The Masked Singer: Television's Gift to America

The year was 2018. I had seen commercials for this upcoming show, "The Masked Singer," for months. These TV spots made the premise seem simple: costumed celebrities sing songs for a panel of judges. It looked pretty stupid, to be honest. But I needed more information - chiefly, what caliber of celebrities are they dealing with?

After what seemed like an eternity, January 2, 2019 finally rolled around. "The Masked Singer" premiered that night. I made myself a deal: I'd watch for five minutes to see what the show was like, and then I'd turn it off and move along with my life.

Then this happened:

I wasn't quite sure what on earth I had stumbled across... but I kind of liked it, so I kept watching.
And then this happened:

I was hooked.
Six of the 12 elaborately costumed characters performed in that first episode. The remaining six went the following Wednesday night. At the end of each episode, the studio audience voted for their favorite singers. The singer with the least amount of votes got eliminated from competition and was forced to unmask.
In the first episode, the Hippo received the fewest votes. He was revealed to be professional football player Antonio Brown. Later episodes exposed celebrities such as comedians Tommy Chong and Margaret Cho, TV icons like Tori Spelling and Ricki Lake, and legit singers LaToya Jackson and *NSYNC's Joey Fatone.
It was silly, it was ridiculous, and I'll be darned if I wasn't on the edge of my seat every time those crazy masks came off.

Why did this show work?

A handful of people filled out a survey I published about their experience watching "The Masked Singer." I'll reference those results periodically throughout the rest of this blog. When asked about their initial expectations for this show, no one gave a score higher than 3, on a scale from 1 to 5. It was a unique concept - something not unheard of overseas (it's patterned after a competition in South Korea) - but foreign (literally) to America audiences.
Somehow, some way, "The Masked Singer" was a smash hit with viewers and many critics. (It even sits at a 52% score on Rotten Tomatoes, which is... about 47% higher than I anticipated.) As a competition show, it lives somewhere in some freaky dimension between "American Idol" and "Survivor." It's a pre-recorded singing competition which eliminates its participants months before airing on TV, yet somehow still lets the viewers at home feel included in the process.
I didn't have a say in which singers got unmasked, nor which character won the finale, but I did get to play along from my couch, thanks to weekly video packages that gradually revealed clues about the secret identities of the celebrities. Some of these clues were intentionally misleading, like clues constantly indicating that Vegas mainstay Donny Osmond was a magician, while others were blatantly obvious, such as a line in one of the Rabbit's early performances that said, "It's gonna be me" - a virtual guarantee that the celebrity was a member of *NSYNC. As viewers, we had the opportunity to try to guess the identities from the get-go, then, as the show went on, additional clues would either validate our assumptions or make us completely re-think our strategy.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Executive Producer Craig Plestis said, "Our show is not a serious show at all. It's a fun party that you can come to each week and invite into your house, and that's what we need in America — just to disengage a little bit. There's so much crazy stuff going on, and this is a show you don't have to worry about it. You can just worry about who's underneath the Peacock mask, and who's underneath the Monster mask."
For me, and for others, "The Masked Singer" was must-see television each Wednesday night. I'm glad to hear that I'm not alone. Everyone who took my survey rated their likelihood of watching Season 2 as 5 out of 5.
As a bit of a side note, I hear that celebrities loved being on the show. for people like Rumer Willis (daughter of Bruce and Demi Moore), it was a chance to showcase a new or previously little-known talent; I also read that they loved not having any press obligations and being able to ignore or otherwise disregard questions about their involvement with the show. It's been a great source of publicity for the contestants; Gladys Knight (third place) told Entertainment Weekly that her phone has been "ringin' off the hook," and a career resurrection may be in the cards for T-Pain, who was moved to tears while accepting the Golden Mask trophy. For an interesting interview with Donny Osmond, who reflected on his time on the show, click here to read the Deseret News article.

Why shouldn't it have worked?

