Judging the jurors

With so many talent tilts ongoing or just recently concluded on TV, the viewing public has been given a crash course in the appreciation and evaluation of performing talents and stellar potential. Trouble is, quite a number of the winners of those talent competitions don’t live up to their promise and fail to launch successful stellar careers in the biz.

What has gone wrong? One of the problems appears to be the less than astute judgment on the part of the tilt’s all-important mentors and jurors. Some of them don’t know how to spot real talent, or may be looking for the wrong things.

That’s what you get when you tap celebrities and stars to do the judging and the mentoring. They’re chosen for their star value, or their quotable and even controversial comments, not for their ability to spot and nurture talent.

They spend so much time being quotable and controversial that they don’t concentrate on the talents they’re supposed to evaluate and develop.

In addition, many stars habitually focus on themselves, so some celebrity jurors and mentors have a hard time concentrating on the talents assigned to them, and on how to improve them and help them come into their own.

Worst of all are the stars who think that they’re great actors or singers, but are actually lushly over-the-top performers. Naturally, they teach their wards to perform exactly like them—so, instead of producing good performers, they create hapless mini versions of themselves, with no real stellar prospects in the biz.

Is there a way out of this sad and unproductive situation? First, talent searches on TV have to realize that celebrity status is one thing, and the ability to teach is quite another—and the twain hardly ever meet in one individual.

In fact, most of the time, they are inimical, and even cancel each other out. So, get star value by tapping stars to host a talent search, but hire noncelebrities to do the all-important tasks of judging and mentoring.

It would also be great if talent searches don’t expect jurors and mentors to be entertaining and controversial in the comments they make. It’s hard to find people who can be both astute and quotable, so cool it.

People keep citing Simon Cowell as the quintessential “quotable evaluator,” but the reason he’s paid many millions of dollars each year is the fact that he’s sui generis. Why hope to find his local counterpart and then pay him relative peanuts for his rare mix of talents?

No, the most essential task is to have the knack for evaluating and/or developing raw talent, so all other considerations have to play second fiddle to that main goal.

If you need verbal entertainment, get a stellar comedian. If you need star value, get celebrities as hosts, not as evaluators.

Leave the judging and mentoring to the pros, so astute evaluation and truly productive training and mentoring can take place, and authentic stars are eventually produced!