Idle Idol
The big news today comes from Fox, with the announcement that the network will NOT shift its mega-hit American Idol from a Tuesday/Wednesday scheduling to a bold-yet-risky Wednesday/Thursday scheduling, as had been long-speculated. Idol returns to the airwaves on January 17.
Fox is long-known for its bold moves, and a shift of Idol to Thursday would have been among its boldest. Rumor has it that the network came close to making the move, but decided against it at the 11th hour. The Thursday night edition of Idol would likely have been scheduled at 9:00, where it would have faced-off against CBS’ CSI and NBC’s The Apprentice. While both shows would likely have lost audience to Idol, CBS losses would likely have been minor, while NBC stood as the one to truly be hurt. The Apprentice has been slowly fading, and that programming steamroller known as American Idol would likely have crushed what’s left of Donald Trump’s reality-TV empire… and this would have come about at just about the time when NBC had been thinking that things couldn’t have gotten any worse for them on Thursdays.
As things now stand, Idol will return to its traditional Tuesday at 8 time slot. The Wednesday show, however, will return, but initially in a slightly-altered form. For the first few weeks, the Wednesday show will expand to one hour (from its former 30-minute length), and it has been dubbed by Fox as the American Idol Auditions show (and how this differs from the initial weeks of prior years' editions of Idol baffles me). Fox is also claiming that the Wednesday show will eventually revert to its 30-minute length (at 9:00pm), and will again become strictly a "results" show.
For everyone's sake, let's hope that Fox means what they say. Because if the Wednesday results show were to permanently become a one-hour show instead of a 30-minute show, then within that one-hour results show we the viewers would actually be subejcted to 55 minutes of inane filler, and 5 minutes of actual voting results.
A 55/5 split? No thanks, Fox. Unless it's 55 minutes filled with the likes of Wiliam Hung, then I think that I'd rather be drinking a Brussels sprout soda...
Fox is long-known for its bold moves, and a shift of Idol to Thursday would have been among its boldest. Rumor has it that the network came close to making the move, but decided against it at the 11th hour. The Thursday night edition of Idol would likely have been scheduled at 9:00, where it would have faced-off against CBS’ CSI and NBC’s The Apprentice. While both shows would likely have lost audience to Idol, CBS losses would likely have been minor, while NBC stood as the one to truly be hurt. The Apprentice has been slowly fading, and that programming steamroller known as American Idol would likely have crushed what’s left of Donald Trump’s reality-TV empire… and this would have come about at just about the time when NBC had been thinking that things couldn’t have gotten any worse for them on Thursdays.
As things now stand, Idol will return to its traditional Tuesday at 8 time slot. The Wednesday show, however, will return, but initially in a slightly-altered form. For the first few weeks, the Wednesday show will expand to one hour (from its former 30-minute length), and it has been dubbed by Fox as the American Idol Auditions show (and how this differs from the initial weeks of prior years' editions of Idol baffles me). Fox is also claiming that the Wednesday show will eventually revert to its 30-minute length (at 9:00pm), and will again become strictly a "results" show.
For everyone's sake, let's hope that Fox means what they say. Because if the Wednesday results show were to permanently become a one-hour show instead of a 30-minute show, then within that one-hour results show we the viewers would actually be subejcted to 55 minutes of inane filler, and 5 minutes of actual voting results.
A 55/5 split? No thanks, Fox. Unless it's 55 minutes filled with the likes of Wiliam Hung, then I think that I'd rather be drinking a Brussels sprout soda...
posted by TV Boy at 8:05 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home