TV’s most insane, fever dream-esque show is officially back tonight, and so are your nightmares!
Just kidding, but actually maybe not, since some of the costumes this season are definitely scarier. Season two of Fox’s most unexpected hit features 16 celebrities disguised in cartoonish costumes, singing for the chance to continue singing.
Jenny McCarthy, Nicole Scherzinger, Ken Jeong, and Robin Thicke are tasked with figuring out who they are, and with helping determine which celebrities get eliminated (and unmasked). They got a few right in season one, but they’re determined to get even more right in season two.
Jeong specifically noticed that two of his co-judges, Scherzinger and Thicke, have got some serious listening skills.
“They have just a gift of sound-finding that I am in complete awe of,” Jeong says. “They are geniuses. It’s pretty like, wow, I can’t believe it.”
“That’s kind of what we do. It’s what we’ve been bred our whole lives…” Scherzinger explains. “I can’t always put all the clues together…I’m trying to put the clues together this year more, but my best skillset is just listening and paying attention.”
Jeong admits that he’s also not the best at the clues, but he feels like he’s in a masterclass of musicology when Thicke and Scherzinger debate the voices they’re hearing.
“It literally is like two music professors having an academic debate, and that was thrilling to watch this season just behind the scenes,” he says.
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“We just know how to play the game now,” McCarthy says of season two. “I think the first season, we were just kind of understanding how it works, and now watching the show back, we go, oh we kind of missed that clue. It’s paying attention a little bit more, listening to each other, maybe somebody picked up a clue that we didn’t.”
Thicke says that he’s picked up on the producers trying to mess with the judges.
“I think the worse we look, the the less we get it right, I think, the more exciting it is for the reveal,” he says. “We’ve gotten less right in the first half.”
McCarthy says she imagined that season two would feature a higher caliber of celebrities after they saw what season one was like, and she was right, according to her.
“More wanted to be on it, the caliber’s been raised,” she says.
“The par for the course has been raised up,” Thicke adds. “I mean, not everybody is going to be Gladys Knight, but the average voice on this new season is very strong.”
We were in the audience for an upcoming episode so we’ll have lots of tidbits to share, but for now we’ll just say that the judges actually do seem to have upped their listening skills. The guesses, which they have to give without the opportunity to google things first, seemed to be a lot less wild and a lot more reasonable, and everybody seemed to be ready to play this game.
Season two premieres at 8 p.m. on Fox.