But these aren’t like the bastardized holograms of Whitney Houston and Prince that can somehow be projected onto a stage, there is zero physical presence in our world. You see, Alter Ego is edited in post to make it seem as though the alter egos are performing on stage in front of the judges.
Not even on the stage, but on a giant screen-one of the show’s most obnoxious deceits. The show repeatedly calls them “the next generation’s superstar,” as if we’re anywhere close to wanting to go to a live concert and see an unknown 3D figure performing before us. The conceit of the show seems to be that once people who are too shy, self-doubting, or generally boring turn themselves into 3D animated avatars, that will somehow make them become so irresistibly magnetic that the world will fall in love with them and their alter ego’s star will catapult to the highest echelons of the music industry.
#ALTER EGO BAND HOUSTON SKIN#
In each episode (so far), a handful of people with zero discernible star quality who each feel like pariahs of society strap themselves into the motion capture suit and sing a song backstage while their colorful alter egos-characters that they’ve helped design down to the hairstyle and skin color-perform in front of the judges. And there’s no way we can solve that problem.” Every aspect of Alter Ego makes me throw my hands in the air and wonder how and why this show got made-as in why was this developed and how did this make it to air without anyone involved in the production stopping themselves and saying, “Wait, that doesn’t make any sense. This is a program that is so bafflingly watchable I had to wonder if there was some Josie and the Pussycats -esque government subliminal messaging that kept me not only watching but wanting more. The whole thing feels like an extended bit from an episode of 30 Rock collided with the plotline of an unmemorable episode of Black Mirror -two more pop culture references that are overused, but when you’re trying to ascertain the meaning of something like Alter Ego, you must grasp at every straw you can to make sense out of something that was never supposed to make any sense at all.
As much as these two descriptors are lazily applied to things that don’t actually fit their definition, there’s no denying that they are certainly the most appropriate terms that come to mind when trying to make sense of Alter Ego, the confounding new FOX reality competition where “singers” of middling-to-mildly-deserving merit suck themselves into a skin-tight motion capture suit to create the show’s titular animated personalities so they can “perform” for possibly the most perplexing panel of judges ever assembled for a reality television show.
The same goes for the word “dystopian,” which has now become a favorite throw-around adjective for any societal problem that feels strange or unjust. We’ve nearly gotten to the point where two words that are used to describe something that is artificial or robotic in nature as eerily humanlike-so much so that it evokes a feeling of distress or unease-are nearly meaningless because of how often they’re ascribed to things that are simply just weird. The phrase “uncanny valley” is thrown around a lot these days.
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