Fox gets gamy

As the Fox-Disney merger or sale or mess lurches forward, the remaining Fox broadcast network looks to get cheaper and younger. Oops, that's sports talk. But it's also game show talk. Because game shows are notoriously cheap to produce, and Fox will debut three of them in the 2018-19 season.

The weirdest one sounds like the mystery guest segment on What's My Line, only the mystery guests are the ones who are blindfolded, not the panel. And the guests sing instead of talking in strange accents. The show's title is The Masked Singer, and it features Grammy winners and other celeb warblers doing karaoke for a panel of Ken Jeong, Jenny McCarthy, Nicole Scherzinger and Robin Thicke.

The celebs wear elaborate costumes including silly masks, and the panel tries to guess who they are. It's based on what we're assured is a "hugely popular" Korean format, and Nick Cannon hosts. However popular it may prove to be, The Masked Singer debuts next January.

Then there's Spin the Wheel, with Justin Timberlake as one of the showrunners. The linked story describes it as Wheel of Fortune with trivia questions instead of word puzzles. How that works, I'm not sure. We do know about a $20 million top prize, which beats Wheel by a lot. Dax Shepard hosts, and there's no debut date yet.

Finally, Rob Lowe produces and hosts Mental Samurai, where contestants solve puzzles while getting whirled around the stage. Sounds dizzying, but I just have to watch and review the show, not compete on it. No debut date yet for this show, either.

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