Fox’s ‘X-Factor’ is no ‘Idol’-slayer just yet

By Scott Collins

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES

The morning after “The X Factor’s” American premiere last month, Simon Cowell got a call from his agent at Creative Artists Agency.

The ratings were nowhere near the monster hit Cowell himself had predicted, but the agent believed that if the 12 million or so people who turned up for the premiere kept tuning in, the show would be fine. “But if you go down by 30 percent tonight, you’re dead,” Cowell remembered his agent adding ominously.

Nearly a month later, “X Factor” still doesn’t look ready to slay Cowell’s old employer, “American Idol,” in the TV-singing-competition grudge match. That’s an important personal and professional point for Cowell, who has a bitter rivalry with “Idol” creator Simon Fuller. Cowell left his ultra-lucrative judging perch at that Fox hit to star in and produce the U.S. “Factor” on the same network.

But “Factor” is nevertheless off to a consistent if not spectacular start in a crowded fall marketplace, despite nettlesome interruptions from postseason baseball. A rain delay for a postseason game necessitated a last-minute scheduling switch that ended up bumping Thursday’s show to Sunday. The World Series will further disrupt the schedule.

More important, the program has enabled Fox to control Thursdays in the fall for the first time ever, with ratings up 35 percent that night — the most lucrative of the week due to major advertisers seeking to sell movies and cars to weekend shoppers — compared with last year, according to Nielsen. That’s made network executives forget that “Factor’s” premiere ratings were treated as a disappointment in many quarters — including in rival networks’ executive suites, where it was believed over the summer that “Factor” would do twice the ratings it has.

“If you look at this in the real world,” said Fox’s energetic reality guru, Mike Darnell, “a 4 demo rating for a brand-new television show in its third week ... is called an out-of-the-box hit. Period.”

The program may also be poised for the kind of growth seen in the British “Factor,” where Cowell and his team have shrewdly manipulated an endless series of stage-managed controversies — including a deportation melodrama last year over teenage Zimbabwean contestant Gamu Nhengu that helped goose ratings.

“It does feel like where we were 10 years ago with ‘Idol,”’ Cowell said of the U.S. “Factor” in an interview last week. “It’s like new territory again. I’ve had to shed everything we did with the U.K. [version] and get into my head that this is a brand-new audience who actually knew nothing about this show. ... It was really hard, first of all, because I’ve been doing the show for seven years. You sort of assume that everybody knows what you’re doing and then you quickly realize, ‘God, no one’s got a clue.’ You’ve got to explain the whole process and you’ve gotta get people interested from scratch.”

Still unknown is whether “Factor” can follow the path it took in Britain: a slow start followed by an inexorable rise to ratings glory.