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"That&amp;#039;s that, then. After months of speculation and rumours and false starts and dead-end possibilities, we finally have our American Idol panel: Keith Urban, Jennifer Lopez, and Harry Connick Jr! Okay, you&amp;#039;re going to need to stop your excitable screaming. They&amp;#039;re not on television until January. Just calm down.  Oh, wait, you&amp;#039;re not overly excited? You&amp;#039;re actually incredibly, totally, massively, hugely underwhelmed? Thank God, because we are too. Individually, we have absolutely nothing against any of these stars. Harry Connick Jr gets points for providing the soundtrack to When Harry Met Sally and being married to Jill Goodacre of Friends ATM vestibule fame. Jennifer Lopez gifted us with &amp;#039;Jenny From the Block&amp;#039;, for which we shall always be grateful. And Keith Urban is a very talented, very nice man. But put together, they combine to make what is possibly the most boring American Idol panel. Ever. We&amp;#039;re not asking for much. We always knew that Diddy and Kanye were long shots, even though both of them would be utterly incredible on the panel (can you imagine?) And we weren&amp;#039;t even asking for anyone particularly famous - after all, Simon Cowell was hardly a big name when he made the show huge back in the day. We just wanted something... more. Perhaps some of our ennui comes from the fact that this panel doesn&amp;#039;t even seem that new. Keith&amp;#039;s back for a second year in a row. Jennifer Lopez wasn&amp;#039;t on the show last year, but she&amp;#039;s judged it twice before. Harry&amp;#039;s been buzzing around it for ages (and talking about getting promoted a lot, too.) And we&amp;#039;re not even saying goodbye to dawg Randy Jackson, who quit as a judge but apparently couldn&amp;#039;t stay away - he&amp;#039;ll be back as the in-house mentor and purveyor of &amp;quot;yos&amp;quot;.  With that said, this panel seems stale before they&amp;#039;ve even got started. It doesn&amp;#039;t help that the previous rumours had suggested we&amp;#039;d be in for something much more exciting - super-producer and one man hit factory Dr Luke would have been an inspired choice, if it wasn&amp;#039;t for his pesky contractual conflict. And say what you want about Justin Bieber, but you can&amp;#039;t deny that his manager Scooter Braun - also responsible for folk like Carly Rae Jepsen and The Wanted - is smart, savvy and relevant. These potential picks even threatened to make American Idol matter again - to make it fresh and exciting, and possibly to find a new star with a little edge. When you&amp;#039;re teased with the possibility of big, juicy apples, it&amp;#039;s perfectly reasonable to be disappointed when you&amp;#039;re handed a couple of raisins. It&amp;#039;s not that you don&amp;#039;t like raisins - actually, you like them quite a bit - but it&amp;#039;s just not quite what you were expecting. (Incidentally, I&amp;#039;d feel a little sorry for Harry that he obviously wasn&amp;#039;t the first choice if it wasn&amp;#039;t for the fact that he&amp;#039;s been after this job for ages and is probably quite happy just to land it.) And what happened to those reports that we could be seeing an American Idol alumni panel? Previous rumours suggested that Jennifer Hudson was all signed up and ready to go, and with stars like Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Adam Lambert and Jordin Sparks in the pool of talent to pick from, there&amp;#039;s no end of amazing combinations that could have been figured out.  It&amp;#039;s been suggested that the idea of an all-alum panel went out of the window with the show&amp;#039;s change of producers, but what a shame. The Idol stars are uniquely placed to be perfect as judges - they&amp;#039;ve been through the process themselves, they&amp;#039;ve achieved huge fame and success, and to win they had to have at least some charisma and personality (indeed, most of them have proved to be feisty, outspoken and loveable.) And it really would be something new in the miasma of talent shows that&amp;#039;s emerged since Idol first hit television screens. Maybe we shouldn&amp;#039;t be too harsh - after all, we haven&amp;#039;t seen the new panel in action, and maybe they&amp;#039;ll end up being full of charisma, humour, and insightful comments. Perhaps this will be the panel that turns American Idol&amp;#039;s fortunes around. Perhaps suddenly The Voice will fade into irrelevance and Idol will rise like a phoenix from the ashes to reclaim the title of Best Talent Show.  Or maybe we&amp;#039;ll just have to hope that the contestants this year are really, really good. American Idol returns to Fox in January 2014 and will air in the UK on 5*.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/american-idol/news/a512266/american-idol-judges-is-this-the-worst-panel-ever/>