This morning NBC announced that Christina Aguilera and Cee Lo Green will be taking a hiatus from the hit show The Voice and they will be replaced by Usher and Shakira. You can read about it in case I wasn’t very clear. Yahoo:
Rumors have swirled for months that NBC’s overkill decision to air “The Voice” twice yearly would at least temporarily drive away some or all of the show’s regular judges, causing the lineup to be revamped for the spring 2013 season. Apparently such is the downside of hiring judges who, you know, are still relevant hitmakers and have other important things to do with their time, like touring and recording, besides sitting on an NBC soundstage six months out of the year. (And this is why talent shows should consider hiring non-celebrity judges, but I digress.) In fact, just last week when talking to Ryan Seacrest, Christina admitted that she’d first assumed her “Voice” gig would be “kind of like a side project…then it kind of took off, and there goes my free time!”
With Christina getting ready to release her comeback album, Lotus, in November (her new single, “Your Body,” debuted last week to positive reviews), and the ubiquitous Cee Lo working on a Christmas album and a new sitcom, it’s no surprise that they are the first “Voice” judges to take official leaves of absence.
NBC’s press release assured that “The Voice’s” resident bromancers, Adam Levine (whose Maroon 5 band is hotter than ever) and Blake Shelton, will stick around to hang with Shakira and Usher in Season 4, but it seems like only a matter of time before they too decide to take a break. Blake in particular has repeatedly, quite loudly complained about “The Voice’s” new grueling two-seasons-a-year shoot schedule, and just this week he told Access Hollywood: “I don’t know how much longer I’m even going to do it. It’s [NBC's] decision [for us to leave], in that they’re the ones choosing to do back-to-back seasons. They really leave us no other option. As far as Christina and Adam and Cee Lo and I, if we want to tour, there’s not a chance of that doing back-to-back seasons. That’s not acceptable to me. At some point, I’ve got to go, ‘You know what, this has been awesome. It’s changed my life, but it’s not my life. I’ve got to get back to what I really do, and that’s country music.”
So if you are a fan of the show I guess that this means don’t worry because you are getting replacements and everything will be ok, supposedly they will come back for the 2013 season. In the other hand, it looks like Blake will leave the show in order to tour meaning that NBC might not be paying them enough to sit in an air-conditioned studio 9 or 10 months out of the year and might be his way to negotiate, instead he wants to get in a bus and travel around for days on end, the latter sounds like the smart choice don’t you think?….NOT!
PS: The picture was done that way on purpose in case you were wondering. It is my artistic choice after all.