a packet off it of course.