This Year’s X Factor Australia Might Be A Short Season

Sure gets rid of that mid-season dull patch

A report in today’s Herald Sun, which is a newspaper, has suggested Seven might be giving us a shorter season of The X Factor this year.

Confidential, well known for needing to fill two full pages a day with whatever rumours they can find, are sometimes right, and they reckon that because the season will be shorter, Seven might be able to find bigger superstar judges for the season, as the amount of time they’d need to spend in Australia would be shorter.

Seven have the Olympics in August, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t have the same amount of space in their schedule to fill as they usually do.

Here’s a few ways they could shorten the season:

• Revert back to the original format. Three judges, not four, are assigned one of three categories: Under 25s (as opposed to separate categories for Under 25 Boys and Under 25 Girls), Over 25s, and Groups. A top nine would mean the live shows would only take up seven weeks. Three judges would also mean we wouldn’t have to put up with any Deadlocks for the entire season.
• If you insist on having your four judges, fine, but instead of each judge bringing three acts to the finals, only let them bring two. A top eight would result in a six-week live season, so we’d definitely avoid the issue we have where almost everyone except for a few notable exceptions who get eliminated between 10th and 5th place are entirely forgettable.
• In the US version, each judge brought four contestants to the finals, and in the first week, each judge had to kick one of their acts out. If each judge brought three, like normal, and then each kicked one out in the first week, we’d be down to eight finalists after one week and we’ll have all saved ourselves four uneventful weeks of television. It’d still be a seven-week live season.
• Just play all the auditions in one night, and jump straight to Five Chair Challenge on night two. Save the backstory for the intro packages in the live shows. (This will obviously never happen.)

Alternatively, Confidental might just be entirely full of it and we’ll get the same dragged-out season as last year.

So, what do you think? What’s the best option?