Simon Cowell is back with The Next Act on Netflix, but what happened to The X Factor?!

Simon Cowell was once adorning our screens every Saturday night with The X Factor, and now he’s brought us right back to that nostalgic time with The Next Act on Netflix. I simply need to know why my favourite OG television show came to an end all those years ago.

The X Factor officially came to an end in 2018, with ITV confirming three years later that they had no plans for its return. We were all quite frankly heartbroken, because that TV show lived with many of us throughout our childhoods. BTW, it used to be called Pop Idol.

It brought us One Direction and Little Mix, alongside many other huge stars like Leona Lewis, but Simon noted the show’s appeal basically decreased as the result of how streaming music completely changed, because it was no longer iPods and burning onto CDs.

simon cowells new boy band is gonna fail because while they’re making thirst traps on tiktok they should be fighting for their lives being forced to do bad dances on x factor

— liese🌟 ⁶³ ¹² ⁸¹ | pjo s2 spoilers (@jelllybeantime) December 11, 2025

To be fair, we did get a Celebrity Edition of The X Factor in 2019, but that was it. The X Factor first aired in 2004 and judges on the show included Sharon Osbourne, Louis Walsh, Cheryl, and Nicole Scherzinger, while a US version of the show ran for three seasons.

In 2019, ITV signed a deal with Cowell to broadcast Britain’s Got Talent until at least 2024, but did not commit to keeping The X Factor past 2020. More than 10 million would watch the talent show more than a decade ago, with the most at 17 million viewers in 2010.

In 2018, an average of 5.3 million people watched Dalton Harris be crowned the winner, when the judges were Louis Tomlinson, Robbie Williams and Ayda Field. So it had clearly gone down in ratings a lot, especially because everyone could just chuck Netflix on instead.

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