With the Season 11 premiere only a few weeks away, 'American Idol' boss Nigel Lythgoe has released a new promo video (watch it after the jump) and talked about his plans for the show.
After all the upheaval surrounding Season 10 after the departure of Simon Cowell and the most of the judging panel, Lythgoe says he's done changing the show around. He told the AP "I think we made a lot of tweaks last year. I'm not sure that we want to make too many more tweaks this year."
Lythgoe acknowledged that the biggest change he made to the show in Season 10, which was to stop making contestants sing in styles other than their own, had been a game-changer. It produced the first country winner since 2005, and made it possible for contestants like Casey Abrams to go further in the competition than they might have done otherwise.
He said that in Season 10 the show discovered "some incredible talent, and it was so diverse. ... We got this great jazz singer in Casey, we got a soft jazz singer in Haley, and the two country kids (in the finals) probably in previous years wouldn't have been as successful because they would have been asked to sing in the different styles that we used to do then."
With the Season 11 auditions done and dusted Lythgoe's confident that 2012 will uncover a similar pool of talent. "The kids that have auditioned this year that we're going to be taking to Hollywood in December are again really talented and really diverse," he said. "Hopefully they'll get through one of the toughest auditions, which is the Hollywood week, and get themselves into the top 20."
After the judging bloodbath at the end of Season 9 and last summer's will-she, won't-she uncertainty over Jennifer Lopez, Lythgoe once again confirmed that all the judges and Jimmy Iovine will be back for Season 11.
