Idol Chatter & Voice Views

The Voice Season 19 coaches, Gwen Stefani, Blake Shelton, John Legend and Kelly Clarkson.

For the third straight year, RuPaul’s Drag Race won the Emmy for Outstanding Reality Competition Program Sunday night.

That means that, thankfully, The Voice did not win.

Between all its gimmicks, its format changes and its shortened schedule of live shows, The Voice has gone downhill quickly in terms of quality of programming in recent year.

Rewarding it with an Emmy for a vastly inferior product would have seemed silly.

The Voice was far more deserving when it won its four Emmy Awards — in 2013 for Seasons 3 and 4, in 2015 for Seasons 7 and 8, in 2016 for Seasons 9 and 10 and in 2017 for Seasons 11 and 12.

The show has been nominated for an Emmy every year since 2012, but hasn’t won since RePaul’s Drag Race began its streak of victories.

Recently, the fall seasons of The Voice — with a full Tuesday night schedule and a full slate of live shows — have been more worth watching than the spring seasons.

Unfortunately, Season 19 is already off to a shaky start with the season premiere pushed back to Oct. 19 because of the pandemic.

Curiously, American Idol has not been nominated for an Emmy since returning to the air on NBC in 2018, despite putting on a better show with a younger and more marketable cast of singers.

In fact, Idol never won an Emmy, even back in its days of enormous popularity and ratings that dwarfed what The Voice attained even in its best years.

Makes you wonder what the Emmy folks are thinking.