It is a weird, often compelling, occasionally horrifying collision of grotesquerie and profundity. It has spawned Reddit threads and podcast segments and “ What We Know So Far” summaries on E. The American show, with its Hunger Games aesthetic and its CSI appeal, has proved to be a ratings juggernaut. Before departing, the performer’s identity-via a ceremonial unmasking that involves a rendition of The Who’s song “ Who Are You?” ( “WHO, who, WHO, who?”), and the audience and judges chanting “Take! It! Off!”-is revealed. It’s a game of attrition, with musical talent alone meant to serve as the primary deciding factor. And each week, the lowest-performing member of the cast, as determined by the votes of the audience and the judges, leaves the show. Each week, the judges try, and quite often fail, to guess the identity of the performer inside the costume. They perform songs, American Idol–style, for a studio audience and a panel of judges who themselves vary in celebrity. The Masked Singer, an Americanized remake of the South Korean show The King of Mask Singer, works like this: 12 celebrities, of slightly varying levels of fame, don elaborate, identity-concealing costumes-a rabbit, an alien, a hippo, a pineapple, a lion-that are tailored to their offstage personas. The artifice, here, is the point.Įarly on in The Masked Singer’s competition, Tori Spelling, her identity obscured by the layers of her corset-and-hoop-skirted Unicorn costume, her voice transformed into a high-pitched squeak, tells the audience, “By putting on this mask, I am showing myself and the next generation of unicorns that true magic comes from within-all you have to do is believe.” She goes on to sing Rachel Platten’s “ Fight Song.” In the several absurdities contained in that moment-myths woven and wrapped and layered so assiduously that it becomes difficult to tell where the joke ends and the truth begins-there’s a kind of insight. The Masked Singer inverts all that, because it treats the lies of reality-as-a-genre not as open secrets, but rather as premises. They ask viewers to suspend disbelief, to think that maybe the romance that blossoms along with the roses on The Bachelor really is genuine, or that the rivalries that bring the drama to the Real Housewives franchise are more than merely performative. Many reality shows, competition-based and otherwise, revolve around a soft-lit version of a noble lie. He is more-more talented, more multifaceted, more complicated-than many have previously assumed him to be. With the win, T-Pain also proved the same thing that all 12 of the show’s celebrity contestants had set out to make clear. During The Masked Singer’s Season 1 finale, the rapper, singer, songwriter, and producer ultimately defeated the show’s runner-up, Donny Osmond (the Peacock), and its second-runner-up, Gladys Knight (the Bee), to claim a mask-shaped trophy. On Wednesday evening, viewers found out what that meant: The celebrity in disguise as the Monster was … T-Pain. To Cannon’s “ Who are you?” question, the Monster, his speaking voice disguised as a cheerful squeak, replied, “I’m a father, a husband, a son, a brother, and more than anything, I’m a person.” And they achieve it through disguising their identities within a series of impressively elaborate, and sometimes wonderfully comical, costumes-a situation that occasionally results in things like a two-toothed pseudo-Minion bringing an audience to tears. Instead of anonymous people seeking fame, this show involves famous people seeking anonymity. That is the operative question of The Masked Singer, a show that is very much like its fellow reality-TV singing competitions, with one notable exception. Talking onstage with the disguised celebrity, remarking on the performance just delivered, against all odds, by a person shrouded in mint-green fur, Cannon intoned, “And now we want to hear from the monster. It was episode 8 of The Masked Singer, the Fox competition’s semifinals round, and a mystery celebrity dressed in a monster costume-a Minion-meets-Gritty situation, conical in form, with a cyclopean eye, a duo of teeth, and three wiggly fingers on each paw-had just performed a powerful, haunting, and deeply poetic rendition of Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me.” Nick Cannon, the show’s host, was as moved by the single-song concert as the rest of the show’s audience members were. “Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have just witnessed greatness. This article contains spoilers throughout the first season of The Masked Singer.
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