Netflix launched its first major foray into broadcast-style reality competition programming on Tuesday night.
Star Search, a reboot of the 1980s series, is the streamer’s attempt to finally crack the big studio show, and it decided that live was the way to do it. Well, mostly live.
It marks the first major roll of the dice for Jeff Gaspin, who oversees unscripted programming for Netflix The exec oversaw series such as America’s Got Talent during his time at NBCUniversal and later produced Netflix’s Rhythm + Flow.
Hosted by Anthony Anderson, who previously hosted live events like the Emmys, and featuring a judging panel of Sarah Michelle Gellar, Chrissy Teigen and Jelly Roll, the show felt like a broadcast variety show, which is exactly what Netflix wanted it to feel like.
There were four musical performances: child performers Eric Adrien Williams, who sang The Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There,” against Blair Kudelka, who sang “Blue,” originally recorded in 1958 but famously covered by LeAnn Rimes, and boy band 2BYG, who sang a cover of *NSYNC’s “It’s Gonna Be Me,” against Australian girl group H3rizon, who took on Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso.” On the dance front, French troupe Ladymetry took on Movement55.
“We are live, worldwide, baby,” Anderson said during the opening of the show.
Well, sort of. The magic portion of the night, which saw Las Vegas headliner TJ Salta do an elaborate trick to compete with illusionist Fernando Velasco, was pre-recorded for “technical reasons,” not that the audience watching on Netflix would have noticed much difference.
Unlike some of the buffering issues Netflix suffered during the Jake Paul-Mike Tyson fight in November 2024, one of its first forays into live programming, Star Search was drama free. There was only one small gaffe on stage at CBS Radford in Studio City when some of the contestants came out too early towards the end, but it was hardly noticed.
Executive producer Jesse Collins, whose eponymous production company makes the show, told Deadline, “The best thing about live is that it’s live. Whatever happens is whatever happens. You’re not going into an edit, second guessing, trying to fix, change, whatever it’s going to be. We love that. You thrive,” he said.
Big-budget entertainment shows tend to look a lot alike. Put aside that Star Search is a classic format that ran between 1983-1995 with a short Arsenio Hall-fronted reboot in 2003, the main reason for this is familiarity. Netflix’s twist? Live voting via remote control or cell phone, which Collins said separates it from the past as well as “everything that’s on television right now.”
‘Star Search’
Kit Karzen/Netflix
Collins added that Netflix always wanted it live but it also wanted something extra. “We figured out how to do that, and then Netflix came in with the next thing of wanting the entire world to be able to vote, and they have to be able to vote within one minute of the host saying, ‘Now you vote.’ I thought that sounded awesome. Then Netflix brought in the right people figure it out,” he said.
He said that it’s a form of “instant gratification.” “It keeps everybody actively engaged in the show. There’s been audience voting in the past, but you paid 99 cents, you went on a website, you downloaded an app,” he added. “But with this, whatever device you’re watching on, there’ll be an overlay, and you’ll be able to pick how many stars you want the person to have. It’s in and out.”
The project was originated by Empire star Taraji P. Henson, who was working with Village Roadshow, which owned the Star Search IP, before it filed for bankruptcy. Henson, an executive producer on the project alongside former Village Roadshow boss Steve Mosko, was previously attached to host a reboot of Candid Camera with the company.
“They opened up their whole catalog and said, ‘What do you love?’ and she loves Star Search, and she brought us in to help develop the format. There was just a lot of motivation to get it going,” added Collins.
The Grammys producer noted that it had to strike the balance between using the Star Search format but putting a “fresh twist” on it.
The judging panel is part of this. Gellar, a self-professed “dance mom,” previously tried and failed to make it onto the original show and she is the harshest critic of the three. Teigen promised to be “real” and Jelly Roll leaned into his past, joking to one of the magicians that he could have used his escape skills when he was in and out of jail early in his life. “If I had to wager, I think Jelly Roll cries first,” Collins said. “The unifying thing of all of them is that they all really care.”
The voters share the responsibility of choosing the winner, with 50% of the vote coming from the TV audience, although in the finale, set for February 17, only the public will choose.
“We’ve really worked hard to make sure that everybody on this show has that star power. Some shows might go for talent that they know aren’t the best, but will get a big reaction and go viral, but on [Star Search] no one is a joke. Everyone has the potential to be a winner,” Collins added.
What’s winning for Netflix? The show will air two episodes a week – the second episode airs tonight – and it’s clear that the streamer is hoping to disrupt the hegemony of ABC, Fox and NBC with these shows.
It’s not clear what number is a success for the streamer; the warm-up man kept touting 30 million viewers around the world, which is around half of what Netflix concurrently got for the Paul-Tyson fight. That number seems high, and isn’t one the streamer itself is using, but Gaspin and his team certainly hopes Star Search will do well enough to allow it to do more in this space.
