NBC’s hit show The Voice returns for Season 15 on Sept. 24 and with any luck, hopefully with a little bit of a tweak to its format. TVLine suggests that the show should dump the Block and we agree. The show has always employed new twists to try to increase the suspense about which contestants will get to move forward, but the one they introduced last season, the Block, wasn’t very good. The Block was a button that judges Blake Shelton, Adam Levine, Alicia Keys, and Kelly Clarkson could press if they wanted to stop another judge from being able to turn for a contestant during the Blind Auditions. On the surface, this would seem the perfect avenue to rile up the judges and get the banter going as they yell at each other for keeping them from being able to vie for an amazing singer.
Unfortunately, it upset more than one contestant during Season 14 who would have wanted the blocked judge to have been theirs. Instead, they were forced to choose someone else, and it left the audience with a bad taste in their mouth over the whole thing. It would be a very smart move on the part of producers to get rid of the button and return things to the normal competition during the blinds.
With the new season coming up this fall, the judges will be the usual two, Shelton and Levine, as well as two former first-time judges returning for their sophomore runs — last year’s Kelly Clarkson and Jennifer Hudson from Season 13. Noticeably missing from the last few seasons is original judge Christina Aguilera, who opened up about why she quit the hit show. The singer/actress spoke candidly this week with the L.A. Times , revealing that she wanted to leave after the show went in a direction she didn’t exactly support.
“Nobody expected [ The Voice ] to be as big as Idol or take off the way it did. It just became a whole different kind of a machine,” she said after being asked why she walked away from the hit show. “It just wasn’t exactly what I wanted to be doing with my life. I’m not a spokesperson. I’m an artist.” She proved that time and again on the show when she would spontaneously burst into song along with contestant. That wasn’t something every judge seemed ready to do and it endeared Aguilera to those watching. “The show progressed in a direction I wasn’t into and that I didn’t think was a lot of times fair,” Aguilera added.
