Is ‘American Idol’ really over? Creator Simon Fuller doesn’t think so

It was a decade and a half ago when Simon Fuller opted to adapt his “Pop Idol” format for American TV, and with that “American Idol” was born. Not long after that, it was the biggest show on TV, and kicked off a wave of other copycat singing shows across the board.

So with the show ending next week, we don’t think that it is too early to start asking if the show will return … or when. We almost think it is a foregone conclusion that it’ll be back someday. Fuller spoke on the series’ legacy and more recently to Yahoo! Music, and made it clear that in the future, we could see some iteration of the franchise that implements all of the latest innovations in technology:

“Here we are in 2016. There’s plenty of opportunities to be very interactive. The sort of burgeoning reach of social media, and what social media has become, is perfectly suited to what American Idol could be going forward – and might have been, if social media had been around in the past. Each fan of American Idol back in the day, if they’d had their little social network, Snapchat in particular… it’s all very compatible and in tune with American Idol. So I’m thinking far more interactive, far more connected, far broader.”

We do think that there is something to what Fuller is saying, and we also think that sooner or later, there will be a tipping point to where so many people are socially-connected that almost everything gets lost. This is where television re-enters the fray as a grand uniter. We think that it probably should be a few years down the road before the franchise comes back. There’s always going to be talent, and we could see this having almost a “Girl Meets World” sort of effect where parents choose to watch this show with their children after growing up watching it with their own parents. It’s just going to take time, and this singing-show genre needs a little bit of time to heal after years of rampant oversaturation.

One thing that does make us happy as we near the end of the run for the series on Fox: The ratings are steadily improving. While we do not love everything about modern “Idol,” we’d really be disappointed if the show was to go out with anything other than a bang after years of watching.

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