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Fox Is Adding Three Crazy-Sounding Game Shows This Season

Prepare yourself for The Masked Singer, Mental Samurai and Spin the Wheel

liam-mathews
Liam Mathews

The Fox network, in the midst of huge change as its studio partner gets absorbed by Disney, is already at the point of "alright, let's try this and see what happens." Fox Entertainment Group CEO Dana Walden announced three new game shows at the Television Critics Association summer press tour, and they all sound absolutely bonkers.

The first is The Masked Singer, in which celebrities perform karaoke while wearing elaborate, face-and-body-hiding costumes. The panel of celebrity judges -- Ken Jeong, Jenny McCarthy, Nicole Scherzinger and Robin Thicke -- then has to guess who the singer is. Fox teases that "celebrity competitors have earned a total of 65 Grammy nominations, 16 Emmy Award nominations, 16 multi-platinum albums and 4 Super Bowl titles." It's based on a hugely popular South Korean format and hosted by Nick Cannon. Ken Jeong and Jenny McCarthy together is going to be a lot. Here's a clip from the Korean version, and it looks dope, tbh.

The next is Mental Samurai, hosted and produced by Rob Lowe. On this show, it sounds like competitors will basically run a mental obstacle course? It's a little hard to envision. "Not only does the course test their acumen in categories of knowledge, memory, numbers and sequencing, but players will also have to contend with being transported around the set at high speeds in a specially designed capsule that is capable of rotating 360 degrees," Fox says. 360 degrees? That's like, all of the possible degrees! Sounds weird! Rob Lowe is doing it because he's been into mental challenge shows since he won The $10,000 Pyramid when he was 15, which is a fun fact.

And finally there's Spin the Wheel, which is created by Justin Timberlake(?!) and The Wall's Andrew Glassman. It's basically Wheel of Fortune but with trivia questions instead of word puzzles plus huge sums of money. There's the possibility of winning $2o million in a game. Dax Shepard will host.

The Masked Singer will premiere in January. Mental Samurai and Spin the Wheel don't have dates yet, but will premiere in the 2018-2019 season.