Josh Groban and ABC provides America with yet another take on American Idol and/or The Voice (more the latter, though), but with a difference, and that difference is real-time voting with an accompanying smartphone app. In the first round, a contestant performed, hidden to the audience behind a video screen; if at least 70% of live viewers voted "Yes" on a performer, the screen rose to reveal them to the studio audience, and they advanced. There were also three judg-[ahem], "experts", Brad Paisley, Kesha, and Ludacris—who could also add "Yes" votes into the mix to improve their score. Those who moved on competed in the Duel round—highest vote total in each match won and advanced; the loser in each episode who got the best score from west coast votes got a wildcard berth in the next round too.
The remaining singers were whittled down through a Top 13 heat, quarter and semi-finals, and then an eventual final. The experts' influence on the proceedings were steadily nerfed throughout the rounds; at the beginning, each Yes vote by the experts counted for 7% worth of votes. By the finale, an expert's "Yes" vote counted the same as a civilian's vote. That is, not much at all.
Jesse Kinch was the winner of the first ... and only season of Rising Star, clinching the victory with his take on The Who's "Love, Reign o'er Me". The premiere got 5.20 million viewers, but ratings steadily fell throughout the run — it aired on Sunday nights as the 'Wipeout Lead-Out With a Slim Chance of Returning Next Season", if that counts for anything. It was cancelled, as ABC decided to air Celebrity Family Feud and BattleBots as its Sunday night Summer shows instead (and, in subsequent seasons, decided to just go all-in on game shows and revivals on Sunday nights).
Although the format has been popular in other regions (such as its home country of Israel — where the show also used to decide who will represent the country at the Eurovision Song Contest), the relative failure of the U.S. version had a ripple effect on other international versions: the German version cut down the number of episodes it planned to air, and ITV axed a planned British version before it even aired a single episode
(it would have also been dueling with Channel 4's short-lived The Singer Takes It All, which had similar mechanics but more of a Game Show-like structure rather than a full-length competition); Spain's Antena 3 also acquirted the rights to the format, but ultimately did nothing with them after seeing the flops of the American and French versions. With that, Rising Star will either be best remembered for its attempt to subvert how time zones effect reality music competitions in North America, or thrown in the "interactive TV shows that were too ambitious for their own good" pile in the corner next to The Million Second Quiz. Later on, ABC would actually acquire the rights to American Idol instead, to relatively better success, and going as far as actually broadcasting the show live from coast-to-coast.
This series provides examples of
- Hopeless Auditionees: Averted; as with The Voice, auditions to get on the show were not broadcast. Hence, the hopeless auditionees had their voting apparatuses permanently glued in the "No" position before the show even went on the air!
- Insistent Terminology: The show insisted on referring to its "judges" as "experts", emphasizing that the viewers would be the judge.
- Live but Delayed: Played with; while it was still technically tape-delayed for the west (they didn't perform live twice), the voting was live on both feeds. In most cases, contestants who advanced were able to get the required target score from east coast viewers alone, and western viewers followed suit with a similar result. On one first-round episode, both Shameia Crawford and Megan Tibbits fell short of the benchmark from eastern numbers (1 and 2% respectively), but got just enough more from the West to make it; in these cases, a live cut-in segment was added with their reactions.
