Rising Star: Season 1 Review

Rising Star: Season 1 Review

The main reason I decided to watch this show was because of the judges (mainly Kesha and Brad Paisley). If there is a celebrity judge that I really like, then I will give the show a try. If you switch the judges to someone I dislike, than I will give up on the show without so much as a second thought (Nicki Minaj on American Idol).

The concept of this show is similar to other singing competitions except for the fact that you can vote on the free Rising Star app and the votes are tallied in real time. The performer knows what their score is, America knows what the score is and we can move on. There's no more of this waiting until the next day for results. During the auditions all of the contestants sang behind a wall and the wall would rise if they reached a score of 70% from America, which meant they were safe. Later in the season the last half of the contestants would sing behind the wall while the first half would sing without a wall. I honestly don't think the wall made much of a difference for the voting. The wall isn't going to change if you can sing or not.

The judges ended up only being okay. I'm a pretty big fan of both Kesha and Brad Paisley personally and music wise, but I knew very little about Ludacris. After watching the first season, I don't think they were necessarily the best choice for judges as most of the comments weren't all that constructive or helpful. Half the time, they were just reading tweets as their comments. The host Josh Groban took the job as host to a whole new level. He was completely fresh, original and awkward in the best ways. A lot of reality shows these days are so edited and time scheduled that we don't have time to see a lot of hosts bring their personality to the job. Josh Groban's personality just shined through. Between his jokes and awesome socks, he brought a new life to the host position and I loved it. 

This show made the concept of voting for a winner more interesting. There was very little I enjoyed more on Sunday nights than voting yes for the contestants that I liked and voting no for the ones I didn't. This show got aired both in the East coast and again in the West coast and the voting in the West would save one of the contestants that the East had voted out. Now this is a really cool idea because I normally watch TV on East coast time but some weeks because my favorites were in danger of going home, I would watch the West coast time as well just so I could vote again and try to save them. That's right. Not only would I watch the show live on a jam-packed Sunday night during the East coast time, sometimes I would watch the same episode twice! My TV schedule is jam-packed and there are very few TV shows that I ever watch live. This was one of them.

I do hope that they bring this show back for a second season. Getting to see the public's votes in real time instead of having to wait until the next episode is a fresh concept and makes all the difference for me. I loved being a part of the show and having my vote count. I would swipe YES to raise the wall for a second season.

Overall Grade: A-

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