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10 Discarded Titles For NBC’s New Singing Show (Yes, Another), “The Winner Is”

Posted by Katherine St Asaph on 05/29/2012 at 5:35 PM News

The Popdust Files: upcoming shows, yet another talent competition

What the world needs now is yet another singing show. NBC doesn’t disagree; it recently green-lighted a show called The Winner Is, which has all the elements you need. It’s got a panel with a celebrity judge, or will once the network finds one. It’s got singers of all ages with head-to-head sing-offs. It’s got a $1 million prize at the end. And it’s got a Big Twist–namely, that contestants, instead of letting the judges’ panel decide who’s eliminated, will get the option to bow out of the competition in exchange for a cash consolation prize that increases every round.

Photo: Lewis Jacobs/NBC

Imagine this, except with more bitter competition and/or math.

In other words, this show is The Voice (singing battles) with a little bit of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and/or Deal Or No Deal, or a Nonstartr elevator pitch for television. What it isn’t: compelling, SHOCKINGLY UNIQUE–or, at this point, surprising. American Idol‘s relatively long-lived success, plus the success of importing The Voice, means that there are going to be many more new talent competitions. We have an entire tag for new talent competitions. It’s like dating shows a decade or show ago: a bubble that’ll get more and more hilariously inflated then pop hard.

Photo: Art Streiber/NBC

Four unsurprised people.

But let’s stop focusing for one second on the supersaturated market (it passed saturated a few Sing-Offs ago) or this show’s prospects (if we knew when the talent-show bubble would pop, we’d be TV execs) and start focusing on that title. The Winner Is? That screams working title, or compromise, the sort of thing you grudgingly settle on after your backroom brainstorming session already progressed through mediocre puns and terrible puns and obscure pop-culture references from one fanboy in advertising. It can’t have been the original idea. It can’t even have come close. Granted, nobody at Popdust sat in on that meeting. (The heckling would’ve probably started within 5 minutes.) But we did the next best thing: tried to imagine what went down! And if there’s a last-second name change–which isn’t implausible–it may well be to one of these.