Netflix Revival: Could ‘Star Search’ Return?

Just a few weeks after the successful launch of Queer Eye in February 2018, a group of Netflix programmers gathered inside a small auditorium at the company’s Hollywood headquarters to map out a strategy for taking over the world of reality TV. The meeting, which I attended as part of my reporting for a bigger story about the fast-growing streamer, was filled with enthusiastic talk about dozens of projects across almost every imaginable genre of unscripted. But while nearly everything discussed came to fruition within a year or two, one goal remained elusive: Creating the Netflix version of a live talent competition like American Idol or The Voice. Eight years later, that’s about to change.

Tonight, Netflix will premiere Star Search, finally giving the streamer its own live, weekly competition series where home audiences help determine winners. The service has tried its hand at talent shows before — most recently with last year’s Building the Band — but those series were taped months in advance and didn’t offer a chance for viewer buy-in. By contrast, Star Search will play out in real time, with new episodes airing live around the world Tuesday and Wednesday nights at 9 p.m. ET, and audiences will be able to vote on contestants using either their remote controls or, if they’re watching on their phones, the Netflix mobile app.

Although Star Search fits nicely with Netflix’s recent push into live programming such as boxing matches, holiday football games, and weekly WWE matches, Jeff Gaspin, the streamer’s vice president of unscripted series for the U.S. and Canada, says he’s not doing the show because of some platform-wide mandate to add live content. Rather, he says Star Search, and a larger focus on broadcast-style reality at Netflix, is part of a longer game the streamer has been playing since the days of House of Cards. “It’s a constant iteration, a constant evolution of the content — but you can’t do it all at once. It’s a 10-, 15-, 20-, 30-year process,” Gaspin says. And having already successfully conquered so many cable-style reality formats (docu-series, food shows, dating experiments), the streamer is now aiming its programming artillery — and algorithm — at one of the few remaining formats still dominated by broadcast networks such as ABC and NBC. “The reason I came here two years ago is to not only offer the cable content, but to start offering the content that you would have got if you were still watching broadcast,” Gaspin says. “We believe there’s an appetite for it, and we want to serve that appetite. Simple as that.”

To satiate that hunger for broadcast-style reality programming, Gaspin and his team decided to serve up the video equivalent of comfort food. As most Americans over the age of 45 know, Star Search was originally a syndicated series which, every weekend between 1982 and 1995, had Ed McMahon emceeing a hunt for the best unknown singers, dancers, actors, bands, and even models (or, as the show called them, “spokesmodels”). Netflix’s promos for Star Search have played up the fact that many of the contestants from the original went on to find success, from Brad Garrett and Ray Romano to Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears. “There’s a built-in familiarity and a nostalgia factor,” Gaspin says. “Netflix has a lot of content, and it takes a lot to get noticed given how much else there is. So I liked having familiar IP as a starting point.”

That said, Gaspin ultimately gave the go-ahead to Star Search because he felt key elements of the show’s format made it “superior to other talent competitions.” Unlike the long-running America’s Got Talent, which Gaspin worked on during his time at NBCUniversal, “It’s like-to-like, so it’s singers against singers and dancers against dancers and magicians against magicians, as opposed to everybody competing against each other,” he says. “On America’s Got Talent, you never know what’s coming out next — and that’s fun, and has its appeal. But one of the things that we always used to hear on America’s Got Talent was, ‘How do you compare an aerial act to a singer, and how do you compare a magician to a dance troupe?’” By contrast, on Star Search, contestants will compete only with people in their own categories, allowing multiple champions every season.

Gaspin also points out that every edition of the show offers the chance for an upset with previous champs constantly forced to defend their crowns. “It’s a little bit like Jeopardy!: The winner in one episode competes against the challenger in the next,” he says. “I just remember growing up when Sam Harris went the whole season in the singing category, and it was exciting week after week to see if he was going to stay victorious. It was like an individual challenge within the context of a larger competition.”

Despite his confidence in the format, Gaspin says he held off on greenlighting Star Search until he was certain Netflix had the technology to allow for “live voting where the audience was really the fourth judge — not after the fact, but at that moment,” he explains. While network shows have for years relied on text and phone voting that offered results at the end of an episode or in a follow-up show, Gaspin felt Star Search needed instant interactivity. “So I went to our product team and I said, ‘Can you build voting capability for millions of people simultaneously so they only have to use their remote?’” he says. “They came back 24 hours later and said ‘yes.’ And so they’ve spent the last year building that capability.”

Netflix is betting the tech will open up reality show democracy to a much wider audience, in theory giving viewers more ownership of who wins and loses. “We used to get 2 percent to 3 percent voting participation on a show like America’s Got Talent,” he says. “But you don’t have to download an app for us. You just turn on Netflix, you watch Star Search, and you can vote with your remote, or if you’re watching on your mobile device, you just have to tap on the number of stars. The barrier to entry for voting is basically zero. That was the final piece that made me say ‘yes’ to this.”

In addition to being interactive, Star Search will also move Netflix’s internal Overton window a bit with its release pattern: It’ll play out over five weeks, with two, 70-75 minute live episodes twice each week for a month, followed by a live grand finale in week five. Though Netflix has rolled out some of its biggest reality shows over similar amounts of time, the combination of single-episode releasing and a five-week run is a big deviation from the streamer’s norm. And yet, Netflix is still not ready to embrace true network-style scheduling by having Star Search play out over multiple months. “We aren’t broadcast, and that is a very broadcast approach,” he says when asked why Star Search isn’t being stretched out even further. “To spread it over 10 or 14 weeks would be tricky on Netflix, because we have so much content joining the service every week, and that’s a long period of time for our consumer.” Five weeks, he said, felt like a good compromise. “We’re trying to accommodate our viewers’ habits, but at the same time, service the format,” he says.

Unlike so many of its new projects, Netflix has been going all out to promote Star Search, both with frequent reminders on-platform letting viewers know the series is coming and with external paid advertising on rival video platforms such as Tubi. And, mirroring the eclectic nature of the show’s multi-talent format, the streamer has recruited a somewhat random assortment of bold-faced names to host (Anthony Anderson) and judge (Jelly Roll, Chrissy Teigen, Sarah Michelle Gellar) the series. It’s a big swing for Netflix, which even in 2026 is still trying to push its way into new programming categories.

But it’s also something of an experiment to see whether Netflix audiences need or want this kind of broadcast-coded content — and, if so, whether Star Search is the best way to offer it or whether something like Building the Band makes more sense. That show — a twist on The X-Factor, which aimed to create a breakout pop group — wasn’t radically different from other previous Netflix competitions: Everything was pre-recorded, judges alone decided who would win, and all 10 episodes were released in small batches over two weeks last summer. While the show generated some initial social media buzz, especially around individual bands, there’s no evidence it was an out-of-the-gate smash. (Per Netflix’s just-released internal data report for the second half of 2025, the show averaged about 7 million viewers over its run.)

Gaspin makes it clear he doesn’t see either Star Search or Building the Band as “experiments,” even though he concedes he’s waiting to see how the former does before he decides on a second season of either. “I have been looking at it as, how can we serve our viewer? What can we offer them that they’re not being offered now on service?” he says. “They can get it elsewhere, but they can’t get it on Netflix. But also, is it worth offering it on Netflix? That’s really what I’ve been focused on.”