Review: Why New Zealand's the Masked Singer was more cringe than binge

The Alien from the New Zealand version and Robopine from the US version. Enough said. Photos / Supplied and Getty Images

OPINION:

New Zealand's very own version of the highly addictive international sensation The Masked Singer hit our screens last night and the Kiwis were left baffled - truly and honestly baffled.

The show, which airs Sundays from 7pm and Mondays from 7.30pm on Three, has a somewhat simple enough premise. Twelve Kiwi celebrities are dressed in extravagant costumes and given a song to sing while dressed in said costume. The judges then have to try and guess who is under the mask, using only their voice and a series of clues.

One "celeb" is then unveiled at the end of each show. But the trick is, you have to watch until the end of the show, something which proved difficult for some.

Last night we met six of the season's 12 singers: Tuatara, Tūī, Possum, Alien, Medusa and Jellyfish. The singers went head-to-head, with host Clinton Randell then asking the studio audience to vote for their favourite, on their own mobile phones.

The panellists, Ladi6, Sharyn Casey, Rhys Darby and James Roque all put their guesses in, but did they really? New Zealand's "celebrity" pool is small and, working in the entertainment industry, I could instantly identify the identity of three of the six singers. So how on Earth could these people at the heart of that industry not know? Spoiler alert - they knew.

The judges seemed to intentionally make guesses which were so far off the mark that it left me infuriated.

No "Kylie Minogue" and "Kelly Clarkson" had not decided to end their lucrative careers and find themselves on New Zealand's version of The Masked Singer. While I have you here, The Rock, Ellen DeGeneres and Brad Pitt also will not be in attendance this season.

If you were able to get past the infuriating guesses, you then had to face up to the ridiculous amounts of auto-tune, something which doesn't feature in the US version of the show. I use this truly awful version of Caitlyn Jenner singing Kesha's TikTok to reiterate my point.

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Then you had the costumes to deal with. The US version has striking costumes like the Phoenix, Chameleon, Black Swan, Russian Dolls and Robopine.

We had an alien, which truly looked like it was from a small rural school's Stage Challenge and the PTA went absolutely ham at their last working bee. The rest of our costumes were largely Kiwiana themed and I honestly cringed, I cringed hard.

The celebrity pull on the US version is huge, LeAnne Rimes was a past winner, T-Pain, Tony Hawk, Mickey Rourke, Lil Wayne and even Kermit the Frog. That's what pulls the US viewers in - wondering who the major celebrity behind the mask is.

The Alien from the New Zealand version and Robopine from the US version. Enough said. Photos / Supplied and Getty Images

The Kiwi version appears to instead be host to ex-reality show contestants, Shortland St actors, a politician and most likely a TV host or two whose name is on the tip of your tongue, but you can't quite get it.

So what about the big reveal? Surely that would save the show and pull it back from the brink? Surely.

The bottom three as voted by the audience on their Nokia 3310s, were Alien, Tūī and Jellyfish.

After host Randell tried to build suspense by throwing to a break for the 18th time, we found out we were saying goodbye to Tūī, the sweet melodic Tūī, who could actually hold a tune and regardless of the auto-tune intervention, we actually really liked her.

Despite the insistence of Darby, Tūī was not Judith Collins, no, the "national treasure" was beloved children's entertainer Suzy Cato. Because of course it was, we knew that the second she started singing and the judges knew that the second she started singing.

Suzy Cato was revealed as the Tūī and quite literally no one was shocked - except host Clinton Randell.

And we were genuinely sad to say "see ya, see ya later" to Cato. Mostly because one can only assume she was the most recognisable and most adored of the contestants, and now we must listen to ex-sports stars rap and honestly I saw enough of that at the Longroom in my early 20s.

I think maybe José Barbosa put it best in his brilliant YouTube video - Why the late 90s and early 00s was NZ's golden age of reality TV - where he stated that New Zealand reality TV is just like other countries' reality TV except ours, is "just a little bit shit".

• The Masked Singer NZ screens on Three on Sundays from 7pm and Mondays from 7.30pm