Much More Music: 'The Voice' Live Episodes Expand to Two Hours

Usually in competition shows, fewer contestants means less time needed per episode to feature them all. "The Voice" begs to differ.

Despite a dip in ratings for the most recent episode, "The Voice" will be extended to two-hour episodes when they go live later in the season. This will mirror the first two episodes, which were both two hours long as they went through the entire blind auditions process. The latest episode, which showed the first "battle round," was just one hour long.

There are two ways to look at this: either NBC saw the dip in ratings last week and thought, "Uh oh, we'd better switch things back to two hours," or they saw the big ratings for the first two weeks and thought, "Give the people what they want! More of 'The Voice!'"

Or, it could be both.

Regardless, I don't mind the move. I find "The Voice" to be infinitely more interesting than "American Idol," even though it's considerably less dramatic. There's one condition, though: if "The Voice" expands the live episodes to two hours just so that they can fit in a bunch of ad-placement and sponsorships like "American Idol" does, then I will protest. Briefly. Then I'll go back to watching, because I just can't stop.

The live episodes will begin on Tuesday June 7th, and will run from 9 to 11 pm. In the meantime, the three more weeks of battle rounds will continue to air as hour-long episodes starting at 10pm.