The new reality show feels like something that would be on in the background of a dystopian movie.
Every week, we pick a new episode of the week. It could be good. It could be bad. It will always be interesting. You can read the archives here. The episode of the week for December 31 through January 5 is “Mask On Face Off,” the series premiere of Fox’s The Masked Singer.
The Masked Singer is the future of network television.
It feels, in some ways, like a future I’ve been pointing toward since 2013, when I suggested in an article for the A. V. Club that the future of network TV might look a lot like its past, geared toward slightly bizarre sketch comedy, variety shows, and over-the-top product placement. What’s wild about The Masked Singer — which is a reality show singing competition, but only nominally — is that it’s essentially all of those things at once. (It’s not yet the product placement monster it could be, but give it time.)
And its massive debut ratings — just under 10 million live viewers on January 2, along with a 3.0 rating in the 18- to 49-year-old viewership demographic (only one other show airing that night even slightly crested above a 1.0 in the 18-to-49 demo, to give you a sense of how big it was) — suggest that, yeah, what people want in the future of TV is this:
Of course, we’ll have to wait to see if The Masked Singer can hold on to that viewership in the weeks to come — it’s only aired one episode so far, after all. And already, the internet seems to have sussed out much of the show’s mystery. The whole thing feels decidedly low-rent, as if it was filmed over one long Sunday afternoon and things eventually came to blows in the end.
But I’m betting on the show, and I’m betting it will grow.
And that’s in spite of the fact that The Masked Singer is a stupid, unconscionable act of lowest-common denominator aggression on the American public, by a network owned by Rupert Murdoch, a man who has nothing to lose and everything to gain by furiously attempting to dumb us down.
I am going to watch EVERY SECOND of it.
Like most successful American reality competition series, The Masked Singer is an import. (For whatever reason, we are terrible at coming up with fresh, original ideas for reality competition shows, while the rest of the world reels them off as a matter of course.) The series originated in South Korea, and American celebrities have stopped by that version of the show to perform as costumed characters. (Most notably: Ryan Reynolds!)
The US version evolves the original idea — which is structured much more as a series of head-to-head battles between singers, and cycles through its celebrity contestants very quickly — into something more like American Idol (itself a British import).
