If it sometimes feels like Fox’s singing series The Masked Singer is always on, that’s pretty much because it is: Since it kicked off on the second day of 2019, the series has run a new season every six months like clockwork, launching two per year for the past six years. Now, though, it turns out even TV shows need an escape from the grind of guessing which C-list celebrity is massacring an old Spice Girls tune while dressed up like Cookie Monster’s less photogenic friend. Per Deadline, The Masked Singer will be skipping its fall season in 2025, for the first time in ever, meaning you will have to just, like, look at some baseball mascots and sing quietly to yourself if you want to capture the show’s magic when September rolls around.
To be clear, this is to be taken as a one-off exception: The show expects to return to its twice-yearly schedule starting in 2026, when it will debut what it’s referring to as a “super-charged” season 14. Reading between the lines, it kind of sounds like the show was really running out of mid-tier sports stars or people you half-remember from reality TV in order to shove in suits, and felt like a break might facilitate finding some more: A Fox spokesperson said that, “Debuting the new season in January is a strategic move to give ample runway for America’s favorite guessing game and allow us to creatively look at enhancing the show with the biggest names at the center of it.” (It’s not for nothing that this season’s most surprising reveal wasn’t of a formal contestant, but “Lucky Duck,” who just sort of hung around the studio until it was eventually revealed that it was Taika Waiti, husband of judge Rita Orr, under the mask.)
Relatively few American reality shows are currently hitting the “two seasons per year” metric. (The Voice and Survivor still manage it, but lots of shows have dropped down to a season a year.) And none of those series have the whole celebrity element that Masked has to deal with. As of tonight’s season finale, the series has now run through a little more than 200 masked reveals; at some point, the intersection between “Someone‘s heard of them’ and “Is doing poorly enough to make the Masked Singer seem like a good deal” has to run out, so we can’t blame the series for trying to ration things.