The hardest thing about watching "The Masked Singer" is knowing that it's all pre-recorded. An article on Vox.com explained that the show was taped over the summer of 2018, far before the show was on anybody's radar, which was a huge benefit, in terms of secrecy. Nobody was expecting it, so the first season took television by storm. (The show isn't a secret anymore, but we'll touch on that more later.)
In today's spoiler-happy society, a show like this absolutely shouldn't have worked. Because the show was recorded in front of a (Non-Disclosure-Agreement-signing) crowd, it's a wonder that there was even a sliver of surprise remaining once the show hit airwaves months later. A little Googling taught me something interesting:
Vox discussed the jittery editing of those exciting unmasking sequences (with "Who Are You" by The Who gloriously blaring in the background) by explaining that most of the audience was evacuated from the auditorium before the actual revealing of the singers.
"Each reveal took place in front of a skeleton audience [of the crew and people who were attached to that week's mystery celebrity]," Vox reported. "Many of the audience members [shown on screen] looking on in shock and surprise weren’t even present when the singers finally emerged from beneath their elaborate costume heads."
(Aside: I've considered how this show would work if it were filmed live, like "America's Got Talent" or the playoff rounds of "The Voice." This would provide viewers at home more of an opportunity to participate in the voting aspect of the show, but ultimately would not work at all, because the judges would go home, get on social media or Google and immediately know who the contestants were, and that wouldn't be any fun at all. Gotta keep the show pre-recorded, sadly.)
Despite the insane degree of privacy required during production, the whole Internet pretty much knew who was behind each mask after the first episode. Every single person that responded to my survey said that they unintentionally encountered "Masked Singer" spoilers. They were all over the place, to the extent that I am considering not looking at any articles about the show during Season 2. But even that - or muting phrases like #MaskedSinger on Twitter - won't prevent the accidental spoiling of secrets. For example, I saw "Donny Osmond" trending on the night of the first episode. Unaware that his name was a "Masked Singer" spoiler, I clicked to see whether he had died prematurely or something. Nope. Twitter just came to the consensus that he was behind the Peacock mask. This turned out to be true, as did every other spoiler or rumor that I encountered over the course of the season.
So does knowing the identity of a singer ruin the fun of it all? It's hard to say. Those who responded to my survey were perfectly divided between "Yes," "No" and "Somewhat." I suppose that it depends on how you discover the identity. If a viewer guessed correctly, like I did with Joey Fatone, knowing the identity of the celebrity may make them proud and thereby enhance their viewing pleasure. But if one were to accidentally stumble across the theory that the ultimate winner, the Monster, is T-Pain, as the Internet correctly assumed, it might take some of the excitement out of it. For me, his particular voice had been a lively source of debate amongst my family for the better part of two months, so finding out that Twitter knew it all along was a bit of a disappointment for me. I can't imagine that sitting through an entire season of this show after having looked up the answers at the very beginning would have been much fun.

What can be changed for Season 2?

Now that the world knows about "The Masked Singer," the producers are going to have to crack down on security even more for Season 2 in order to prevent spoilers from being leaked. Thankfully, Plestis is well aware of this, and it sounds like his team is up to the task.
"We're going to be hiring more security people," he told THR. "Now that we're on everyone's radar it's making sure that, when we're filming it, everyone has given up their iPhones and cameras. It's making sure that no pictures are taken during the performances and being really on top of it to make sure that no one has a picture of our celebrities underneath the masks. That's going to be our key for the next season. ... This is something that no other show has to deal with ... It's not simply just making a great show and having a great panel and costumes and shooting it all, there's this whole other operation and side with crew of just keeping the secrets, the paperwork, the NDAs, the security guards. The logistics are monumental to do this."
On top of cracking down on privacy and trying to deter Internet spoilers, I think that they might want to try giving harder (or fewer) clues about the celebrities. More than 80 percent of my survey voters said that the contestant clues were "somewhere in between" being "too easy" and "too difficult," although none felt that the clues were generally too hard to be helpful, and everyone that took the survey said that they were able to identify at least one celebrity without the use of spoilers.
Of course, part of the fun of "The Masked Singer" is letting viewers play Sherlock Holmes and piece together the clues. It wouldn't be enjoyable if every single clue was so difficult that nobody could guess. But how about these options to shake things up next season?:

