‘American Idol’ season 14: New Fox boss has interesting view on series

Is “American Idol” finally starting to wind down? It may be a little too early to confirm that one way or the other, but the one thing that we can say right now is that the new man in charge of reality programming at Fox seems to mostly think that the contestants are to blame for season 13’s failures, and not anything else with production.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Simon Andreae discussed the exit of Mike Darnell, David Hill overseeing the new season, and the things that are currently being done on the show:

“David Hill stepped up to supervise [after Darnell left]. It happened that he did a good job — he refreshed the set; he got a much better and effective set of judges — but there was a bit left to do. For whatever reason, we ended up with a top 20 [group of contestants] that was less than stellar. David wanted the opportunity to continue the turnaround, so he asked and was offered Idol [season] 14. We touch base every now and then, and he tells me what he’s doing, but he doesn’t report to me. After this season, I don’t know. We’ll take a look at it.”

The weirdest thing about this quote is that it doesn’t really seem like Hill and Andreae really communicate that much about the show. We do think in some ways that Hill did a good job with the show, as the judges were mostly good (save for the cameras obsession with Jennifer Lopez), and there were some new themes. Ultimately, the problems for us were that the show was still too repetitive, the pre-performance packages too contrived, and nothing was that revolutionary. Sure, we wouldn’t say that there was an A+ group of contestants at all (more like a C), but how can they guarantee that? They can’t. They have to just build a better show. “The Voice” does it.

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Photo: Fox