The X Factor Premiere – Simon Cowell Spoils His Own Party

by Rickey
September 24, 2011 at 7:17 pm

Let’s face it: If Simon Cowell didn’t say “less than 20 million” viewers watching the premiere of The X Factor in the U.S. would be “a failure” — a lot of people wouldn’t think the show had flopped. Instead, all everyone was talking about when the ratings came out on Thursday was how The X Factor didn’t live up to the hype — and how the show wasn’t Idolesque.

But did The X Factor really bomb?

I talked to some of my media friends to give me some insight on what happened this week — and it’s pretty clear to everyone what went down. If I was running for political office, I would steer clear of Simon Cowell to run my PR — this week proved that he’s the worst person to hire when it comes to managing expectations.

The X Factor Premiere Simon Cowell Spoils His Own Party The X Factor Premiere Simon Cowell Spoils His Own Party

Joseph Kapsch from The Hollywood Reporter said “Simon set the bar so high very publicly” and the media perception was that the show failed specially when compared to American Idol, Simon’s former show.

Richard Rushfield who writes for the Daily Beast pointed out that Simon Cowell had not launched a show in a long time in the U.S. Meanwhile, the American audience has seen a barrage of reality shows like America’s Got Talent, The Voice and The Sing-Off through the years — so a show like The X Factor was not revolutionary. 20 million was “crazy to predict” he added. In fact, I don’t remember any show making a series debut at 20 million recently. Simon’s ego got the better of him this time.

The X Factor logged a 4.2 adults on Wednesday and 4.3 adults on Thursday. Lyndsey Parker from Yahoo Music said “These ratings are not failure ratings.” She noted that on Tuesday when FOX’s “New Girl” beat rating powerhouse “Glee” with a 4.7 rating and 10 million viewers, everyone called it a “hit” — but when X Factor produced 4.2 and 12 million viewers, it was a “flop.” Perception, perception!

And the comparison to American Idol was also unbalanced — even as Simon himself wanted us to do so. Idol premiered in the Summer of 2002 with no competition. X Factor premiered during a very competitive Fall 2012 season. In particular – Modern Family was coming off huge Emmy wins over the weekend. FOX was actually breaking records for the Fall with the X Factor in terms of ratings, but no one cared to notice because everyone expected it to have American Idol numbers.

Though all the experts I talked to said that they don’t know how the show will perform in the ratings over the next few weeks — they were quite optimistic that the show’s ratings will get better. Jarett Wieselman, editor of the Insider, said “The show is new and it will take a while to catch on. Once the X Factor has finalists, the numbers will rise.”

As far as the quality of the show, they were happy with The X Factor so far. Joseph loved the production value and the use of Top 40 music in the audition packages. Richard thought it was fun and zipped along. “It’s more produced than Idol,” he said. Jarett loved that Paula Abdul and Simon were back together again.

Stacy Francis Stroller The X Factor Premiere Simon Cowell Spoils His Own Party They all agreed with me that the auditions were so much better than other reality singing shows we’ve seen before. I loved that at the end, we get to see moments unique to every contestant, like Stacy Francis pushing her baby stroller to go home after winning over the judges and audience. And instead of every audition ending with “I’m going to Hollywood” like on Idol — the contestants “go to Heaven” in a freeze frame inside the glowing X Factor confessional box.

Surprisingly, the complaints were common: Cheryl Cole should have been given a chance to judge the full season – as she was good during the one audition show she was in. And last Thursday’s show was full of bad auditions, it might leave a bad impression on the audience. Jarett pointed out that after 4 hours of programming, there was only a handful of memorable talent. Lyndsey however reminded me that this year, American Idol had one of the worst audition episodes ever when the show visited Los Angeles. It was able to rebound from that, so maybe X Factor will too.

Thanks to Joseph, Richard, Lyndsey and Jarett for chatting with me. I think it’s going to be an amazing season of The X Factor!

Twitter links:

Joseph Kapsch – @josephkapsch
Richard Rushfield – @richardrushfield
Lyndsey Parker – @lyndseyparker
Jarett Wieselman – @jarettsays

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9 comments

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takakupo

Simon put it best, "If the talent isn't there then we don't have a show." Now I'd hate to put that in quotes cause I'm sure he said it differently but whatev. The talent is definitely lacking but this is only coming from a single performance of each contestant. I think perhaps we haven't seen enough yet to judge the show and it's definitely going to grow when word of mouth spreads (I have a feeling that the 12 million debut was of a very loyal fanbase).

In my opinion, people are actually rooting for both Simon and Paula. The show is just going to need a little adjustment going into the next season. They should have indeed let Cheryl keep her position for a season (big mistake) and made the host a much more american one. There's far too many accents to begin with. Axing Cheryl was the wrong choice.

IdolTime

You criticize the show having too many accents, yet advocating for keeping Cheryl Cole?

mateo

American Idol has the best format (youngish contestants, mostly relatively unheard of before, starting out with a private audition, etc) for maintaining a young, rabid fan base that gets behind a contestant from start to finish.

X Factor will need to channel some of that demographic by hyping up a few "white guys with guitars."

Ollie

The show was mostly commercials with only a handful of performances, and those weren't that good.

Lot's of sob stories. Every contestant they should so far had some sort of sob story, none looked like they would be stars.

I was completely underwhelmed by the so-called "talent" and the show is kinda boring.

Daddy

I watched the 2 hour premiere and was VERY underwhelmed.

I watched the 1st hour of the following night's 2 hour episode and switched to "Person of Interest" instead...which I liked much more!

There was a severe lack of good talent thus far and everyone that the judges went crazy over I thought were just marginally talented (Chris Rene, anyone?) guess I'm an "AI" guy afterall?

Phill

the x factor is facing the most competitive nights in the fall schedule and still doing good, with a huge room to grow i think some people are jumping on conclusions way too fast.

chessguy99

This is going to be a hard go for Simon and XF. Very tough to run this type of show in the fall season. SYTYCD got pummeled when it jumped to fall. I look at the scheduling around the World Series and start to think Fox may have to run some major advertising and practically relaunch the XF in November. That could save the overall ratings for XF, otherwise Fox may be looking at bleak prospects for Nov sweeps. I'm starting to think Simon counted on Idol collapsing without him, so he could slip XF into the winter/spring season. There he would have freedom to continue UK XF and run the US version on his schedule, not Major League Baseball's.

chessguy99

I also questioned NBC'c decision to move The Sing Off to the fall. It was perfect as a December show, that ran multiple nights a week as a fill in for shows on hiatus after Nov sweeps.

Marie Ruffin

What this means is that the audience will be "fatigued" by the time Idol rolls around. There are just too many singing reality shows....and NBC put the Singoff in the fall? What a dumb move...it is clearly a summer show.
I often wonder why the judges are the stars and not the singers? Why do the judges get more press than the singers?
And really, does anybody care about Simon & Paula being together again? But give it to Simon, he's pulling out all the stops to get this show rolling.
He should have kept the XFactor over in England and exported the real stars from that show to America.