This isn’t a bulletin to savvy American Idol watchers, who noted from the FOX mid-season schedule that Bones and Backstrom would take over Thursdays from Idol, beginning March 26. But now, Idol host, Ryan Seacrest, made it official, when he confirmed, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, that results and performance shows would be combined into one night.
So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing with the Stars have already switched to the format, and it seems to work out pretty well for those shows.
“We are going to do the performance show and the results in the same show,” said Ryan to THR, “So there won’t be a ‘wait ‘til tomorrow night.’ There won’t be a ‘Coming up, coming up, coming up.’ We are going to put it all into one format in one night. So that will be exciting.”
The change won’t take effect until the show gets into the “final stretch” Ryan said, “[It will be] one night when we get to the final stage, the top ten, there will be one night of performances and results all in one night,”
The other show changes, such as the three judges, Keith Urban, Harry Connick Jr., and Jennifer Lopez spending more personal time with contestants (Keith talked about this a bit in his conference call) have made for high quality contestants. “They found some amazing contestants, and they had a chance to get to know them a little bit better,” Ryan said.
The good news about ditching the results show–no more padded episodes. Results shows could be excruciatingly boring. The bad news is fewer opportunities to bring back Idol alums to perform. Although, there’s always the possibility that they could come back as mentors.
Ryan also like the Idols-as-mentors idea. “Now that we’ve been on for such a long time, you’ve got mentors in these Idols and they come back with some real experience to talk about,” he said. As for Adam Lambert’s stint filling in for Keith Urban who was suddenly called away after his father-in-law died, Ryan says, “Adam stepped up when Keith couldn’t be there, and Adam did a great job.”
There is another drawback to combining results and performances into one show. Unless the elimination is done at the top of the show (which proved to be an awkward downer when Nigel Lythgoe tried it on SYTYCD) a contestant will have to prepare a song and sing–only to be cut at the end of the show.
The format isn’t perfect, but it’s still reasonable. Anything to keep my favorite singing show on the air…
