NBC’s ‘The Voice’: Another welcome format change for the live shows

After looking at the past two seasons of “The Voice,” it feels as though somebody came and pointed their finger at Mark Burnett long enough for him to get the point: while he had a good reality show, he also had a flawed reality show. First things first, the battle rounds were boring … and he fixed that by incorporating the steal for the first time this season, which was a welcome twist even when sometimes it was obvious just who was going to be save and who wasn’t.

Now, Burnett has provided a welcome change to the format for the second round of the live shows officially starting up on Monday, November 12: there’s no longer any guarantee that there will be one artist from each coach in the finale. Instead, we are going to have a situation present here where America will vote on the top 12 singers (which will be narrowed down on the three-day marathon the week of November 5), and then the two artists with the lowest number of votes will be going home. The twist here is that obviously this takes the power completely out of the coaches’ hands, and this is the first time that this has happened in the entire competition.

While the bad thing about this twist is that it gives little safety net to an artist with a bad week, it does help prevent an incident like what happened last season, when Cee Lo Green’s top two were clearly better than anyone else in the competition, and Jamar Rogers didn’t even get to make it to the finale. (Ironically, Juliet Simms also lost to Jermaine Paul.)

Do you like making the live rounds a little more about the talent, and a little less about the coaches?