Fox first approached Ellen DeGeneres about The Masked Dancer a year ago

TheWrap

Fox Entertainment's alternative chief Rob Wade explained how Ellen's The Masked Singer spoof ended up becoming a spinoff reality show “I watched it and I was like, ‘This is great. This works.’ So we approached them. And that was like a year ago," he told The Wrap, adding: “And it’s just taken a while, because we obviously wanted to get The Masked Singer off the ground and get Season 2 to go and get Season 3 into production. And we wanted to develop the Dancer series and really try to understand the nuances of it. It took us a year to get here, but now we’re in a position where we feel like it’s a perfect extension of the brand.” Wade admits, though, that aspects of The Masked Dancer format are still being hashed out. “Obviously the difference in the format is the fact that you don’t hear someone’s voice, yet you still have to guess, so we need to work out ways to help the viewer guess people in a slightly different way,” he tells Variety. “It doesn’t have to be a solo dance. It could be a group dance or dances with another person who doesn’t have a mask on, so you can have partners as well, which would give you the ability to have a variety of different dances. I think it’s a question of how you can get the clues out.”