NBC’s ‘The Voice’ preview: Adam Levine, Blake Shelton square off over ‘steal’

At this point last season on “The Voice,” we were admittedly pretty bored out of our minds courtesy of some battle rounds that were almost bringing the excitement of an otherwise-fun show to a screeching halt. With that in mind, we have to give some credit to the producers for the NBC show for now managing to find a way to have us excited about this series all over again. Even more surprisingly, we really have just one thing to credit for it: the steal.

Thanks to this one small alteration to the show’s format, these battles are now actually intense again. The coaches have to pay close attention to every artist that takes part here, since they are each going to have two artists that they can add to their teams who are not chosen as the winner of this stage in the competition. It’s almost like having the blind auditions all over again, except with this time an added layer of guilt over some artists that they should have chosen during the first round, but they either declined to turn around or lost to another coach. Amanda Brown last week was a prime example of a great artist who was far better than any of the coaches first realized.

This week, the steals will keep coming as Adam Levine and Blake Shelton specifically go head-to-head over some contestants who they each want to add to their teams. Of course, the promo tries to make it look like these two guys are going to have some sort of serious fight on their hands; however, we really know already that this is probably not going to be the case. While these guys are each competitive, they also have plenty of fun with the competition; plus, we don’t think Adam really wants another feud like he had last season with Christina Aguilera.

Are you loving the battle rounds this year?