Have we gone again in time to 2010? If solely! No, Simon Cowell is simply again within the headlines, reasserting his svengali standing for his new Netflix present. Opinions recommend that Cowell’s tried comeback, 15 years since his celeb peak, highlights much less his specific star energy than how completely the world has moved on. However is there something to be taught from SyCo now, and can his new boyband work? Let’s see!
1. Cowell is chasing a new path
Simon Cowell: The Subsequent Act, which hit Netflix on Wednesday, follows Cowell in his bid to place collectively “the subsequent One Route”, and do his bit to reassert western dominance in the one sphere that issues: the pop charts! “There hasn’t been a boyband from the UK or America who I feel is as thrilling as these Okay-pop artists,” Cowell declares.
However whereas he’s satisfied of the “ginormous” alternative for a “male model of the Spice Women”, the six-part docuseries has been extensively panned, with evaluations describing it as anachronistic and even bleak.
Looking for future stars, Cowell labours the significance of open-call auditions, billboard advertising and marketing and regional radio promotion. At one level he even slaps wheat paste on a poster himself, hoping for “some media consideration” – although he has “at all times believed radio is the very best software”.
2. Radio might not be the very best software
Although bodily incapable of furrowing his forehead, Cowell has apparent disdain for YouTube, TikTok and the routes devised by younger folks to get round trade gatekeepers like him. “You’ve received to get out of your bed room and are available alongside and audition!” he barks throughout an interview.
He’s compelled to confront his hubris when, one week away from auditions, Cowell learns his marketing campaign has drummed up 160 functions, solely 93 of whom are throughout the eligible age vary.
After a gathering with a staff of digital strategists – who blame every part from the wordy web site to youngsters’ quick consideration spans and Cowell’s lack of identify recognition with gen Z (the final revelation assembly with some froideur) – he ultimately agrees to interact with new media. “I’ve met 40 TikTok influencers,” he says later, resignedly.
3. Possibly future pop stars ought to be AI
Cowell kicks off auditions in Liverpool, due to the Beatles (heard of them?) and the town’s “actually enjoyable folks”. Vibrant-eyed hopefuls being paraded earlier than a stony-faced Cowell is acquainted from many years of The X Issue, American Idol and all the opposite expertise exhibits which have churned out pop stars.
Now, after all, we all know the toll taken behind the scenes, and what number of of these contestants struggled with the sudden publicity. However The Subsequent Act is about as keen to interact with the prices of fame as Cowell is with the idea of Snapchat.
If something, he ramps up the stakes, promising a extra “messy, uncooked” method to the talent-show mannequin. The sequence, forged in a heat Netflix glow, fails to ship on this – however the open-call auditions retain a number of the ritual humiliation of its predecessors.
Cowell deems a 20-year-old “somewhat bit over the road”. One other aspirant is dismissed with: “You simply didn’t really feel particular.” Cowell ultimately strides out to instruct the horde of youngsters that he’s not keen on “secure and good”, and they need to as an alternative endeavour to be “folks with persona”.
4. Cowell is much less keen on self-reflection than success
One expertise Cowell famously plucked from obscurity was Liam Payne, who shot to fame in One Route and later struggled with psychological well being and substance abuse. The timing of this sequence, a yr after Payne’s loss of life at 31, has been criticised; although filming started earlier than the tragedy, in October 2024, the glancing tribute featured within the present doesn’t reduce the unhealthy style.
Cowell is clearly emotional, describing his name to Payne’s mother and father and the “regular and down-to-earth” teenager to whom he gave a standing ovation on The X Issue. The footage of a floppy-haired, 16-year-old Payne – who auditioned twice, after Cowell instructed him to strive once more when he was older – is horrible to revisit.
Cowell lately instructed the New York Occasions he knew “somewhat bit” about Payne’s difficulties post-1D and tried to present him recommendation. However the sequence exhibits Cowell’s reckoning with the half he or the trade might have performed in Payne’s troubled closing years to be fleeting.
