Simon Cowell — Genius, Genie or Ghoul?

It is over. Or is it? On 11 Janu­ary 2010, Simon Cowell’s exit from Amer­ican Idol was made official.

The 2010 sea­son will be Cowell’s last. It was also announced that FOX has acquired the rights to an Amer­ican ver­sion of Cowell’s pop­u­lar Brit­ish show, X-Factor, which is slated to begin pro­duc­tion in the fall of 2011.

“I don’t mean to be rude, but…” – he knows some­thing. A closer look at one of the world’s most maligned fig­ures reveals some­thing eer­ily pro­found. His pub­lic per­sona is built upon unspar­ingly blunt apprais­als of contestant’s tal­ents, per­son­al­ity, and phys­ical appear­ance; how­ever he’s hid­ing in plain sight. Cow­ell is ruth­less and shrewd, but above all, untouchable.

Cow­ell was described in April 2009 by the The Times as rep­res­ent­ing the “heart­less, thought­less and super­fi­cial – the flot­sam and jet­sam of the pol­luted seas of celebrity that is likely to sink without trace into toxic foam” (1). The fol­low­ing month, he bought his $22 mil­lion, 11,550 sq ft Beverly Hills home. Money is not always an accur­ate gauge of mor­als, but it is of pro­ductiv­ity. News Cor­por­a­tion, the owner of FOX and The Times, didn’t seem to mind the com­ment – nor did Cowell.

Cow­ell learnt his trade at the fam­ily din­ner table. His father was an exec­ut­ive at the record giant EMI, and like all men of pos­i­tion he under­stood the cred­ib­il­ity of build­ing a career from the ground up. Cowell’s star­ted in the EMI mail­room. While he reached for the salt, his mother a former bal­let dan­cer and social­ite would delight in the details of gos­sip. An instinct developed. He knew how to play the game.

Cowell’s prom­in­ence has under­pinned Amer­ican Idol’s suc­cess. Although the rat­ings have flagged for the last three sea­sons, it’s prof­it­ab­il­ity through other mar­ket­ing arrange­ments has increased. In May 2009, the head of non-scripted pro­gram­ming for FOX told The Times that Idol could lose 12 per­cent of its audi­ence every sea­son and remain among the top-10 TV shows in 2016 (2).

Cow­ell pro­jects sel­dom encounter the pub­li­city hurdles of new pro­grams. The suc­cess of the Idol and X-Factor fran­chises has lead to other prof­it­able shows within the Got Tal­ent format. Along with sign­ing Idol and X-Factor con­test­ants, Cow­ell is respons­ible for the inter­na­tional suc­cess of the oper­atic pop group Il Divo.

Simon Cow­ell is one of the few bank­able acts in tele­vi­sion and FOX are diver­si­fy­ing their invest­ment. Cow­ell at his best is bit­ingly crit­ical. He is a ghoul. His com­ments gen­er­ate mil­lions. He is a genius. His approval launches careers and indelibly marks pop-culture. He is a genie.

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