The Masked Singer is back for season two this fall. The hit FOX competitive reality show will return with all new celebrities hidden behind all new costumes. Contestants are only unmasked when they are eliminated by the studio audience. In the meantime, viewers go CRAZY trying to guess who the celebrity is behind the mask.
The cast remains the same. Jenny McCarthy, Ken Jeong, Robin Thicke and Nicole Scherzinger will sit on the judges panel, while Nick Cannon returns as host. The new season will expand from 12 contestants to 16. And the series has already been renewed for a third season, which will premiere right after the Super Bowl on Feb. 2, 2020.
The Masked Singer: More Colorful Costumes from Season 2 (PHOTOS)
The Masked Singer: First Look at Season 2’s CRAZY Costumes (VIDEO)
However, there will be a few format changes:
- Executive producer Rob Wade told the Hollywood Reporter at the Television Critics Association tour last week: “The first few rounds we do this thing called the Smackdown. And we did that because we wanted to have a bit more time in the show to meet people. So we didn’t want to have six performances in a show in the early rounds; we only have four. The way it works is there’s four people, two sing-offs, and then the judges and the audience decide who the winners are of those and that leaves two left. And they do what we call a Smackdown — they basically sing a short song back and forth to each other, but really in each other’s faces, in a quite comedic way. It’s supposed to be funny. And then whoever loses that is unmasked.”
- USA Today reports that season 1 winner, T-Pain (The Monster!) will return to the show as a guest judge “providing inside commentary as only someone who’s been inside one of those overheated costumes can.”
- Wade confirms that the clues hinting at the contestant’s identity will be harder but not “ridiculously” harder. He told THR, “Who wants to play a guessing game when you don’t have a clue? You can’t just put someone in a mask and they sing and say, “Guess who it is!” No. Give me a clue.”
- This could be a good thing or a bad thing. But in any case, it appears that the show has already lost at least some of it’s charming innocence. Wade shares this tidbit with THR: “In season one, everyone got there and they still didn’t quite understand what they were doing. But in season two, people came with characters, hidden voices, they’ve adjusted their costumes to make themselves look taller, or smaller, or bigger. They did things to put the viewers off, which was amazing. So now we have that added bonus in season two. They know the game.”
The Masked Singer season 2 premieres on FOX September 25 at 9 pm ET/PT. The show just finished taping the finale. All contestants have been unmasked, and a winner HAS been crowned. We’ll see if any spoilers leak ahead of time. Wade said to THR,
I think anyone who leaks the cast is going to be pretty mean-spirited. And even if we did the show live — we considered doing the show live, for example. But even if you do it live, at the end of the day you have to book these people, you have to go through lawyers and agents, and their names are out there and there’s contracts done. So I don’t think there’s a foolproof way of saving. I think you have to rely on the fact that there’s certain people in the world who will want to try and ruin everyone’s fun.
Characters Revealed So Far
The Eagle
The Egg
The Flamingo
The Fox
The Leopard
The Panda
The Skeleton
The Rottweiler
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