From the folks that brought us American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance comes the newest music-focused creation, The Next Great American Band. It’s in a rather iffy time slot of 8PM on Fridays, so I wouldn’t expect too much from it in terms of ratings, but it may perform well enough to move to a real night.
“You just have to cross your fingers,” said Mike Darnell, Fox’s president for alternative entertainment. He added that American Idol’s success “doesn’t necessarily translate to the band show. … You can’t compare anything to American Idol.”
Nigel Lythgoe’s not afraid to poke fun of American Idol in the process of promoting this new show. “I can pick out five bands that I can go, ‘Wow, these guys are tremendous.’ You can’t do that with the top 12 Idols,” Lythgoe said.
One of the judges, the Goo Goo Dolls’ Johnny Rzeznik, told The Associated Press, “People are tired of seeing really manufactured artists, who are very beautiful and can sing but don’t have their own body of work… This is a cool process, not put together by a marketing team, a record company.”
The producers accepted 60 videos from online submissions and will narrow that down to the final 12 on the first night. So they will get rid of one of Idol’s biggest criticisms (yet also its biggest draw): the excessive really bad auditions. Two bands will be voted off each week.