Charlie Brooker has Season 6 nailed:

it pre-emptively wrecks the live shows. How can the viewer possibly salivate at the prospect of watching a successful auditionee cope in front of a live studio audience when they’ve already seen them slay an entire stadium in week one? Where’s the jeopardy going to come from? Unless ITV suddenly reveal they’ll be singing live in a Thunderdome, dodging cudgel blows as they belt out the best of Elton John, there’ll be little or no sense of peril at all.

He’s right. The rejigged format actually breaks the entire reason why the pop reality shows work. You get introduced to seemingly unknown acts who must, with no help or accompaniment impress four crabby judges in a ‘claustrophobic rehearsal room’, and you root for ones you like, without really having an idea how they’ll fare in the increasingly hard further stages. They may work well in the audition but they usually can’t cut it on the live shows – you root for your favourites and do everything in your power at the later stages to keep them in. No longer. Now, because they’re playing to stadiums from the beginning, clearly given full rehearsal space (and worse, like Danyl Johnson, seemingly primed by the producers in advance), you know how good they’ll be at the live shows. In fact the judges respond to the audience’s response. Why bother with boot camp? The judges’ homes? Even the live shows? We know what the audience wants already! Where’s the suspense when even the editing is telling you who the good ones are and who the clear losers will be? It’s absurd.

I’ll bring this back to Will Young if I may, who is the example to continue to point to. His rise to stardom was entirely out of the blue. A mediocre audition in an anteroom, a PR machine telling you throughout that Gareth Gates was guaranteed victory, which forced huge viewing figures, the motivation to keep watching and voting, all giving him a reason to keep upping his game. But when Will abruptly came into his own in the early stages of Pop Idol there really was a chance he wouldn’t make it (the originally stated conditions of the show were that only the winner would be signed). Danyl Johnson anyone? Does anyone think he’s not guaranteed to make the last 3 already? Simon Cowell says he’ll take the responsibility if the new format fails – I wonder what that’ll actually mean.