TMZ covered the story of American Idol‘s prospects for 2018 reboot. The case looked strong for NBC to bring back the 15-year-long show, but the project has now been scrapped. While a revival is never out of the question for a singing competition tycoon like Idol, it looks like the reboot is dead, at least for now.
Both NBC and FOX (the incumbent Idol station) made bids for the show, but the show’s owners did not return a counter offer to either network. American Idol has two co-owners: FremantleMedia and CoreMedia. According to TMZ, the owners remained in dispute and could not agree on which network to host reboot. NBC was planning to rotate American Idol with America’s Got Talent and The Voice. FremantleMedia also owns America’s Got Talent and was pressuring CoreMedia to accept the NBC offer. But TMZ reported that CoreMedia thought Fremantle’s conflict of interest was pressuring CoreMedia to accept the NBC offer in order to make AGT the crown jewel of a year-round talent competition.
But that would undermine Idol‘s place on the air. CoreMedia wanted to be sure that Idol‘s best interests were not pushed behind America’s Got Talent‘s. So Fremantle and Core went with neither NBC nor Fox and have indefinitely postponed plans for rebooting Idol.
The unlikelihood of American Idol‘s return is good news for NBC’s The Voice which will now not necessarily have to go from two cycles to one in order to make room for Idol.
So it looks like American Idol: The Farewell Season will be our last farewell to Idol. Original judges Paula Abdul, Simon Cowell, and Randy Jackson along with host Ryan Seacrest laid the show to rest in April of 2016.