Watch Simon Cowell’s TV search for a new boyband – and see how our world has changed | Emma Brockes
Twenty years on, the social media-savvy contestants will have greater power. His brutal approach to judging them will have to change, tooThere is a moment in the trailer for Simon...
By Emma Brockes · The Guardian Opinion
Twenty years on, the social media-savvy contestants will have greater power. His brutal approach to judging them will have to change, too There is a moment in the trailer for Simon Cowell’s new Netflix show, The Next Act , that is almost touching in its adherence to the way things once were. Cowell, who we see on a variety of beige sofas primly clutching his knees, talks about how to curate a new boyband, 20 years after the launch of his first TV talent show. “There is a huge risk here,” he says, heavy with drama. “If this goes wrong, it will be: ‘Simon Cowell has lost it.’” In fact, as anyone who has an eye on dwindling audience figures for his existing shows knows, for the vast majority of 18- to 24-year-olds – or even for younger millennials – the more likely response will be, “Simon who?” Which doesn’t mean that a new generation of viewers can’t be lured in by Cowell’s expertise. The question of whether 66-year-old Cowell can tweak a dusty and decades-old model has less to do with current music trends – just as well, since pop music has moved from TV to TikTok, which Cowell says he hates – than the music executive’s extremely well-tested ability to make good TV and bend his persona to align with the times. In the rollout of publicity for the new show, Cowell has made a good fist of expressing regret at how rude he used to be to contestants, apologising in the New York Times, after some cajoling, for “being a dick”, and putting his eye-rolling, grimacing performance as a judge down to the tedium of audition days rather than what most of us understood it to be: the extraction of lolz out of confused individuals who had the misfortune to appear on his shows. Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...