One of their big ideas is to streamline the show's early episodes, by beginning in Hollywood and having the long, arduous circus of human meanness and misery that is the audition process only exist in flashback form. While I like the idea of devoting less time to the tedious auditions on principle, I think the show would lose something by not laying the season's narrative out completely linearly. The most exciting thing to watch (think Melinda Doolittle) is someone go from that first audition room all the way to the big stage. Plopping us down in Hollywood right away would feel like cheating.