Rudy Giuliani on The Masked Singer marks a new low for "TV image laundering"

The Hollywood Reporter

"Using reality TV for low-level criminality isn’t just commonplace — it’s pretty much entirely what the genre exists for," says Daniel Fienberg. "Bring us your previous drunk drivers, drug possessors and tax evaders yearning to breathe free. And that’s before we get to the genre’s embrace of non-illegal behavior. Reality TV is the last bastion of the bad tweeter, the near-canceled, the unapologetically non-PC reprobate." But having Giuliani on The Masked Singer to rehabilitate his image is different. "Rudy Giuliani, however, has moved past shame, and having him on Masked Singer reflects poorly not on him, but only on the show and on Fox," says Fienberg. "He’s immune. Once you’ve spent the past half-decade yelling incoherently into various voids, having press conferences at confusingly blundered locations, maintaining you were not, in fact, fooled into disrobing to have sex with a possibly underage prostitute by Sacha Baron Cohen, and answering questions about the brown goo dripping down the side of your head, there’s nothing left. If the producers of The Masked Singer protest that they booked the mob-fighting prosecutor who became America’s Mayor and Time‘s Person of the Year in 2001, nobody should believe them. The Masked Singer booked a man who has been the public face of an unsuccessful attempt to overturn a democratic election. He is under congressional investigation as an alleged ringleader of an alleged coup. He is one of the defendants in a $2.7 billion lawsuit filed last February by voting machine company Smartmatic against Fox News and various talking heads. I don’t for a second expect that Rudy Giuliani is going to find himself in jail or facing criminal charges in the next few months, but there is a narrative of very active disgrace tied to Giuliani, not past-tense disgrace. And the Masked Singer producers and Fox felt they wanted to be a part of the laundering process for him." ALSO: The real horror of Giuliani’s unmasking is that it actually isn’t shocking at all.