Fox adds dancers to its masked universe
PASADENA, California — The Masked Singer has been such a hit for Fox that the network is doubling down on hidden entertainers.
Fox said Tuesday that it is joining with Ellen DeGeneres to produce The Masked Dancer, a celebrity competition show based on The Masked Singer and a segment that DeGeneres originated on her talk show. Contestants will perform unique dances while covered from head to toe in elaborate costumes and face masks, leaving audiences to guess their identities.
“This is gonna be just as fun and suspenseful as The Masked Singer, with a lot more krumping,” DeGeneres said in a statement, referring to a style of street dancing, “and I cannot wait!”
Meanwhile, Jamie Foxx will join The Masked Singer as a guest panelist along with regulars Ken Jeong, Jenny McCarthy, Nicole Scherzinger and Robin Thicke and host Nick Cannon for the show’s third season première on Feb. 2 after the Super Bowl.
The show will take its regular time slot on Feb. 5.
This season, 18 disguised celebrities will be split into three groups of six, and immediately be whittled down to three singers in each group. The final nine from all three groups will compete for the trophy.
Among the new custom-made costumes for the singers are the Robot, the Frog, the Banana, the Mouse, the Monster and the Llama.
Jeff Goldblum’s curious mind continues to roam into familiar places egged on by Disney+ with The World According to Jeff Goldblum. On Jan. 17 he explores the nature of pools, from an L.A. water park to NASA’s neutral buoyancy lab.
Goldblum says the death of his older brother cemented his attitude about life. “I had a brother named Rick. There were four of us, he was four years older than I was . . . He died when he was 23 and I was 19. That made a mark on my psychic emotional landscape,” he says.
“He was a writer, was travelling — he was very adventurous and kind of romantic. He loved Hemingway and he was near Casablanca and got a quick kind of disease and died in 24 hours. It starts to ask you: What can change about you? And even when things change and even when you lose things that you thought were a part of you — as we all do — we lose our youthfulness, our abilities, our relationships seem to be fleeting finally. Everything goes finally. Everything’s going to go. We finally lose our lives. Everything is constantly changing but who are YOU? Are you all the arrangement of things, the element of your life that keeps changing? Or are you something deeper beyond all that that never gets changed no matter what is collapsing around you? That interests me.”
The magicians who’ve taken us to the wildest places on Earth before with the Planet Earth series are buckling up for an astounding seven-part series that visits all seven of Earth’s continents with Seven Worlds, One Planet. It’s such a big deal that the show will première simultaneously on BBC America, AMC, Sundance TV and IFC Jan. 18. Sir David Attenborough will, once again, serve as the wonderstruck narrator.
With super new photo technology, the intrepid souls who brave the worst of nature’s wrath to film the shows are able to capture scenes we’ve never seen before, such as the largest aggregation of great whites ever filmed in Antarctica.