The Masked Singer is Black Mirror meets American Idol, the perfect dystopian singing competition

The Ringer

Fox's new reality competition is "both extremely self-aware and still not nearly self-aware enough," says Rob Harvilla, adding that it's the perfect singing competition for our dystopian age. "Welcome to Fox’s The Masked Singer, the strangest and most discomfiting reality-TV singing competition ever born," says Harvilla. "It is American Idol via Black Mirror; it is Eurovision via David Cronenberg. It is inspired by the 3-year-old South Korean program King of Mask Singer despite being nowhere near as weird or (presumably) as good. It is somehow both extremely self-aware and still not nearly self-aware enough. It is, impressively, all sorts of f*cked up.“ He adds: "The performances themselves are usually terrible, usually on purpose, with a distinctly Sia-esque vibe given the wacky costumes and general camp flamboyance...The celebrity-judge patter is pleasingly inane, but it’s not immediately clear whether they’re supposed to really try to guess a singer’s identity, or just misdirect and stall until that identity—oh, sh*t!—is revealed."

ALSO:

• The Masked Singer is serious about secrecy: Only seven staffers know the true identity of the celebrities -- and their entourage is required to wear masks, too
• The Masked Singer feels like a "warped, through-the-looking-glass vision of both what reality shows are and what celebrity is"
• It's a guessing game wrapped in horrifying costume
• The Masked Singer is far more boring than it has any right to be with too much focus on the enormity of the unmaskings
• After a disappointing first reveal, The Masked Singer feels more like Dancing with the Stars with crazier costumes
• The Masked Singer is best described as "Donnie Darko + Pan’s Labrynth x Las Vegas"