Moonbow

You may be mixing up Reagan and Jessie. Jessie is the one who sang Elton John's song and "Holding out for a Hero" (which is perhaps the other song you meant?). Reagan is the one who the coaches called creative and ahead of her time (although they may have said that about Jessie too, I don't remember). I do think that Reagan is good at rearranging songs in creative ways, but that didn't come across too well in some of her performances, because she had problems with breath control and pitch. What I've been really impressed by are things I listened to on Youtube: her original songs and her cover of Blake's "Neon Light", which makes it sound completely different (I actually like it better than the original, because I'm not a huge country fan). I'm amazed that a 15-year-old could have done something like that, and I'm sure Blake based some of his comments on Reagan's work off the show too. But like I said, I don't think her creativity translated all that well to what we actually saw on TV, and I think it's probably because of her lack of experience.

I'm sure that all coaches have favorites, because it's only human to like some people/artists better than others. I don't see how not blatantly showing his favoritism makes Blake (or anyone else) any less authentic though. I'm sure he does genuinely like everyone he brought to the live rounds anyway. As for Reagan and Jessie, it's hard to say if Blake did the right thing by essentially giving them free reign, or if he should have guided them into a different direction and perhaps extended their stay on the show. I think he stepped back because he recognized that they both had clear ideas about what kind of artists they wanted to be, so whether they succeeded or failed, at least it would be on their own terms. I think that especially with Reagan, her age played a big part: she's definitely very creative, but not quite ready for the big stage yet.

I actually do think the average contestant is less informed about the coaches' history than the average viewer/fan of the show. Many of these people are working musicians who rarely or never watch The Voice (and they've said as much in interviews). I think a lot of them choose Adam because his music style is the closest to pop/rock ... and some of them are blinded by his promises and enthusiasm.

Yeah, I agree. Why would he "give" Ricky to Gwen when at this point he has already weakened his team so much that she probably has a better shot at being in the finale than he does? (Besides, I doubt Ricky is a potential winner anyway.) And if he cares so much about nurturing young talent, why did he pick Danica over Katriz? People have also said that the producers must have made him pair up his strongest contestants (Luke and Taylor P.), but I don't see this kind of pairing on any other team, and I doubt it's the producers' intention to make Pharrell look foolish. I do really like Pharrell, but if the other coaches get called on their favoritism and WTF-decision-making, the same standards should apply to him. I think so far he's made even stranger decisions than Shakira did last season (and she had a much weaker team to begin with than Pharrell did).

For what it's worth, I watched the whole seasons 1 and 2, and I had no preconceived notions about any of the coaches. I thought the whole Tony Lucca situation made Adam look like a huge douche. Not that Christina was completely innocent, but when Adam and Tony kept insulting her (and calling it a "metaphor", which implied she was somehow imagining the whole thing), I actually felt sorry for her. That whole thing made me dislike Adam more than his treatment of any of the contestants. I did think that artists like Katrina, Amber and Will were treated like red-headed stepchildren of Adam's team, and most of them definitely weren't among my favorites (only Will was, but by S5 I had long become used to Adam's favoritism, so his behavior towards Will actually didn't affect my opinion of him either way). The irony is that I think Adam's indifference towards them probably helped them get farther in the competition than they would have otherwise, so I wouldn't really say he screwed them. Anyway, I guess my point is that any negative bias I have towards Adam now is based solely on having watched him on The Voice in the past seasons. It isn't based on any internet speculation or my positive bias towards someone else, only on what I have seen. Obviously two people can (and often do) watch the same thing and interpret it in a completely different way, but to me, Adam definitely doesn't come across as a very good coach or a particularly pleasant human being.

As much as Adam annoys me, I have to admit that's probably true. He definitely makes the show more dynamic and interesting. Even if his personality is very polarizing, at least people (including us) are talking about him. I don't mind that Adam is enthusiastic and successful during the auditions. The problem (for me anyway) is that he never shows the same enthusiasm towards 95% of his own team after that. It really seems like the main thing he cares about is beating the other coaches and getting all the good contestants (even if they represent a genre he couldn't care less about, like country), after which he can ignore/discard most of them and focus on his one or two favorites. Yes, all the coaches sometimes make questionable choices, but I don't think I've ever seen the others show favoritism in as blatant way as Adam does. With Blake I always get the impression that he really cares at least about all the members of the team he brings to the live rounds, while you can spot Adam's favorites (like Judith & Sarah in S4, James & Tessanne in S5, Grimmie in S6) a mile away.

That's definitely not true. If it was, how would Blake have ended up with two female winners, Danielle and Cassadee? If you look at his teams for the live shows in the past few seasons, he had 2 females and 1 male in S6, 2 females and 2 males in S4 (counting the Swon brothers as one artist) and 3 females and 2 males in S3. Season 5 is the only one where he only had 1 female and 4 males. I definitely recall women winning against man in his battle rounds too. Perhaps he has a tendency to pair up women with women and men with men more often than pairing up a man and a woman, but I don't think this indicates any kind of gender bias. He also tends to pair up two singers that are close in age. Like many others, I have no idea why people choose Adam as their coach, but I don't think he has a gender bias either. He just picks his favorite or two and screws everybody else. To make things even worse, he usually ends up screwing his favorites with bad song choices too. (Except for Tessanne, where he was lucky that she was such a flawless singer. I still think his actual favorite that season was James.) I'm looking forward to seeing what Pharrell and Gwen will do. Pharrell definitely has a strong team this season, and Gwen has some strong contenders as well.

I think that's actually their goal: to get more people to sign up for Twitter and increase the show's social media presence. I doubt they care about the demographics of Twitter voters that much. And yeah, I hated the two battle rounds too. I wonder if they did that because they wanted Chris Martin as a mentor for the second round. It would have been too much work for him to coach every contestant individually, so they just paired them up again. (It was still a terrible idea though.)