I used to love The Show because it was so damn cheesy. The contestants had to perform the sorts of musical opening numbers that hadn’t been seen since Dean Martin was on TV; most of the judges had little actual relevance in modern popular music; and you never knew when some poor soul would badly remake a song and be torn to ribbons on live TV before tens of millions.

Here’s the thing about The Show, Rebooted: Almost all of the cheese is gone. In its place has (already) been a number of spectacular performances. Sure, sometimes things still go horribly wrong (Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing” as a raeggae tune? Really?) but I’m having to face the awful possibility that I now watch this show for the music.

It certainly isn’t for the judging. All three judges — musicians themselves, including a rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Famer — basically root, root, root for the home team. There’s been a little mild criticism but nothing even remotely crushing; no one has even dared say that a performance was, you know, bad. Phrases like “horrible” and “dreadful” — so popular with The Only Worthy Judge in the last iteration of this show — appear to be banned. Everyone is special; everyone is a star.

Now, all of the cheerleading may have helped to a degree. There have been a couple of weeks already where things just seem to build and build and build, to the point where you almost expected flames to start coming out of the floor (actually, now that I think about it, that’s already happened).

And there is clearly one way the cheerleading appears to have hurt. This week’s Show featured what I think is the biggest surprise elimination in its history. Someone who would be a finalist, if not a winner, in most years got eliminated at Slot No. 9. In the past, The Only Judge With Guts would have cut up a couple of this week’s singers for some feh-at-best performances, helping to push them down the plank, but the current judges again decided everybody was above average. Now you see what that can lead to.

Fortunately, the cheese isn’t completely gone. Almost all of these singers sound old-fashioned — a problem that almost always has plagued The Show. It’s one thing to compare a contestant to Luther Vandross; it’s another to note that Vandross probably hit his peak as a pop singer in the 1990s and has been dead for six years. How a Vandross-like voice fits into current dance pop (which is pretty much the only kind of pop now) is an interesting question. We also have contestant who has some Randy Travis going on; a guy who covered Judas Priest, another who seems to channel Rod Stewart and (until this week) a pure diva with unimaginable range. Again, all of that would have worked well in the 1990s (or in Stewart’s case, the 1980s or 1970s).