Netflix’s Simon Cowell: The Next Act presents itself as an intimate, quasi-documentary portrait of a once all-powerful music mogul searching for relevance after years out of the spotlight. As The Guardian rightly points out, this framing is little more than a bait and switch. What begins as a reflective look at Cowell’s personal and professional life quickly collapses into yet another iteration of The X Factor: auditions, boot camps, eliminations, and the now-familiar hunt for a manufactured boyband. It is, as Stuart Heritage notes, Cowell’s single idea repeated for the billionth time, dressed up in Netflix gloss.

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Simon Cowell comes across, on a personal level, as surprisingly kind and caring—especially toward the young contestants. He appears emotionally invested in them, protective, and sincere in his desire to help them succeed. His wife, Lauren Silverman, is also presented as warm and grounded, reinforcing the image of Cowell as a softer, more reflective figure than the caricature of his early TV years.

Yet none of this warmth can disguise how deeply prefabricated the entire project feels. The show is not a genuine documentary, nor is it a meaningful exploration of contemporary music. It is simply a casting exercise—one that might have worked in 2005, but feels culturally out of sync in 2025.

The music at the centre of The Next Act is the clearest example of this disconnect. The aesthetic, the songwriting ambitions, and even the idea of what constitutes “talent” feel frozen in an era when audiences were less musically literate and less demanding. Today’s young artists are different. Many play instruments, read music, understand harmony, and have studied formally. Increasingly, they are shaped by global influences rather than narrow national pop formulas.

Artists like Rosalía embody this shift. She studied music at the prestigious Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (ESMUC) in Barcelona, where she developed a deep grounding in theory, composition, and performance—an education that clearly underpins the ambition, discipline, and experimental confidence of her work today. Her work demonstrates why the industry has changed: audiences now expect innovation, risk, and authorship.

Today’s international pop landscape is vastly different from what Cowell is chasing. Christine and the Queens, Finneas, Billie Eilish, and IU show that modern young musicians are either formally trained or deeply involved in creating, arranging, and producing their own music. Even K-pop stars like RM, SUGA, and IU combine rigorous training with authorship, proving that audiences now demand real musicianship, not just carefully manufactured backstories.Compared to this, the musical output implied by The Next Act feels not just safe, but obsolete.

The kids featured in the series largely come across as children who want to be famous—often for understandable reasons, such as helping their families—but with limited musical or cultural grounding. This isn’t a moral judgement; it’s an observation about the system that selects them. Their knowledge of music, history, or broader artistic context appears thin, especially when compared to young artists currently breaking through outside the UK. Fame is presented as the goal, not music itself.

This is where the show becomes troubling. We are still rewarding manufactured narratives and emotional backstories over genuine artistic development, at a time when thousands of teenagers are learning notation, composition, and instruments, and building careers independently. The industry has changed. Audiences are sharper. They can tell the difference.

Kind intentions aside, this is not a “next act” at all. It is a rerun—and one that underestimates just how far music, artists, and audiences have moved on.