Lifting the veil on The Mask
The surprise US reality sensation hits Kiwi screens tonight. It sounds wild and looks spectacular, but what do you find when you remove the mask? Emily Brookes reports.
The weirdest thing about this whole weird show is that the costumes have nothing to do with the gameplay. It’s window-dressing, a gimmick.
Sometimes I like to imagine being the executive who first heard the elevator pitch for popular reality shows, and how I might have reacted. ‘‘You take a group of single women, ply them with alcohol and insecurity, and make them compete to marry a man they have never met.’’ That sound you just heard was the entire second wave of feminism crashing to the shore.
‘‘You take a woman famous for having made a sex tape and you film her and her family just going about their daily wildly privileged lives for 20 whole seasons.’’ I weep for humanity.
‘‘You take a bunch of amateur bakers, put them in a marquee full of pastel-coloured KitchenAids and other similarly twee decorations, and get them to be as kind to each other as possible while they bake beautiful cakes and biscuits in the hopes of winning nothing but a trophy.’’ OK, that one I commission.
Listen to this one though: You take some celebrities, anywhere from B- to Z-list will do, at least two-thirds of whom are not known for their singing prowess, dress them in elaborate couture costumes that cover them head to toe, completely concealing their identities, and have them sing to a judging panel of equally mid-alphabet celebrities. That one, that one is wild.
It’s the basis for a format known in English as The Masked Singer, the American version of which airs for the first time in New Zealand tonight.
The show began life in South Korea, which makes sense when you consider that it’s basically very elaborate karaoke. It has since been adapted in 33 countries – pretty astounding as the original version only launched in 2015.
The Masked Singer, or King of Mask Singer, as the Korean title translates, had already been made in a few other Asian countries when the United States picked it up last year (in fact, the version that alerted the American producer to the format was Thai).
It was considered a gamble for US audiences. Host Nick Cannon (firmly somewhere around the L-to-Ps) said it would ‘‘either be a huge failure or a huge hit’’, and a lot of commentators were betting on the former. It’s just so weird.
But it was the opposite. The Masked Singer was a massive success.
The series premiere – which was only in January last year and four seasons have been produced since – was the highest-rated unscripted debut in the US since The X Factor in 2011. Not only that, but the first season’s finale was its mostwatched episode.
That’s huge for a new reality programme. Audiences often flock to them out of curiosity, then get bored and stop watching after an episode or two. After that unexpected success, Australia produced its own version, with headline-grabbing judge Lindsay Lohan. In season two, which finished a couple of weeks ago, Kiwi comedian Urzila Carlson replaced her.
So what actually is this show?
In South Korea and other Asian markets, The Masked Singer is a tournament-style competition, in which the winner of each episode challenges the previous week’s winner.
In the US, it was adapted to be more familiar to Western audiences. The competition lasts for a whole season, with a grand sing-off between the final three in the last episode.
Four to six masked/bewilderingly costumed celebrities (in season four, the one we’re getting, they’ll be dressed up as things including Baby Alien, Broccoli, Gremlin, Lips, and Squiggly Monster) perform in each episode. Before they take the stage, a pre-recorded interview with the contestant is shown, which gives some cryptic clues as to their identity.
The panellists can ask the contestant questions about themselves before and after they perform, and have special little notebooks in which they write down all the clues.
The celebrities sing, and at the end of the episode, the panellists and the studio audience vote for their favourite singer. The one with the least votes removes their mask and leaves the show.
That’s right. The weirdest thing about this whole weird show is that the costumes have nothing to do with the gameplay. It’s windowdressing, a gimmick. Contrary to popular assumption, the point of the show is not to guess who the celebrities are. It’s a sideshow.
What it is, really, is Celebrity Idol and, like any other Idol, the producers choose some bad singers for laughs.
So previous American seasons have included contestants such as Tommy Chong, as in Cheech and, pop-doc Dr Drew Pinsky and skateboarder Tony Hawk, but they’ve all been won by professional singers. Same goes in Australia.
Take off the mask, then, and the pitch for this show is: A bunch of mid-range celebrities, some of them singers and some not, perform and the worst one gets voted off.
Like so many things, remove The Masked Singer’s mask and it’s really pretty ordinary.
Those costumes are pretty spectacular, though.
The Masked Singer premieres tonight at 7.30pm on Three.