MTV News’ Jim Cantiello offers his first-week take on Simon Cowell’s latest singing contest and suggests some upgrades. By Jim Cantiello Simon Cowell Photo: FOX After a year of hype and the promise of a revamped singing competition that will blow everything else out of the water, Simon Cowell’s “X Factor” debuted and turned out to be, at best, “American Idol” in an arena and, at worst, “America’s Got Talent” without the jugglers. Comparisons to other reality competitions are unavoidable, not only because “X Factor” marks the TV return of beloved duo Simon and Paula, but because Cowell has taken elements from many competitive series and put them in a giant blender: the auditions in front of a live audience of “Talent”; the small-town-hero angle of “Idol”; former “Sing-Off “judge Nicole Scherzinger; and an impossibly tall, foreign-born, hug-happy host,
