Despite a brief, ultimately temporary brush with death a few years back, American Idol has apparently regained its role as TV’s unkillable reality show juggernaut, with Variety reporting that the singing competition series has just been renewed for a second season at its new home at ABC (and its 17th, overall.) After a rough start, the ABC incarnation of the show—which stars Katy Perry, Lionel Richie, and Luke Bryan as judges, and the similarly immortal Ryan Seacrest as its host—has finally started drawing in some stronger ratings with its recent live episodes.
Specifically, the show got a big boost from a recent Disney-themed outing, which is admittedly a pretty clever way for Idol to leverage its newly forged connections to the House Of Mouse. It’s still a long way from the show’s Fox heyday in the mid-2000s, when it was easily the most consistently successful ratings hit on TV, destroying pretty much anything the other networks (ABC included) would try to program against it. Still, like the mighty redwood (or antibiotic-resistant bacteria, if you’re feeling a little more negative about its renewed unkillability), it’s never paid to bet against this particular show’s bulletproof ability to survive.