Which is really the point of so much entertainment these days. The point is not creativity but revelation. This coda, rather than the preceding competition, provides the cathartic climax of Alter Ego episodes. At the end of each audition round, one eliminated player steps in front of the curtain to show their true human form, and the live audience gives a wow. But mostly the judges pine to learn who is behind the visages. They rave, “She’s embodying the hell out of this alter ego,” and, “I just can’t believe there is somebody backstage singing,” and “I totally forgot that there was someone backstage singing.” They praise voices (which emit from lethargic mouth movements, the shoddiest part of the illusion) and appearances (contestants exert an unclear amount of control over whether their avatars wear pants or summon sparkles from the ground). In saccharine biographical segments, Alter Ego suggests that afflictions as diverse as Crohn’s disease, shyness, and having a “baby face” can be transcended with the same technique that gave us Jar Jar Binks.īut the judges, at least, don’t know anything about the performers’ identities. The effect is very Wizard of Oz, except that you’re absolutely supposed to pay attention to the person behind the curtain: The show spends as much time on the human backstories of the singers as it does on their singing. Contestants squeeze into sensor-studded bodysuits and then hop around while their characters-cartoonish humanoids that, to my untrained eye, are cruder and less compelling than what I’d expect from CGI in 2021-mirror them on camera. The show’s motion-capture tech, unfortunately, casts the uninspiring spell of 20-year-old Star Wars prequels.
Alter Ego’s concept would seem poised to celebrate pop’s joyful artifice-and even to push it further than it’s ever gone before. Others, such as Britney Spears or Beyoncé, coif themselves into caricatures-larger-than-life projections of the sort of humans we all might wish to be. Some of history’s most unifying stars-Prince, David Bowie, Madonna, Lady Gaga-performed the magic trick of reinvention, with sparkly spandex and shoulder pads keeping their flesh-and-blood banality hidden. Pop music, the art form at the center of Alter Ego, thrives off of this kind of imagination. Imagine you’re freed from the station, situation, and body that you drag along every day. But an older impulse is embedded in these works: the impulse of The Prince and the Pauper, or Batman, or Mrs. The rise of digital anonymity-the Fortnite avatar, the burner Instagram account-would seem an obvious explanation for what’s going on here.
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The series ostensibly follows the spirit of The Masked Singer, the freaky costumed competition that Fox imported from South Korea in 2019. Sci-fi technology, we’re told, will help people be more like themselves-and Alter Ego’s dullness hints at the way that identity has become a suffocating concept in the 21st century.
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But the viewing experience is not as bizarre or dystopian as you might expect: A wacky premise and judging panel (will.i.am, Alanis Morissette, Nick Lachey, and the “musician, innovator” Grimes) just disguise the same schmaltz and strained belting that have been common on network TV ever since American Idol premiered in 2002. The long- prophesied future in which holographic performers replace real ones is here, according to Alter Ego, a singing competition that has amateurs inhabit CGI avatars. What otherworldly wisdom does this being have to share? Standing before a panel of human celebrities in the first episode of the Fox reality series Alter Ego, Seven sheds a big, glistening tear and says, “I am who I think I am.
Amber eyes and feline bone structure make her strikingly beautiful. The aspiring pop star Seven has blue skin, finned forearms, and a mohawk of writhing tentacles.
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