AMERICAN IDOL

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End Of Singing Shows Glory Days?

Ratings dips for 'American Idol' and 'The Voice' indicate the end of singing shows' glory days

The two competition shows are still strong in the ratings, but the 'Idol' juggernaut of years ago is gone.

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Sunday, May 18, 2014

With “X Factor” canceled earlier this season while “American Idol” and even “The Voice” ride downward ratings slopes, it’s safe to say the golden age of television singing competition shows has passed its peak.

And that means we’ve all lost something — a little of the pop culture glue that in its own strange way binds us together.

Still, that doesn’t mean it’s time for “American Idol” to hold a nostalgia night and have all the contestants sing “Dead and Gone.”

“ ‘Idol’ is not going to come back to being the ratings champion it once was,” Fox Entertainment President Kevin Reilly said last week. “But it could be on the air for many years to come, and will be a potent time period contender and a top-rated unscripted show. A quality show that people love.”

Reilly likened “Idol” to CBS’ long-running “Survivor,” which long ago stopped being a phenomenon, but has established a loyal audience large enough to make it a profitable ongoing franchise.

Simon Cowell, whose acerbic judging style helped establish the “Idol” brand a dozen years ago, is among many people in the TV biz who say the success of “Idol” simply bred an oversaturation.

“There are too many of these shows,” Cowell said when the American edition of his “X Factor” (also on Fox) was canceled last fall. “You dilute the audience.”

These days, both “Idol” and NBC’s “The Voice” are scrambling to hold their audiences.

“Idol,” whose two-night finale is this Tuesday, 8-9 p.m., and Wednesday, 8-10 p.m., averaged more than 20 million viewers a show for years, spiking above 30 million for finales.

Last week, the Wednesday “Idol” had about 8 million viewers. Thursday drew about 7 million.

Those are respectable audiences for prime-time network shows these days, but there’s a worrisome subtext.

Ratings are also way down among viewers 18 to 49, the ones with whom “Idol” for years dominated. It was their patronage that enabled “Idol” to rake in up to $750 million a season in ad revenue.

This past Wednesday, “Idol” ran 25% behind “Survivor,” a show not particularly targeted toward younger viewers, among 18-49s.

The “why” here is no mystery. “Idol” has been on the air so long it’s now a teenager, which means its most loyal fans have also gotten incrementally older.

The median age for “Idol” fans is now over 50, a stark statistic for a show that built a lot of its buzz on the image of teenagers with superthumbs texting votes for their faves at warp speed.

“The Voice,” which just turned three and thus is still a relative pup, doesn’t have the aging-up issue as much yet. The show has consistently had a 50% higher share than “Idol” among younger viewers who like its flashier style. The chairs, the buttons, the byplay among judges.

But where this February’s season premiere episode of “The Voice” drew 15.86 million viewers, recently it has hovered around 10 million-11 million.

That number should rise for the finale this Tuesday (9-11 p.m.). Still, this could be the first cycle when the show experienced a significant drop from premiere to finale.

The network watches those kinds of small indicators closely with a franchise show like “The Voice,” NBC President of Alternative Programming Paul Telegdy said earlier this year.

“It’s a show that we’ve evolved in many ways,” he said. “The format now is very, very different from the first season.”

For instance, he said, “Something that had worked extremely well for us was the concept of coaches stealing each other’s contestants. So we kind of baked it into the format.

“It’s something we work on every day.”

Reilly says Fox watches “Idol” just as carefully for things that need tweaking.

Next season, he says, “Idol” will be “streamlined,” which means that later episodes will only air once a week. The season will total 36-37 hours, rather than the 50+ it has averaged in the past.

Translation: For the first time in a dozen years, Fox is thinking it has shows potentially as popular as or more popular than “American Idol.”

NBC Entertainment President Robert Greenblatt, like Reilly, stresses that when we assess singing competition show ratings, we need to keep it in perspective.

Compared to the peak of “Idol,” they all seem modest. Compared to almost everything else on TV, they’re big winners.

“ ‘The Voice’ is the number-one reality show on television,” Greenblatt noted, and it had the same kind of buoyant impact on NBC the last couple of years that “Idol” had for Fox a decade ago.

With “Idol” as the tent pole, Fox became the most popular broadcast network among 18-49s for years. Promotions on “Idol” exposed viewers to other Fox shows like “House” and “24.”

Similarly, NBC is poised this year to be No. 1 among broadcast networks among 18-49s, after a number of years in the ratings wilderness.

While Sunday night football may be NBC’s biggest ratings engine, “The Voice” isn’t far behind. Following “The Voice” also helped make “The Blacklist” this season’s No. 1 new broadcast drama.

Nor is there any rush to abandon the singing competition ship.

NBC has “America’s Got Talent” returning this summer and has been happy with Nick Lachey’s “The Sing-Off” as a short-run holiday special.

ABC has scheduled two singing competition shows this summer. “Rising Star,” which premieres June 22, features instant audience voting. “Sing Your Face Off” premieres May 31.

Since we’ve loved singing talent shows back to Ted Mack, “Showtime at the Apollo” and “Star Search,” they’re not going to disappear any more than quiz shows or soaps will disappear.

But, like those perennials, they could morph into different forms. Shorter runs and summer series are a good indication that’s already happening.

Still, as we move out of the golden “Idol” era, we’ve lost something.

“Idol” was the magic show every network dreams about: event television, something that demanded a large swath of the population had to be there watching every week to see what would happen.

Tens of millions of people wanted to know whether Clay Aiken could beat Ruben Studdard. They wanted to know how long the show would keep William Hung or Sanjaya around.

The show also helped viewers discover a laundry list of new stars like Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Hudson, Fantasia Barrino, Jordin Sparks and Katharine McPhee.

It was the first topic in offices the next morning, the lead item on morning radio shows. It blazed across the social media universe.

Now, less so.

Cowell points out that it’s been nine years since a competition show turned out a major star, Carrie Underwood from “Idol” in 2005.

Producers of “The Voice” correctly note that their winners still have some time, but so far that show has spawned no stars to match Underwood or Kelly Clarkson or even Adam Lambert — and part of the reason certainly lies in the fact that they had less buzz to draw on. Fewer viewers got to know them over multiple weeks on television.

No matter how lightweight a singing competition ultimately may be in the grand scheme of the universe, “American Idol” proved it could still bring people together in an age when so much of popular culture seems to push us apart, slicing us into ever-smaller niches.

Maybe we should just be singing “Twilight Time.”

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