After weighing up the “gigantic” strain and stress of being in a boyband, and the way he would really feel about his 11-year-old son doing the identical, Cowell recommits to his new enterprise, and resumes coaching a brand new crop of youngsters for stardom, some as younger as 16. “I understand how a lot they need this … I can’t take this chance away from them.”
5. He’s maybe not the best particular person to dwell with …
In the meantime, Cowell is proven to be simply as exacting at dwelling in LA along with his fiancee (since 2021) Lauren Silverman as in his pursuit of pop greatness. He grumbles at receiving flowers, being “somebody who doesn’t like flowers”, and hates all birthdays – “not simply his birthday”, Silverman confirms.
Silverman appears to have tailored, nonetheless: scrambling to cover paper towels (Simon doesn’t wish to see them blighting the kitchen counter) and humouring him as he sits right down to half a crumpet for lunch. “I’ve to avoid wasting the opposite half for dinner,” he declares, carrying sun shades on the desk, a yorkshire terrier on his lap.
Later, Cowell complains about having to pause his heart-throb hunt to attend his stepson’s end-of-year faculty prizegiving. “I don’t must be there for the entire commencement, do I?” he says wearily, whereas hooked into an IV drip, nonetheless carrying sun shades.
Certainly, fairly than trusting her fiance will discover the time to get married, Silverman modified her identify to “Cowell” by deed ballot. In any case, Cowell reportedly deliberate 4 weddings in 2010 (all to his then-fiancee, the make-up artist Mezhgan Hussainy) – none went forward.
6. … however he plans to stay round
Cowell lately reassured the Solar that he has by no means used weight-loss jabs, as an alternative crediting his physique to good old style calorie restriction and “between 300 and 600” push-ups a day (typically 1,000, if he’s “actually going for it”).
His unlined face displays 10 hours’ sleep, the “superb blue-light glasses” he wears by the evening – in addition to “1000’s” of models of Botox. (He has stopped getting fillers, having realised they made him look “like an actual weirdo”.)
Cowell additionally wears brand-new underpants every day and positive aspects an additional inch from a Cuban heel. However his dedication to ageing backwards – he’s 66, however considers himself 64 – is not only skin-deep. Cowell instructed the Solar he intends to dwell to 100: “, we’re discovering new stuff on a regular basis.”
Within the meantime, he makes use of Boots Twin Defence nasal spray every day, and prays every evening. “I’m positively going to heaven.”
7. Even Cowell can’t flip again time
Early in episode one, to impress ignorant gen Z along with his credentials, Cowell says he was instructed (“and I feel it’s true”) that he has had extra No 1 data than anybody within the music enterprise. The UK Official Charts didn’t reply to the Guardian’s request for clarification; a spokesperson for the Billboard charts stated: “Sadly, that’s too broad of a query” for them to reply.
However the questionable stat foreshadows the sequence’ actual cause for being – not minting the subsequent nice boyband, however bolstering Cowell’s fading svengali standing. Quite than confront the brand new cultural panorama, the present presents Cowell’s obstacles as a scarcity of appropriately charismatic adolescents, and his personal staff of yes-men once they say something aside from “sure”.
Silverman, in the meantime, appears adept at lively listening, at the same time as her try to interact Cowell in her ardour for crystals (which she has hand-delivered to their mansion) is as soon as once more derailed by his single-minded ambition to get again on prime.
“If I used to be making a crystal band …” Cowell says, assessing the crop on show for a “particular one”. “I consider you,” Silverman says of his eventual decide. “I consider myself,” Cowell responds.
The remainder of us won’t have returned to 2010, however Cowell appears decided to maintain making an attempt. His fiancee, at the least, understands. “He simply needs to show to himself and the world that he’s nonetheless received it,” Silverman says. “It makes him really feel good to know that he’s nonetheless related.”
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