Ken Jeong expands his blind-guessing-based singing show empire with I Can See Your Voice on Fox
If there’s one thing Ken Jeong loves, it’s apparently—and really, we can only go off of the copious evidence here—baselessly making guesses about people who are either singing, or who may be about to sing. Hence news tonight that Fox has green-lit a new unscripted series starring the Masked Singer judge, in which he’s forced to look at a bunch of random people and, without hearing them sing, judge whether they’re secretly good at it.
Titled I Can See Your Voice, the show is being paired with The Masked Singer—gearing up for its fourth season—for an exciting night of blind guessing backed up with only the slightest token nods toward deductive reasoning. Jeong will be joined by regular co-hosts Cheryl Hines and Adrienne Bailon-Houghton, plus “a rotating panel of celebrity detectives,” who, from the show’s deeply obscure promo, seem to include Joel McHale and Joel McHale’s streotypical notions about shirts. All of them will help the show’s actual contestant, who’ll be trying to win $100,000 by figuring out which of the paraded performers is a good singer, and which produce “a totally hilarious train wreck” when paired up with each episode’s “musical superstar” for a big closing duet.
And maybe it’s just this blinding headache we suddenly have, but seriously: What in god’s name is this show? “Ken Jeong looks at you, tries to figure out if you can sing, but don’t sing yet, he’s gotta guess” feels like a bad premise for a Hangover movie or a very gaudy kidnapping, let alone a fun-for-the-whole-family game show. As far as we can tell from the promo, the performers’ tactics are mostly about dressing in a slightly funny way that either does, or does not, connote good singing skills, which feels like a bizarre exercise in screwing with pre-conceived notions, and not much else. We can’t wait for the sequel series, where Jeong is given a bunch of book covers, and asks contestants to evaluate the contents of what might possibly be inside.
I Can See Your Voice is set to debut on September 23, the same night as The Masked Singer’s latest debut.