The X Factor star passionately defended his new Netflix series The Next Act after he was accused of manipulating and staging the show to launch his new boyband December 10
Music mogul Simon Cowell has defended his Netflix series The Next Act as “all genuine”, after he was accused of staging the series. The show follows Simon as he searches for the next big boy band through auditions with young, hopeful singers.
Ultimately, the show led to the creation of December 10, a seven-piece boy band. But some felt the show was not as “genuine” as it appeared to be, and accused Simon of staging the series to launch the band.
Appearing on The Rest Is Entertainment podcast with Richard Osman, the host told the former X Factor star: “What I thought I was going to watch was something with a bit more authenticity, if that makes sense.
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“You’re so brilliant at controlling narrative and understanding what people want and understanding how to give it to them. I wondered if you exec-ing that show meant that we missed out on some genuine authenticity, as I felt a number of times where you were saying: ‘Oh this is a big problem, oh I don’t know what’s gonna happen here’ and I though: ‘I think you do know what’s going to happen here’.”
But Simon insisted that the show was indeed “genuine”. He told Richard: “I promise you it was all genuine, what you see is what happened. And there weren’t any second takes.”
However, co-host Marina Hyde questioned the necessity of some of the footage. She referred to some bad auditions that were shown in the series and asked why they needed to be included. Marina also said such auditions were a part of the “theatre of cruelty”.
“Why did we see some rather unfortunate, less talented people?” she asked. “Much in the way we always used to, in that sort of slight X Factor theatre of cruelty way, where we just laugh at them, and you get to be rude to them. By the time of the edit, perhaps you didn’t have to show the unfortunate untalented ones at all.”
Simon argued that the show was made more realistic by including the bad auditions. “That is the reality with auditions, I’ve always gone with about half a per cent of the people you see are gonna be good.
“So there were some not-so-good people. So I guess it was a decision to show the people that turned up, and some of them weren’t very good.”
The Next Act was released on Netflix on 10 December, and this inspired the name of the new boyband. December 10 consists of seven singers aged 16 to 19 from across the UK.
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