Has anyone been watching the new singing competition show Rising Star at all?
I haven’t really been following it, but I have been checking it out some since it premiered, watching a half hour or so each week. I don’t generally care for singing shows, but I’m interested in this particular concept.
I still don’t fully understand how it works, but essentially the premise is to be instant results to viewer interaction. The audience votes as they watch the singers perform and then in real time the results are tallied and displayed determining whether they advance or not. The idea is to be an entirely live event, which sounds cool, but the interesting thing is that it isn’t actually live. Or rather, it originally is, on the East Coast, however the West Coast broadcast is recorded, though their voting is still tallied live. This has led to some interesting situations where singers who didn’t get enough votes to advance in the initial airing on the East Coast were later saved by voters during the West Coast airing and did in fact go on. It seems like that goes against the premise of the show though of all being real time and immediate results.
It seems to me like they were trying to build on the precedent set by the Million Second Quiz of a meta television show that allows real life interaction with the live broadcast, but they aren’t doing it right. The idea is a good one, a groundbreaking format for audience voting that produces instant results in real time, rather than having to do a follow up show the next day as is currently the norm. That’s what they want this to be, and what they advertised it as, but that’s not what it is. If the show is all instantaneous, it all needs to be live. Obviously. Why then is this not live across all time zones so it can indeed be fully immersive and instant? Instead it’s some kind of strange half live, half delayed, but the delayed part is still supposed to have some kind of live interaction thing. It feels like it could have been done better. But it’s still an interesting idea nonetheless.
Rising Star
Something I scoffed at was that the commercial for this was like ‘Don’t you hate shows where the judges make all the decisions? Here it’s all about you!’ yet when the voting is going on the judges get supervotes that count for more than what the audience is putting in. That, in addition to what I already mentioned about only actually being a half live experience, made me say ‘Yeah, this isn’t entirely what you were advertising it to be.’
-- 22 Jul 2014 03:31 pm --
The show has moved from the audition round into eliminations, and now the time zone issue is simply stupid. The East Coast voting is now the sole decider for who goes through, but in an effort to make the West Coast still count for something the person who gets the highest West Coast vote among the East Coast losers will also advance. It's just a bizarre setup.
And the judge supervotes are coming under closer scrutiny now as well. Like I said, they invalidate the premise of the show being all about what the audience thinks in principle already, but now it actually affects that idea in a very tangible way. According to analysis of the voting breakdown from the first elimination show, the judge votes significantly directed the outcome of who won and lost. Now that the people don't need to reach a certain level of votes, it just matters who has more, the judges providing 7% boosts is huge. Without that, if the voting had actually been left to the viewers, or if the judges had the same percentage input as the viewers, the outcomes would have been different.
More evidence that this show was thrown together without real thought put into the workings, they just wanted to run on the idea of their gimmick.
-- 22 Jul 2014 03:31 pm --
The show has moved from the audition round into eliminations, and now the time zone issue is simply stupid. The East Coast voting is now the sole decider for who goes through, but in an effort to make the West Coast still count for something the person who gets the highest West Coast vote among the East Coast losers will also advance. It's just a bizarre setup.
And the judge supervotes are coming under closer scrutiny now as well. Like I said, they invalidate the premise of the show being all about what the audience thinks in principle already, but now it actually affects that idea in a very tangible way. According to analysis of the voting breakdown from the first elimination show, the judge votes significantly directed the outcome of who won and lost. Now that the people don't need to reach a certain level of votes, it just matters who has more, the judges providing 7% boosts is huge. Without that, if the voting had actually been left to the viewers, or if the judges had the same percentage input as the viewers, the outcomes would have been different.
More evidence that this show was thrown together without real thought put into the workings, they just wanted to run on the idea of their gimmick.
