Two hours before one of the most important live events in Netflix’s history, LA’s sprawling CBS Radford Studio Center is abuzz with the strangest combination of things. As I walk through one cavernous soundstage on a Tuesday afternoon, I hear multiple people warming up their voices to sing. I pass a man carefully waving a hair dryer in front of a piano. Outside, a man and a woman, both in scant black leather, walk past with a wave. I’m told they’re aerialists. Somewhere in this enormous rehearsal space, there’s also a 74-year-old budding standup comedian, an 11-year-old gospel singer, and a dancing border collie.
Such is the wondrous, bizarre versatility of Star Search, which on this January evening will start a five-week run of live shows streamed to Netflix’s 300 million-plus subscribers. It’s a reboot of one of TV’s most successful talent shows, though your average Stranger Things fan has likely never heard of it. It also represents one of Netflix’s biggest programming bets ever. The company has spent years building the technical infrastructure to stream all over the world, while also quietly testing show formats and interactive features to see how it might tweak a competition show to make sense in a world overrun by social media.
The company has done huge one-off events, like a boxing match between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson; it has done live shows, like Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney. It has hit shows and blockbuster movies, and the ability to turn a decade-old show nobody’s ever heard of into a No. 1 hit. It has wrestling and even some of the NFL. But Netflix has never really tried to do the hardest thing in TV: get its audience to show up, night after night and week after week, to build a simple talent show into an undeniable star-making machine.
When shows like this work, they become cultural events in their own right. Think of American Idol, The Voice, whatever Got Talent you like — all are among the most popular and long-lasting franchises you’ll find anywhere. “There are those formats that are undeniable,” Brandon Riegg, Netflix’s head of unscripted programming, tells me. He sees American Idol as the genre’s true gold standard. “We’ll never see another Idol, in terms of the gap between Idol and the second-place show,” he says, “but we can certainly try to say, ‘What’s the next iteration?’”
The next iteration is about to take place in the next soundstage I enter, which I do cautiously, so as not to run into the enormous pallet filled with every imaginable size and shape of cactus. The Star Search studio is enormous, with bright screens along one wall and a lit-up star at least twice my height casting a golden glow around the room. There are three stages in the room, plus an elevated platform in the center from which the show’s celebrity judges will watch the night’s proceedings. The only hints as to what’s coming tonight: a single chair on one stage, and a tall platform on another that is perfectly suited for falling off to your death in front of millions of people.
With about 90 minutes to air, 450 select audience members are finally allowed to leave the parking garage they’ve been waiting in, and begin to file into the studio. Most don’t know quite what to expect, other than some good celebrity sightings and maybe a chance to be on Netflix themselves. Meanwhile, the team at Netflix is about to find out whether their platform can mint a superstar.
Star Search’s job is to make even amateur performances feel huge. Photo: Kit Karzen / Netflix
A few minutes after the evening’s audience takes their seats, the event’s emcee, Chuck Dukas, explains how the show works. Most of the audience seems as confused as I am by his explanation, so allow me to try my own: Star Search is America’s Got Talent in content and Jeopardy! in structure. The show features eight categories, from dance to stand-up to music to magic, four of which are shown in a given episode. Each category has a champion, crowned the best of the previous episode, and a challenger, there to knock the champion off the throne. Both contestants do their thing, the judges each give them a score between one and four, and whoever receives the highest average score advances to the next episode to take on a new challenger. Win enough times, and you’re guaranteed a spot in the season finale, where a single grand champion will win $500,000.
Most of the format is borrowed from the original Star Search, which first aired in 1983. It was originally created by Al Masini, a legendary producer who also had a hand in shows from Entertainment Tonight to Baywatch. Masini’s idea was to do an amateur talent show, with carefully chosen acts, presented as glitzily as possible. “We gave them the best lighting available, we gave them the best audio… we put them in a Tiffany setting,” producer Bob Banner said in an interview with the Television Academy years later. “If they didn’t perform well, there’s nothing we could do about it, but we gave them every advantage.”
The show ran until 1995 (not including a reboot nobody really remembers), with Ed McMahon as genial host, and featured an astonishing number of now-household names. Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, Usher, and Beyoncé all sang on the show as young kids; Adam Sandler, Dave Chappelle, and Rosie O’Donnell all competed as comedians; Sharon Stone competed as a “spokesmodel,” a category that mercifully no longer exists, in the show’s very first episode.
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