Songland makes for cold, deeply dehumanizing reality TV

The Muse

"There’s a lot of talking at these songwriters, and not talking with them," says Hazel Cills of NBC's new songwriting competition, where artists are pitched a song and they immediately "Frankenstein" a version that suits them. "Nobody seems to care about how these songwriters feel, or how they wrote these songs, or why they’re even writing them," says Cills. "But the sad and maybe overly practical point of Songland is that that’s kind of the point of these songwriters’ jobs. The job is to take these songs and make them for John Legend; what the songwriters want is clearly beside the point. As a representation of how a song gets better, Songland is fine if not demystifying, but it makes for for cold, deeply dehumanizing reality television."