The Voice featured a brutal playoff episode Monday night, with eight artists eliminated over the course of one night.

Making room for election coverage on Tuesday, The Voice went in a different direction with their playoff rounds this season. Instead of having two teams' artists sing on Monday, the other two teams singing on Tuesday and then a results show Wednesday, the entire playoffs were shoved into one episode on Monday.

This involved all 20 artists singing live for America's vote in just two hours, with little to no time for coach feedback or the usual rehearsal clip packages. Viewers voted for artists on each team and results were announced sporadically throughout the show. Of course, this completely left out the West Coast, who had no real opportunity to watch the performances live and cast their votes. Additionally, voting was only open to those with The Voice app or a Twitter account.

So was this playoff episode fair to the contestants? It can be argued that the early frontrunners who had more airtime and buzzed than other artists (Billy Gilman, We McDonald, Sundance Head) were really benefited by this hectic affair, but many of the outside contenders who we didn't get to know as well were cast aside (Belle Jewel, Sophia Urista, Dana Harper).

Without clip packages and coach feedback, there wasn't much opportunity for such outsiders (who could have become dark horse contenders) to succeed if they didn't already have strong fanbases. The whirlwind pace of the episode didn't exactly help matters, either.

It remains to be seen if The Voice will adopt this format for future seasons, but based on some of the reviews so far and comments on Facebook, it was not a very popular one.

Did you like 'The Voice' playoff format?

Tags: The Voice Reality TV nbc