Are you six for six at guessing the identities of Fox’s eliminated “Masked Singer” contestants and pretty sure you’re going to get the remaining six correct too before the show is over? Good for you because then, as a fan, you should know the panelists definitely aren’t that successful.
While Jenny McCarthy, Ken Jeong, Robin Thicke and Nicole Scherzinger have thrown out many a name on the new Nick Cannon-hosted oddball celebrity singing competition series, they haven’t hit the nail on the head that many times before the unmaskings.
And when TheWrap spoke with executive producer Craig Plestis during the Television Critics Association press tour Wednesday, we learned that none of the panelists ever guessed the identity of the person who won the whole thing — which viewers will find out when the finale airs in three weeks, as the whole season was previously taped.
Like, the name wasn’t ever guessed — not once.
“The funny thing is, no one ever guessed the winner the whole time,” Plestis told us last night, just after the sixth unmasked “Masked Singer” contestant was revealed to be Ricki Lake on the show’s sixth episode.
Wait, never? No one ever even threw out the name as a guess at all?
“No, no one ever guessed who the winner was,” he said.
OK, maybe this isn’t super surprising, seeing as earlier in the day, the panelists told reporters how often they were wrong. However, we do also know they were “constantly” changing their minds, according to Thicke, so you’d think someone might have thrown out the correct guess at some point.
“You would think that by the last episode after seeing five or so performances from each person that you would have them pegged, and yet on the final performance, I was completely blown away by the last show — and I was way off, I was way off,” Thicke told reporters during the show’s TCA panel.
“And I thought for sure I knew who it was, and I wasn’t even close,” he added. “So I think the fun of it is, you know, your sense of conviction of being thwarted by true embarrassment in front of your family is part of the fun of it.”
According to Fox, between all of the 12 celebrities competing on the first season of “The Masked Singer,” they’ve amassed 65 Grammy nominations, 16 multi-platinum albums, 16 Emmy nominations, nine Broadway shows, four stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and four Super Bowl titles.
While as of today we still don’t know who Alien, Bee, Rabbit, Lion, Peacock and Monster are, we have learned Lake was Raven, Tori Spelling was Unicorn, Margaret Cho was Poodle, Terry Bradshaw was Deer, Tommy Chong was Pineapple and Antonio Brown was Hippo.
Plestis, who was also sitting on the show’s TCA panel, addressed how they plan to make the guessing game even harder in Season 2 — which was ordered by Fox last month, not long after the show premiered — by beefing up security.
“It will be increased, it really will,” Plestis told reporters. “What exactly we’re going to do I can’t tell you right now, but it’s going to be a lot more labor intensive. That’s a big part of the show right now, we need to keep it a secret, that’s the beautiful part of the show. We want America to guess, we want our panel to guess. Everything they did, we really try to keep everything a secret from them, but that’s the magic that we got from the show.”
“The Masked Singer” airs Wednesdays at 9/8c on Fox.