Fox Looks to Avoid Post-Super Bowl Pitfalls With The Masked Singer

The plum post-Super Bowl programming slot—which goes to a different entertainment show each year—can be both a blessing and a curse. While it offers higher ratings than almost any other single entertainment episode of the year, there’s no guarantee those viewers will return for another episode. Fox found that out the hard way in 2017, when it scheduled 24 spinoff 24: Legacy after the Big Game, giving the show a debut audience of 17.3 million (and a 6.1 rating in the 18-49 demo). But only a fraction of those viewers stuck around for the rest of the season, leading Fox to cancel the show a few months later. (A similar fate befell CBS' quickly forgotten The World's Best, which aired after last year's game.) This time around, Fox is hoping to avoid the potential pitfalls of that post-Super Bowl slot by scheduling the Season 3 premiere of The Masked Singer, which is currently this season’s No. 1 entertainment show in the adults 18-49 demo. Based on a South Korean format, the reality competition show, in which celebrities dress head to toe in outlandish costumes and sing anonymously with one contestant getting unmasked each week, became broadcast’s biggest freshman hit last year. Fox opted to schedule two cycles during the 2019-20 TV season: one airing last fall and the other at midseason, leading out of the Super Bowl. Fox’s top entertainment priority last fall was continuing the show’s momentum. While the 3.0 demo rating for Season 2 in Nielsen’s most current numbers was down 21% from Season 1, it has been the most-watched entertainment show in the demo this season, edging out NBC’s This Is Us (which has a 2.9). The show has helped propel Fox to No. 1 in the 18-49 demo this season—potentially setting it up for its first season win in eight years—a position it hopes to solidify during and after the Super Bowl. [article_summary section="1"]As Fox Entertainment CEO Charlie Collier considered last spring which Fox program would receive the coveted post-Super Bowl slot, “we researched every show that’s aired after every Super Bowl and tried to really understand the correlations between the lead-in and the success of the show afterwards,” he said. After comparing new series with ongoing shows and scripted vs. unscripted programs, the network settled on The Masked Singer. “Research showed that putting a hit after the Super Bowl historically has done very well," Collier said. "We feel very confident that we've put strength after strength, and we feel good about that." The network will promote The Masked Singer heavily during the Super Bowl and is also featuring the series as part of its "Super Monday" campaign, in which it is encouraging audiences to stay up Sunday to watch the Super Bowl and The Masked Singer, and then take the next day off. So instead of using the Super Bowl to launch 9-1-1 spinoff 9-1-1: Lone Star, the network opted to air it after Jan. 19’s NFC Championship Game. “That’s the biggest launch of the season by far,” Collier said of the show, which debuted to a 3.8 demo rating and 14.6 million total viewers in live-plus-7. It’s Fox’s biggest series debut in more than six years, aside from 24: Legacy’s Super Bowl-boosted number in 2017. Creating the 'best' post-Super Bowl episode [article_summary section="2"]Once Collier picked The Masked Singer as Fox’s Super Bowl follow-up—the news was announced ahead of its upfront event in May—Rob Wade, Fox Entertainment’s president of alternative entertainment and specials, had to determine how to format that post-Super Bowl episode, which is likely to have the show’s biggest audience ever. One option was to create a Super Bowl-themed special episode, with famous NFL players squaring off and all of their identities revealed at the end. That version “might be more palatable to that audience,” Wade said, but “then you’re not showing your show off.” “You want the best version of the show, which is the [regular] show" he continued. "You have to take the Super Bowl audience and use it to your own advantage. That is to sample the show at its best. We believe in the format so much.” That’s not to say Wade didn’t stack the deck a bit for that Super Bowl Sunday episode. The first group includes “six great celebrities,” he said. “And we feel like the first person to be revealed is someone who’s really going to be known by that football audience.” Fox also lined up actor-musician Jamie Foxx, who hosts Beat Shazam on the network, to be a guest panelist on the episode. “But more than anything, we're just trying to get into the show as quickly as possible [following the game],” Wade said. [kickout id="1"] Looking beyond that first episode, as Fox put together Season 3, it looked to replicate Season 2’s mix of famous contestants, like Seal, and less well-known names who were terrific singers, like NBA player Victor Oladipo, and audiences responded to. “That’s a basic template that we’ve tried to redo for this season,” said Wade. The network also worked to make the clues for each contestant more difficult to guess. “But that is easier said than done,” Wade said. The biggest change for Season 3 is how contestants are grouped. Because “viewers want to be taken on a journey,” Wade said, the 18 competitors will be divvied up into three groups of six celebs each. That first group will be whittled down to three remaining contestants, and then producers move onto the next group of six. In the tenth episode, “all nine [remaining] singers come together in a two-hour special, and then the show continues,” Wade said. The “mini seasons” will allow audiences to “really get invested in the characters” before moving on to the next group, Wade said. Dancer with the stars [article_summary section="3"]As Fox prepares to debut The Masked Singer’s third season, it’s also prepping a spinoff series, The Masked Dancer, executive produced by Ellen DeGeneres and based on a popular segment from her talk show. After DeGeneres started to run her Masked Dancer segments, Fox realized it was an organic evolution of the original format. “I’ve always felt like there’s a similarity between certain dance formats and certain singing formats,” Wade said. “I always wondered: Why didn’t you do Dance Idol? That’s why this one felt right for me.” While Fox could have just made the show itself without DeGeneres’ involvement, “Ellen did it with so much aplomb, it felt like something we should do together,” Wade said. “This is someone who’s passionate about it, and she always has great access to celebrities.” Even though Fox has already picked up the new series, there are still some big decisions to make about the format. In The Masked Singer, “you hear someone’s voice, so there’s an extra ability to guess who it is,” Wade said. “We need to figure out how we embellish the clues and the ability for the audience and judges to guess who it is.” The network also wants to make sure The Masked Singer doesn’t seem like a carbon copy of the original series. “We've talked about what format devices we can use to have the dancers dance with other people in a group,” Wade said. “There's ways to make it more entertaining.” Depending on how long it takes to sort out the format, the spinoff could debut this summer or during midseason in 2021, where it could potentially bridge the fall and spring cycles of The Masked Singer. “You don't want to rush it, but I don't think it's that far a departure from our show that we can't put it on pretty quick,” Wade said. No matter when it debuts, it’s likely Fox will air two cycles of The Masked Singer and one cycle of The Masked Dancer within the same 12-month period. But the network isn’t worried about audience burnout. Wade noted that most episodes are just an hour long, compared to two- or three-hour versions of shows like The Voice, America’s Got Talent and The Bachelor, which air multiple cycles or iterations in a year. “We're still at a very nascent point of the format development and I still think we're bringing people to the show, particularly after the Super Bowl,” Wade said. “So we're at a good point to test out other things and other types of formats.”