Ken Jeong Is “At My Most Real And Authentic” On ‘I Can See Your Voice’ – Contenders TV: Doc + Unscripted
Can you tell who has a “good” voice and who has a “bad” voice just by looking someone in the face who is lip-syncing to a song? This is the question posed to participants weekly on the Fox game show I Can See Your Voice, hosted and created by Ken Jeong.
“The whole show is predicated on, is this a ‘good’ singer or a ‘bad’ singer without ever hearing them actually hearing them sing,” Jeong tells Deadline during a panel at its Contenders Television: Documentary + Unscripted awards-season event. “We use visual clues, lip-sync clues, and like detective kind of clues. At the end of the day, the contestant has an opportunity to win life-changing money by determining if the final secret voice is good or bad. And if it is good, then they can win up to $100,000. It’s really just feel-good television at its best.”
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Casting and coaching are perhaps the most important elements of the show because the singers are good actors that can fool even the best panelists — a group that includes Cheryl Hines and Adrienne Bailon-Houghton and a variety of guests including Yvette Nicole Brown, Taye Diggs and Dionne Warwick, to name a few.
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“Shout-out to the producers. Logan Clark, our showrunner Dan Martin, who do this amazing job of auditioning all the secret voices months in advance. They really have a great vetting process, and the coaching of it in rehearsals that I’m not privy to,” shared Jeong. “They will coach, if it’s a really great singer, they may coach that person to ‘lip-sync really badly’ or they may do a reverse fake out where, if the panelists thinks, ‘Okay, this person lip-syncs badly, it’s a good singer.’ Or, they might do a double fake out and have a good singer lip-sync really well to fool some of the panelists. The gameplay gets elevated with every season because it’s ever-changing to keep the viewer and the panelists and the host and the contestant on their toes.”
Jeong is known for many of the hilarious characters he’s played on TV in shows like Community, and on the big screen for the Hangover films and Crazy Rich Asians, to name a few of his credits. These days, he’s pulling double duty hosting I Can See Your Voice and as a panelist on The Masked Singer, both Fox game shows, while also working on other projects. A choice, he says, he enjoys.
“A good friend told me that Masked Singer is me at my funniest and wackiest. On I Can See Your Voice, it’s me at my most real and authentic because I’m hosting the show. [Since I’m] not a panelist, I don’t have to offer any of my silly guesses like I offer on The Masked Singer, and for good reason because I’d be even sillier. Now, I’m really just the advocate for the contestant; I’m the empath. I feel what the contestant is feeling: good and bad, highs and lows. And during commercial breaks, I’m either consoling or supporting or congratulating that contestant. There really is a bond,” Jeong explained.
He continued, “What I love about our show is that the contestant is not competing against anybody else; they’re not winning at somebody else’s expense. There’s only one contestant. Off camera before the show starts, I tell the contestant and the audience and the panelists is, ‘See all this? It’s designed for you to try to win you life-changing money. We’re all here to support you.’ We’re not shaming people if they’re ‘bad singers,’ we’re not that type of show.”
Check out the panel video above.
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