The Top 14 will have to wait until Monday to find out who will make the Top 12. (ABC Photo)
If you were surprised by American Idol’s inability to announce results at the end of Monday night’s Top 20 show, you shouldn’t have been.
Monday marked Idol’s first live show since the introduction of social media voting on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
And that’s in addition to continuing to take votes on its website and via text.
In other words, fans were frantically voting near the end of the show, with millions of votes pouring in from five different sources.
Idol did the right thing, pausing to make sure it got the results right rather than rushing and eliminating the wrong contestants.
Now, the question is: Will Idol do the right thing from this point forward?
And the right thing would not be continuing with a voting window that’s less than two hours long and ends before the show even begins airing on the West Coast.
The right thing would be returning to an overnight voting window that runs through 6 a.m. in the morning, like Idol did during the Top 20 shows.
Rather than announcing results at the end of the show, announce results at the beginning of the next weeks’ show.
If Idol can do that this week, there’s no reason it couldn’t do the same through most of the live shows.
Such a switch would solve a couple of problems with the current voting format.
Contestants singing near the end of the show would have a better chance at making an impact on voting with a superlative performance.
And fans on the West Coast wouldn’t be asked to vote before they’ve seen a single performance, something that always did seem silly to me. Especially now that Idol is airing on Monday nights instead of being simulcast on Sundays.
See also …
Song by song grades from Monday’s show
Four contestants crack the Apple Music charts
A look at which singers score Monday’s most popular performances
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