<em>The Masked Singer </em>Lets You In on the Scam
This article contains spoilers throughout the first season of The Masked Singer.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have just witnessed greatness. From the monster.”
It was episode 8 of The Masked Singer, the Fox competition’s semifinals round, and a mystery celebrity dressed in a monster costume—a Minion-meets-Gritty situation, conical in form, with a cyclopean eye, a duo of teeth, and three wiggly fingers on each paw—had just performed a powerful, haunting, and deeply poetic rendition of Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me.” Nick Cannon, the show’s host, was as moved by the single-song concert as the rest of the show’s audience members were. Talking onstage with the disguised celebrity, remarking on the performance just delivered, against all odds, by a person shrouded in mint-green fur, Cannon intoned, “And now we want to hear from the monster. Deep down, who are you?”
That is the operative question, a show that is very much like its fellow reality-TV singing competitions, with one notable exception. Instead of anonymous people seeking fame, this show involves famous people seeking anonymity. And they achieve it through disguising their identities within a series of impressively elaborate, and sometimes wonderfully comical, costumes—a situation that occasionally results in things like a two-toothed pseudo-Minion bringing an audience to tears. To Cannon’s “” question, the Monster, his speaking voice disguised as a cheerful squeak, replied, “I’m a father, a husband, a son, a brother, and more than anything, I’m a person.”
