Simon Cowell details exactly how staged (or not) finding December 10 on The Next Act was

The new Netflix show Simon Cowell: The Next Act is supposedly a very authentic documentary about starting a new boy band called December 10. Plenty of Netflix viewers have wondered about the extent to which the show is, erm, pre-planned.

Simon Cowell has maintained that his Netflix show is very true to life. On The Rest is Entertainment podcast, Simon Cowell detailed exactly how staged specific scenes of The Next Act were.

The casting call

In the very first episode Where Have All The Boy Bands Gone?, Simon Cowell decides to find wannabe singers through the radio and billboards. Halfway through, he discovers not many teens have signed up, and he clocks that maybe the youths could be found on social media instead.

The presenters Marina Hyde and Richard Osman questioned whether it really took Simon a while to think of using social media in 2025. He insisted that he did believe the poster would be “a good start”. He explained: “The biggest issue really was the website which was created… it was so complicated. And I thought, ‘Why are we making it so difficult? Let’s do social media.'” Apparently he wanted to advertise the opportunity in as many ways as possible, because he felt he needed a thousand people to sign up for the project to be feasible.

The auditions

Simon Cowell in the midst of being rude to an 18-year-old on TV
(Image via Netflix)

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On pretty much every reality TV talent show, people who sign up are whittled down by producers, and only the very best (or the very worst) are put in front of judges to “audition”. Marina Hyde were pleased that this show acknowledged that people who audition go through “a filter room” before Simon Cowell sees them. However, she questioned why Simon would be sent the less talented people on a show that’s supposedly prioritising realism.

Simon’s defence for still filming the less talented people was that he didn’t know how many people would audition. Apparently the crew filmed a broad range of applicants to ensure they had enough footage. Simon later decided to include these scenes in the edit. “The reality with auditions is that about half a percent, if you’re lucky, of the people you see are going to be good. And so there were some not so good people. It was a decision to show the kind of people who turned up, and some of them weren’t very good.”

The final episode

Remind me why he needs these photos on canvas with easels?
(Image via Netflix)

Simon spends a lot of the season finale of the Next Act contemplating how to cut down the group of seven boys to five. He then decides to just make a band of seven singers. He denied that he had planned to have seven boys in the band before we saw this choice on camera.

He insisted this decision was spontaneous. “I’ve got to seven, and I genuinely like all these boys. So, the night before, I couldn’t sleep. So I was thinking of these K-pop bands, and I was like, ‘They’ve done so well, and I think people like big groups now. So, why am I dropping people for the sake of it?’

“I made the decision on the day I did it… I didn’t tell anyone around me. Didn’t tell the producers, didn’t tell my team. I didn’t tell anyone.”

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