I have to say, putting the Celeb Special up against Bother’s Bar’s Game Night 20: Champion of Champions 2020 is brave – expect it to put loads on in +7.
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I have to say, putting the Celeb Special up against Bother’s Bar’s Game Night 20: Champion of Champions 2020 is brave – expect it to put loads on in +7.
In terms of other Saturday night fun, I enjoyed the US premiere of I Can See Your Voice rather more than I expected, though I’m not sure I have much need to watch more. One contestant attempts to discern which of six participants are deemed Good or Bad singers. (I’m not sure I’m fully on board with the notion of subjective singer quality, but I imagine 95% of people would agree with the designations in practice based on the show’s evidence.) They get fairly little evidence to do so, mostly lip-sync performances, though a panel of showbiz types offers their thoughts. After each of five rounds of limited information, the contestant eliminates a participant, who then performs. A Good singer will perform for about a minute, a Bad singer gets about twenty seconds and doesn’t outstay their welcome.
The contestant wins US$10k for each of the first five participants eliminated who is a Bad singer, but can gamble it all, $100k or nothing, that the participant that they did not eliminate is a Good singer. It is not clear how many of the singers are Good or Bad, though I don’t think there’d be much of a show if there were six Bad ones. (Six Good ones would be scary fun… once.)
The presentation of the show is very much as if someone’s seen The Masked Singer and said “oh, we want one of those”. However, the atmosphere is much more positive than I feared and the show feels quite like a party. Even the Bad singers clearly have a good time and have love, care and attention paid to them – there looks like there’s a lot taped that goes to waste. (I hope both Good and Bad singers are very adequately compensated, as well as clearly having a lot of fun.) Not much room is given to Dr. Ken Jeong to host, so there’s not much room for his performance to be any more than competent. The rest of the panel are pretty perfunctory, but if you’re a fan of them already then you’d probably enjoy their work.
Prospects for the 2021 BBC show are, I’d say, mixed. Paddy McGuinness should be in his element here. My concern is that the show is pretty tight at a US commercial TV hour, whereas a BBC TV hour might be something like ten minutes longer, and the show may be rather flabby as a result; I’m not sure what sort of constructive content they might use to fill those missing minutes. Looks like the UK show uses a slightly different prize structure, too; there’s one prize, which is guaranteed to be paid out each episode, going to the contestant if the singer that they haven’t eliminated is Good, or to the singer who they haven’t eliminated if they are Bad. That may work better, as both conclusions sound satisfying, rather than the US version having the potential to have an unsatisfying conclusion if the contestant chooses not to gamble or chooses to gamble but loses.
For completeness, hat tip to the Guardian’s review of the show; I wouldn’t have bothered giving it a try had it not been for the review’s positive, and accurate, comments.