Though you can hardly swing a dead cat in any of the top-10 TV markets in the country without hitting a promo for NBC’s new singing competition series “The Voice,” most TV critics are not getting a chance to see the show in advance of Tuesday night’s unveiling. But NBC held a screening Monday afternoon for fan boys and girls at its digs in Burbank.
The network’s new programming chief, Bob Greenblatt, stopped by briefly but had nothing to say to the crowd. Paul Telegdy, NBC’s head of reality programming, however, kicked things off by telling them that Mark Burnett would not show up, as promised, because he was “stuck in post-production in Santa Monica” and that this very first episode we were about to see had been delivered to the network at 9 o’clock Monday morning.
“We may have a surprise in the middle of it,” Telegdy hinted.
The show kicks off with host Carson Daly blah, blah, blahing about how this show, unlike any other, puts vocal ability first. Though NBC insists in its press material that Daly, who also hosts the network’s “Last Call With Carson Daly,” became “the entertainment icon that he is today” when he became host of MTV’s “Total Request Live” lo these many years ago, today on this tape he’s more Brian Dunkleman than Ryan Seacrest.
The show then explains the rules. Ever have someone try to teach you how to play mah-jongg? It’s kinda like that.
As best we can tell, four celebrity singers will pick wannabes to be on the “teams” they’ll “coach,” only then they have to kill off those team members they deem weakest — like a nature documentary where the mother eats her young, but only the really lame ones. Then, at some point, viewers take over and a winner is eventually chosen. Anyway, it’s a huge hit in the Netherlands, whence it sprang. If more than one celeb mentor picks a singer, he or she gets to pick which team they want to go with.
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