Spoiler alert! This story reveals a couple of the results from The Voice episode that aired September 29. Stream the show with a Peacock subscription if you need to catch up.
There’s an interesting battle happening on The Voice in Season 28, which premiered this month on the 2025 TV schedule. Both Michael Bublé and Niall Horan are coaching their third season after winning both of their previous two appearances. There’s a lot of talk about which of them will remain undefeated — or if they’ll both lose to either Snoop Dogg or Reba McEntire — but Bublé got real on the latest episode about another disadvantage to competing against the former boy-bander.
It seems the Canadian crooner is struggling a bit with how popular Niall Horan is with the crowd. Michael Bublé got served a nice piece of “humble pie,” he said to Reba on the third night of Season 28’s Blind Auditions, when he heard an audience member shouting his name. He relayed the interaction to his fellow coach:
You know the girl that just screams in the audience? She’s like, ‘Michael! Michael!’ And I came over, she says, ‘Michael!’ And I said, ‘Hi,’ and she said, ‘Can you get me Niall?’
Wow, talk about being taken down a notch! The Voice coaches are often seen interacting with the audience, sometimes even going over to fans between auditions, so of course Michael Bublé would assume that someone yelling his name over and over would be a fan of his. I can’t believe someone actually asked him to fetch Niall Horan for her (though I’m sure she didn’t expect that story to be told on national television).
It’s not just the audience, either, it’s the artists! Twice on the September 29 episode, a singer went in with an idea of who they wanted as their coach and instead left as part of Team Niall. First, Revel Day said he wanted to learn from Michael Bublé, but upon hearing the “intentionality” in the One Direction star’s pitch, he changed course — despite getting a chair turn from Bublé.
The same thing happened to Reba McEntire later in the show. Twenty-year-old Kayleigh Clark turned all four chairs with her audition performance and jumped to Niall Horan’s team even after saying she wanted the queen of country. Michael Bublé lamented the luck of the Irish singer, saying:
Snoop and I, and Reba, we might as well be 3,000 years old. Because once any 20-year-old sees Niall Horan, the thing is over.
Not that Michael Bublé is one to talk. He blamed the “Slow Hands” singer after he missed out on hitting his button for an artist, saying he got lost in Niall Horan’s eyes. Bublé was later able to beat his nemesis by literally putting him in a makeshift penalty box, saying:
You get 2 minutes for looking too good.
It’s a pretty fun thing to watch, because Niall Horan can’t help it if he’s beautiful. I can see, however, how not being able to draw the audience’s and the artists’ attention away from him would pose a problem for the other coaches. We’ll just have to see if that translates into Horan’s third win.
Tune in for new episodes of The Voice at 8 p.m. ET Mondays and Tuesdays on NBC and streaming the next day on Peacock.