‘American Idol’ Hollywood Week is Heading to Nashville

Okay, folks, if “Hollywood Week” on American Idol is not on your bingo cards for next year, you might want to add it because the reality singing competition is heading straight for Nashville. Yes, that’s right: the show is trading palm trees for cowboy hats.  

For the upcoming season, Country Now reported that “Hollywood Week” will take place in Nashville instead of Los Angeles. Dubbed “Hollywood Week: Music City Takeover,” it is a first for the franchise. Usually, after the open auditions, hopefuls stay in LA for those intense rounds of singing, grouping, duets, eliminations, etc. But this time? The twist is that the lucky contestants are going down where the guitars never stop strumming: Nashville.  

Judges Carrie Underwood, Luke Bryan, and Lionel Richie helped announce the show’s academic theme via the competition’s Instagram page, including the premiere date for “Idol University” on January 26, 2026. The show captioned the post with, “That’s a tear we couldn’t wait to make. A new season of #AmericanIdol premieres Monday, January 26 on ABC and Stream on Hulu!”  

Longtime host Ryan Seacrest is expected to return with Underwood returning as a judge for the second year, with Bryan and Richie, who have both been judges on the show since 2018.  

Any details about this major twist are kept under wraps, but if we are to guess, we’ll see a lot of genre-blending performances, country-pop, Americana, and folk-rock, among others. Some classic rounds, like the contestants working on duets or group rounds, could be reworked to have more of a Nashville sound.  

There could also be more emphasis on live instrumentation, maybe even using local musicians to back contestants (there’s never going to be a shortage of musicians to call; these artists will even have a platform to reach a more mainstream audience).  

Judges, especially Underwood and Bryan, know what would sell in Nashville, helping some of the participants who might not win the coveted title but could still have a career as a country music artist. And of course, we can expect cameos from Nashville stars.  

American Idol was always about discovering the next big star. At the beginning, this might mean someone from LA, but with the new direction the show is heading, the singing competition is now acknowledging Nashville as a music capital in its own right, giving future country music artists a fair chance.