The Voice Season 14, stronger than ever or flawed with doubtful ethics?

New year, new season, featuring texan singer-songwriter, Kelly Clarkson, as a new judge and bringing back Team Alicia; comes along Season 14 of the Voice, with a youth group stronger than ever.

The Voice USA has been on air for over 7 years now and up to 350 episodes as the top american reality singing competition show. Every year brings a long two seasons with rotating coaches that must judge only upon voice and vocals without having any bias concerning artists’ looks. The show’s format features five stages of competition: the first begins with the blind auditions, then the battle rounds, knockouts, playoffs and, finally, the live performance shows leading to the finals.

This year’s season has already been talked upon with stellar young artists and some flaws questioning ethics. Being personally a longtime fan I can say the show is stellar but this season hasn’t been exempt of flaws at all.

Concerning staging changes, all five phases of competition have their own physical layout for artists to accurately perform in, changing every year, as the coach chairs change as well. Changes have been pretty minimal, the only greater tweak has been the new wider and prominent coach chairs with a renewed brighter red colored padding and bulky structure awarding coaches more of a throne, compared to a more dull and smaller chair featured in season 13.

Coaches this season count with a feature never seen before on the show as part of their winning strategy. When turning around in the blinds they now have the right to single block to disable another coach of their choice from getting the performing artist. Instead of pressing the usual botton they press on one of the other three coaches names and if the chosen coach were to turn around they would be banned from being picked by the participant. This adds a new dimension to the show never seen before in the industry, it is just relatively close to America’s Got Talent, Golden Buzzer where the artist is immediately part of the the judge’s (who pressed the buzzer) team but in this case the artist can still be taken away if another coach turn around for him or her. It is an interesting addition that spiced up the show adding conflict and comedy when it comes to coaches’ dispute for an artist.

This season’s group just like some previous coach groups features a balance with two female coaches and the two males that haven’t changed from season 1. This gives artists a more equal choice weighing their gender preference and style choice when picking a coach. Previous seasons have featured only one female coach as was Shakira back in Season 6. Her spot as the new, fourth coach has always been taken by a pop singer, quality she counts with but she also adds a different genre to the coaches’ roaster of music styles like Blake’s country, Alicia’s R&B/Soul and Adam’s pop with her rock influence.

Her high pitched voice hypes up artists but for the audience she can be too much, a little too exaggerated. She seems unprofessional and inexperienced in her coaching and preparation of the artists getting too involved  and attached to artists and songs where she shows a little preference towards one of the competitors when she should remain unbiased. She adds to the illusion of a bias with her song choice and battle accommodations that evidently favor some of her team members more than others that show preference that speaks terrible of her as a coach. She has created pairings where a soul singer and a country singer get the same soul song that evidently goodwill the soul singer.

This season of The Voice has the largest youth group with a majority ranging from ages as low as 14 to barely 21. Previous artist groups have had a couple young contestants but never as much as this year’s team, even featuring the youngest artist ever on the Voice, Brynn Cartelli being only 14. Prior seasons have all had wide age ranges with elder artist up to age 57 in season 11 and going down to only age 16 but this season has a tight range of 20 years with the youngest being 14 and oldest being 35.

With all this in mind, the show will never stop being a great show but it did disregard a lot of its higher quality attributes which are the fairness of the show and the quality of coaches, but in general it will still be my favorite music show. This season is worth watching due to the quality of singers but it is definitely not the shows best.