American Idol season 23: Carrie Underwood to replace Katy Perry
American Idol season 23 has seemingly found its next judge, and it is certainly someone the show is familiar with already.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, season 4 winner and country music superstar Carrie Underwood is going to be replacing Katy Perry on the panel, where she will be joined by Luke Bryan and Lionel Richie. These two have been a part of the show ever since the franchise moved to ABC, and the hope here will probably be to continue to have stability behind the scenes.
In terms of logic, bringing Underwood on board makes a lot of sense. You can argue that she is one of the most successful winners to ever come from the show, though it’s obviously hard to tabulate exact success. (She may have more total hits than Kelly Clarkson, but Kelly also has a hit daytime talk show, for example.) She can relate to what the contestants are going through, and she will also appeal a great deal to a lot of viewers in the midwest, which is historically one of the show’s key demographics.
If there is one major critique we’d offer here, it is the fact that this means that two of the three judges are primarily country artists. If you think back to the UK original that started this franchise, it was Pop Idol — yet, there is not anyone on the panel who has much in the way of recent pop-music experience. Underwood had a couple of crossover hits, and some of Richie’s larger successes were decades ago. Are you going to be able to capture fans of this particular genre at present, or does it really even matter? We’re sure that these are at least some of the questions that are going to be asked at this particular moment.
Related – Be sure to see even more discussion about American Idol and Perry’s departure
What do you think about Carrie Underwood being the next big American Idol judge?
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This article was written by Jessica Bunbun.