It must hurt to be Simon Cowell in 2021. For two decades, Cowell was the undisputed master of the singing talent show, trampling the charts into paste with his relentless barrage of power ballads and sob stories. But then The X Factor withered away, and his spot was taken by no end of niche singing shows.
Want to watch famous people singing in elaborate costumes? There’s The Masked Singer. Want to watch judges try to figure out whether people can sing, without actually hearing them sing? There’s I Can Hear Your Voice. Want to watch singers cower backstage as their voices are implanted into harrowing frog-style avatars? Go to the US and watch Alter Ego. Or rather, don’t.
Which brings us to Walk the Line: Simon Cowell’s attempt to reassert himself on the genre he once dominated. How exactly does he plan to do that? By hooking up the corpse of The X Factor to an electrical current and making it jerk about for kicks, of course.
All the old tropes are present and correct. Is Walk the Line presented inside a hangar-sized shiny-floored studio? Yes. Is there an audience that whoops on command so efficiently it sometimes borders on North Korean-style propaganda? Yes. Does it take one hour of television and make it feel like six? Yes. Does it consist of loads and loads of people blurting out wobbly amateur versions of songs you have only ever heard played in supermarkets? For the most part, yes.
There is one small difference that separates Walk the Line from The X Factor, though. This new show has zero interest in letting any of these people establish a career. Every episode, five new singers appear, and every episode four of them are binned off into oblivion. The fifth – the winner, if you will – is offered £10,000. They can either take it and sod off, or compete all over again the following night in the hope that they will win £500,000 at the end of the series. But, yes, aside from that, this is The X Factor all over.
Not that Simon Cowell is anywhere to be seen. While this was supposed to be his big television comeback, he decided recently to remain offscreen and cede his spot to everyone’s favourite sub-Cowell fun-sponge, Gary Barlow. Barlow now heads a judging panel consisting of Craig David (aggressively anonymous), Dawn French (reliably lovely) and Alesha Dixon (hired because if she goes more than eight months without judging something on TV, her kidneys will explode).
You have to wonder if any of them knew what they were signing up for, though, because never have TV judges been more unnecessary. All the hard work, all the actual judging, gets done at the end of each episode by the studio audience, who vote for a winner on electronic pads. This means the judges are only really there to pad out the running time with cliched soundbites. I haven’t seen their contracts, so I can’t be certain, but I suspect the legal definition of their role here might be “rusk”.
As for the contestants, they have all just been plucked off the generic singing competition contestant conveyor belt. In the first episode, one guy performed a John Lewis advert version of God Only Knows, one guy attempted to shoehorn as many extraneous notes into Purple Rain as he could, a set of drag queens called Queenz sang a song with the word “Queen” in the title, and one woman did something so bland I wouldn’t even be able to describe it to you under hypnosis. They were, by and large, the musical equivalent of pre-chewed food.
Last night’s episode was won by the fifth contestant, a woman from Bristol who sang a song she had written herself. At the climax, she decided to stay on for the next night’s episode. I suspect this is what will make the show gripping in the long run; because all the dramatic tension comes from wondering whether or not the singers will hold their nerve. But that is redundant for me because, now that I have finished the episode I was contractually obliged to watch, I am going to spend the rest of my life pretending that Walk the Line doesn’t exist. Call it self-care, if you like.
