Chameleon Magazine

 🎤🧼Simon Cowell is back — and so are the trousers. Yes, those sentient skyscrapers of denim that begin somewhere near the nipples and end just below the ego. His new Netflix docuseries, Simon Cowell: The Next Act, attempts to breathe life into the increasingly dusty act of “assembling another boy band” like it’s a cultural emergency. Spoiler: it’s not. According to The Telegraph’s critic Anita Singh, it’s less behind-the-scenes magic, more existential footage of a man doing his hair in a mirror, wondering where it all went wrong.

🧍‍♂️ High-Waisted Desperation and Half-Crumpet Melancholy

Vanity project? More like vanity cry for help. We are treated to such electric content as Cowell being drip-fed vitamins 💉, filmed in intimate, moody lighting like he’s recovering from a traumatic accident — perhaps the moment One Direction discovered solo careers. Singh sums it up best: “Watch as Cowell has his hair cut into that strange flat-top, gets hooked up to a vitamin drip, or sits down to a lunch of precisely half a toasted crumpet, prepared by his personal chef.”

Half a crumpet? Not even a full one? Somewhere, a starving 2006 reality show contestant is screaming.

The whole thing plays like a mid-life crisis filmed in 4K. It’s as if someone accidentally dropped Keeping Up With the Kardashians into a blender with The Apprentice, a bottle of Just For Men, and 20 years of unprocessed fame withdrawal. Fly-on-the-wall? More like moth-on-a-lampshade: sad, flickering, and begging for someone to turn the light off.

What we’re witnessing isn’t entertainment — it’s cowell-tainment, where the stakes are low, the drama is moisturised, and the soundtrack is an endless loop of unreleased boyband ballads that sound like they were written by AI trained solely on Westlife B-sides.

This is not “the next act.” This is the same act, played slower, with better lighting and worse ideas. You can slap a Netflix logo on it, but you can’t hide the scent of reheated relevance.

📺 Challenges 📺

Have you watched this? Survived it? Can you still hear the vitamin drip beeping in your dreams? We want your take — is this peak delusion, or just Cowell’s last hurrah in trousers that defy gravity and good taste? Drop your thoughts in the blog comments — don’t let this tragedy unfold without witnesses. 😬🍽️

👇 Hit comment, hit like, hit share — or hit “next episode” if you’re a glutton for televised self-parody.

The best comments will be featured in the next issue of the magazine. 📝🎬