• Start with more difficult clues. Finding out that the Rabbit was in a boy band wouldn't be bad, but knowing which boy band he was in narrowed things down really quickly - in this case, to either Joey Fatone or Lance Bass; Justin Timberlake is way too big of a star, and nobody knows anything about the other two guys. As the season progressed, they could give some easier clues to help viewers feel more confident in their guesses.
• Consider giving no clues at all! I'm not positive that this would be successful, but it would be interesting to see what the judges (and the rest of us at home) could determine, based solely on the voice of the performer and their body language.
• Battle Rounds. Similar to "The Voice," they could have two contestants face off against each other, with the loser being forced to reveal a clue about their identity. The winner would not have to reveal anything. This would keep the best performers' identities a complete secret for a longer period of time.

Now that the world has seen the success of Season 1, hopefully we can expect bigger names to show up next time around. Plestis mentioned in several interviews that I read that their ultimate goal is to nab an "A-Lister." But I'll be honest - Gladys Knight is about as legendary a performer as I ever could have expected when I asked myself what caliber of celebrity would possibly put on one of those preposterous costumes. It will be fun to see who shows up in the future.

Other survey results

"The Masked Singer" had an interesting panel of judges, including at least two members who arguably know nothing about singing. That panel consisted of Robin Thicke, Jenny McCarthy, Ken Jeong and Nicole Scherzinger, who were periodically joined by guest judges Joel McHale, JB Smoove and Kenan Thompson. My survey asked which judges respondents liked. Here are the results, in order of popularity:

1. Kenan Thompson - Guest Judge (100% approval)
2. Robin Thicke (83%)
3. Ken Jeong and Nicole Scherzinger (66%)
4. Jenny McCarthy (33%)
5. Joel McHale and JB Smoove (16%)

I asked how difficult respondents found it to guess the celebrities behind the masks. On a scale from 1 to 5, two-thirds rated the difficulty as "4," with all others giving it a "3."

One-third of respondents admitted that they intentionally looked up spoilers at any point in the season to discover an identity or confirm a theory.

I asked who the worst singer of the competition was. Half of voters picked the Pineapple (Tommy Chong). Other singers receiving votes included the Unicorn (Tori Spelling) and the Deer (Terry Bradshaw).

Results for the best singer of the competition varied considerably, with a tie for the top spot. Those who took the survey had the Monster (T-Pain) and the Peacock (Donny Osmond) tied for number one, with the Bee (Gladys Knight) and the Rabbit (Joey Fatone) also receiving votes.

When asked about the best character of the season, in terms of personality and on-stage presence, 50 percent preferred the Joey Fatone's twitchy Rabbit. Others receiving votes were the Peacock, the Monster and the Raven. (Full disclosure: The person who voted for the Raven was some random chick on Twitter that somehow found the link to my survey. I don't know them personally and they therefore cannot be trusted nor taken seriously.)

Five of the 12 entertainers received votes for "Best Costume," with the Rabbit receiving the most votes, followed by the Lion, Peacock, Monster and Pineapple.

The Final Word

I loved this show more than I could ever have imagined. My two favorite TV shows of all time are "Survivor" and "LOST," but basically everyone hates both of those shows and I've learned not to bring them up in conversation as much as possible. "The Masked Singer," however, was a show that I constantly brought up to co-workers and would recommend to anyone who needs something fun to watch. So thank you, television. Thank you for giving us this wonderfully strange and incredible gift known as "The Masked Singer." I look forward to seeing what happens with Season 2 and hope that many more of you will watch along with me so we can discuss our theories together.

But if you look up spoilers and ruin it for me, there will be no forgiveness in this world for you.

So tell me... did you watch Season 1 of "The Masked Singer"? What did you think? What did you like? What did you hate? Who did you love? Were you satisfied with the results of the finale? Let me know in the comments below. I'd love to hear what you have to say.