Britney Spears is leaving ‘X Factor,’ Fox’s singing competition, source says

PASADENA, Calif. — Britney Spears will not stick around to mentor X-testants on the third season of the Fox singing competition “The X Factor,” according to an industry source who has knowledge of the situation.

No surprise here.

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Pulitzer Prize winner, Peabody recipient, Medal of Freedom honoree -- Lisa de Moraes is none of these, but she is an authority on the bad direction, over-acting, and muddled plot lines being played out in the TV industry's executive suites.

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(Jason Merritt/GETTY IMAGES) - Britney Spears joined “The X Factor” for its second season.

The pop star was being paid $15 mill-ish to play a mentor on the show. That would have been a small price to pay had she goosed the ratings of “X Factor,” which in its first season achieved only half the crowd that creator Simon Cowell had promised.

But Brit failed to deliver, the ratings tumbled further in the second season and the show got clobbered by NBC’s singing-competition series, “The Voice.”

A Fox rep decline to comment on Spears’s status at the network.

Word of Spears’s reported exit surfaced less than 48 hours after Fox Entertainment Chairman Kevin Reilly told TV critics that Spears did a good job on the show and that the network was on board with bringing her back for the third season.

“I think Britney did a really good job,” he said at Winter TV Press Tour 2013. “People remain fascinated with her and always will be. She tucked in really nicely on that bench.”

Those remarks left at least one TV columnist wondering what show Reilly had been watching. Despite her fame and history of bizarro behavior, Britbrit’s time on “X” was most notable for her apparent boredom and limited vocabulary — “awesome” and one or two other words.

That was enormously disappointing to viewers, who’d naturally hoped to see the pop star engage in more of her famed erratic behavior.

In exiting, Bribrit would be joining L.A. Reid, who has also bailed on the third season. He said that he has to get back to his other career: finding music talent in the real world.

This would be the second time that “X” has replaced two mentors on the show. At the end of the first season, Cowell dumped Paula Abdul and Nicole Scherzinger, as well as host Steve Jones, citing the disappointing ratings — numbers that he’d now be happy to get.

The show this season also added mentor Demi Lovato and co-hosts: Veteran Mario Lopez was joined by Khloe Kardashian, who every week read every line off cue cards as if she were taking the eye test at the DMV.

From Fuhrer to fox trots

TV critics took a break Thursday from the We Welcome a Conversation About TV’s Role in Rampant Real-Life Gun Violence Press Tour to mull whether they should be knicker-knotted about the Hitler joke made by this year’s Oscars host, Seth MacFarlane, at that morning’s Academy Awards nominations unveiling.

“Look, I’m a huge Seth fan. What he brings first is a sense of joy. He wants to be there,” ABC programming chief Paul Lee told the critics when asked about the joke.

“He brings a lot of energy to it. . . . He’s coming to the Oscars with a great sense of respect but brings a really contemporary feel,” said Lee, boldly ignoring the aged Hitler gag.

“I’m feeling good about it and particularly about him — I think we’ll see a very entertaining Oscars, and Seth is right at the heart of that. I’m really bullish about that.”

Hours earlier, MacFarlane and Emma Stone read the names of nominees in the best foreign film derby, after which MacFarlane said that one of the flicks was co-produced by Austria and Germany and that the last time those two countries co-produced something, it was Hitler.