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Have we gone back in time to 2010? If only! No, Simon Cowell is just back in the headlines, reasserting his svengali status for his new Netflix show. Reviews suggest that Cowell’s attempted comeback, 15 years since his celebrity peak, highlights less his particular star power than how totally the world has moved on. But is there anything to learn from SyCo now, and will his new boyband work? Let’s see!
1. Cowell is chasing a new direction
Simon Cowell: The Next Act, which hit Netflix on Wednesday, follows Cowell in his bid to put together “the next One Direction”, and do his bit to reassert western dominance in the only sphere that matters: the pop charts! “There hasn’t been a boyband from the UK or America who I think is as exciting as these K-pop artists,” Cowell declares.
But while he’s convinced of the “ginormous” opportunity for a “male version of the Spice Girls”, the six-part docuseries has been widely panned, with reviews describing it as anachronistic and even bleak.
Searching for future stars, Cowell labours the importance of open-call auditions, billboard marketing and regional radio promotion. At one point he even slaps wheat paste on a poster himself, hoping for “some media attention” – though he has “always believed radio is the best tool”.
2. Radio may not be the best tool
Though physically incapable of furrowing his brow, Cowell has obvious disdain for YouTube, TikTok and the routes devised by young people to get around industry gatekeepers like him. “You’ve got to get out of your bedroom and come along and audition!” he barks during an interview.
He is forced to confront his hubris when, one week away from auditions, Cowell learns his campaign has drummed up 160 applications, only 93 of whom are within the eligible age range.
After a meeting with a team of digital strategists – who blame everything from the wordy website to teenagers’ short attention spans and Cowell’s lack of name recognition with gen Z (the last revelation meeting with some froideur) – he eventually agrees to engage with new media. “I have met 40 TikTok influencers,” he says later, resignedly.
3. Maybe future pop stars should be AI
Cowell kicks off auditions in Liverpool, because of the Beatles (heard of them?) and the city’s “really fun people”. Bright-eyed hopefuls being paraded before a stony-faced Cowell is familiar from decades of The X Factor, American Idol and all the other talent shows that have churned out pop stars.
Now, of course, we know the toll taken behind the scenes, and how many of those contestants struggled with the sudden exposure. But The Next Act is about as eager to engage with the costs of fame as Cowell is with the concept of Snapchat.
If anything, he ramps up the stakes, promising a more “messy, raw” approach to the talent-show model. The series, cast in a warm Netflix glow, fails to deliver on this – but the open-call auditions retain some of the ritual humiliation of its predecessors.
Cowell deems a 20-year-old “a little bit over the line”. Another aspirant is dismissed with: “You just didn’t feel special.” Cowell eventually strides out to instruct the horde of teenagers that he is not interested in “safe and nice”, and they should instead endeavour to be “people with personality”.
4. Cowell is less interested in self-reflection than success
One talent Cowell famously plucked from obscurity was Liam Payne, who shot to fame in One Direction and later struggled with mental health and substance abuse. The timing of this series, a year after Payne’s death at 31, has been criticised; though filming began before the tragedy, in October 2024, the glancing tribute featured in the show does not lessen the bad taste.
Cowell is clearly emotional, describing his call to Payne’s parents and the “normal and down-to-earth” teenager to whom he gave a standing ovation on The X Factor. The footage of a floppy-haired, 16-year-old Payne – who auditioned twice, after Cowell told him to try again when he was older – is horrible to revisit.
Cowell recently told the New York Times he knew “a little bit” about Payne’s difficulties post-1D and tried to give him advice. But the series shows Cowell’s reckoning with the part he or the industry may have played in Payne’s troubled final years to be fleeting.
After weighing up the “gigantic” pressure and stress of being in a boyband, and how he would feel about his 11-year-old son doing the same, Cowell recommits to his new venture, and resumes training a new crop of teenagers for stardom, some as young as 16. “I know how much they want this … I can’t take this opportunity away from them.”
5. He’s perhaps not the easiest person to live with …
Meanwhile, Cowell is shown to be just as exacting at home in LA with his fiancee (since 2021) Lauren Silverman as in his pursuit of pop greatness. He grumbles at receiving flowers, being “someone who doesn’t like flowers”, and hates all birthdays – “not just his birthday”, Silverman confirms.
Silverman seems to have adapted, however: scrambling to hide paper towels (Simon doesn’t like to see them blighting the kitchen counter) and humouring him as he sits down to half a crumpet for lunch. “I have to save the other half for dinner,” he declares, wearing sunglasses at the table, a yorkshire terrier on his lap.
Later, Cowell complains about having to pause his heart-throb hunt to attend his stepson’s end-of-year school prizegiving. “I don’t have to be there for the whole graduation, do I?” he says wearily, while hooked into an IV drip, still wearing sunglasses.
Indeed, rather than trusting her fiance will find the time to get married, Silverman changed her name to “Cowell” by deed poll. After all, Cowell reportedly planned four weddings in 2010 (all to his then-fiancee, the makeup artist Mezhgan Hussainy) – none went ahead.
6. … but he plans to stick around
Cowell recently reassured the Sun that he has never used weight-loss jabs, instead crediting his physique to good old-fashioned calorie restriction and “between 300 and 600” push-ups a day (sometimes 1,000, if he’s “really going for it”).
His unlined face reflects 10 hours’ sleep, the “amazing blue-light glasses” he wears through the night – as well as “thousands” of units of Botox. (He has stopped getting fillers, having realised they made him look “like a real weirdo”.)
Cowell also wears brand-new underpants daily and gains an extra inch from a Cuban heel. But his commitment to ageing backwards – he’s 66, but considers himself 64 – is not just skin-deep. Cowell told the Sun he intends to live to 100: “You know, we’re discovering new stuff all the time.”
In the meantime, he uses Boots Dual Defence nasal spray daily, and prays each night. “I’m definitely going to heaven.”
7. Even Cowell can’t turn back time
Early in episode one, to impress ignorant gen Z with his credentials, Cowell says he was told (“and I think it’s true”) that he has had more No 1 records than anyone in the music business. The UK Official Charts did not respond to the Guardian’s request for clarification; a spokesperson for the Billboard charts said: “Unfortunately, that is too broad of a question” for them to answer.
But the questionable stat foreshadows the series’ real reason for being – not minting the next great boyband, but bolstering Cowell’s fading svengali status. Rather than confront the new cultural landscape, the show presents Cowell’s obstacles as a shortage of appropriately charismatic adolescents, and his own team of yes-men when they say anything other than “yes”.
Silverman, meanwhile, seems adept at active listening, even as her attempt to engage Cowell in her passion for crystals (which she has hand-delivered to their mansion) is once again derailed by his single-minded ambition to get back on top.
“If I was making a crystal band …” Cowell says, assessing the crop on display for a “special one”. “I believe you,” Silverman says of his eventual pick. “I believe myself,” Cowell responds.
The rest of us might not have returned to 2010, but Cowell seems determined to keep trying. His fiancee, at least, understands. “He just wants to prove to himself and the world that he’s still got it,” Silverman says. “It makes him feel good to know that he is still relevant.”
