Is American Idol doomed?

The ratings are slipping and those of us who end up tuning in already figured out who would win back when there were twelve finalists, so when will the jig be up for American Idol. This season started off fairly strong and it was obvious that it wasn’t filled with a lot of screen time stealers, but more talented musicians. We had a few who had already received a record deal and some more who were destined for the Top 100, so what’s going wrong? Fox has been switching things up a bit to see if that would pull in stronger numbers or more callers, but it hasn’t seemed to work in their favor. The judging incident last week with Paula when she commented on two of Jason Castro’s songs, even though he only performed one, it confirmed to critics and some viewers that things weren’t as “live” as we were to believe.

So where do you go from here? It will be a cold day in hell when they finally pull the plug on this show, but the time between them announcing this season’s winner and next years’ auditions, you can believe that there will be many changes on the show and possibly some replacement judges. A show, which is targeted to younger audiences and that allows them to pick their next “star” needs to be much more hip, which is really the bigger problem with “AI”. Having Mariah Carey as a mentor this year was a stroke of genius and hopefully next year there will be more currently influential artists. Unfortunately, Neil Diamond and Dolly Parton just don’t draw in the kids anymore.
If you want to keep credit and the history flowing, add a Bob Dylan night – that could be incredibly interesting. What the producers of this show need is a gut renovation. I don’t necessarily think the judges need to change but I feel the method of judging isn’t the best. I think a panel like “Top Chef”, where one judge is present for the rehearsals and sees the work and preparation going into the performance would be great and this could be a role that Abdul could fill perfectly. Also, the producers need to contact a rock singer, a hip hop artist and maybe Carey again to have hipper mentors. And personally, if you don’t want these people to be Broadway bound, then don’t have them perform Andrew Lloyd Weber songs. The show can come back and be better than before. It just needs a whole lot of shaking.

What do you all feel about “American Idol”? What can this show do to bring back it’s audience or even better increase its audience?