Mike Darnell: “Simon Cowell Learned To Be A Mean Judge For Fox — Underneath He’s Different”

29.11.2022 - 19:19 / deadline.com

Simon Cowell wasn’t always the mean judge character he played on American Idol.

Mike Darnell, who shepherded Fox’s run at the top of U.S. reality game during the first decade of the 2000s, revealed Cowell is not like the grumpy, unimpressed persona he adopted for American Idol and brought to The X Factor and his other reality shows.

Recalling when Idol was in development, Darnell said he had instructed Cowell to “walk into a room and actually verbally tell someone, ‘you’re out’,” but that the initial feeling after trying it out was that the character was “too harsh.”

Darnell had first noticed Cowell’s frankness during a small audition taping in Hollywood and was keen to lean into a different kind of reality TV judge, as the trend at that time was for nicer, more supportive critiques. Cowell was already adopting a frank tone on the British version, Pop Idol, which ran on ITV between 2001 and 2003.

“I knew we had to get Simon Cowell as he was the star of the show but we needed something different in the U.S. — the mean judge, the frank judge. In all the other shows before him, everyone was polite and nice, and I knew that was going to be thing. 

“Simon, to his credit, was willing to do anything,” said Darnell, who is now President of Unscripted Television at Warner Bros Discovery, during a career retrospective session at Content London.

“Simon Cowell learned the character,” added Darnell. “Underneath he’s a different character. Watch Britain’s Got Talent or America’s Got Talent now and he’s a much softer version now.”

Cowell ultimately went on to perfect a bad guy image that helped drive the 19 Entertainment and Fremantle North America show to the top of the ratings charts for an unprecedented run between 2003 and 2011.