Superhumans – the real kind not the Marvel version – are coming to your living room. Don’t be frightened, it’s a new show from Fox, a reality competition which pits people with extraordinary abilities against one another in a fight to the death! demonstration of their skills. That’s actually much more compelling than it sounds.
The show, called Superhuman, had a test episode in January, featuring 12 people with skills like memory, agility, hearing, calculating, vision and more.
One woman contorted her way through a laser maze…blindfolded. A Louisiana chef named each one ingredient that was left out of each of three dishes…with one taste (almost, he missed one). A new dad with eagle eyes looked at two walls of over 18,000 colored tiles, then identified which three of the tiny tiles the hosts switched around. A woman wore soundproof headphones while identifying songs by watching a pianist play the notes (guest appearance from Paul Schaeffer). A gentleman met 100 audience members before the show and memorized four pieces of information about each of them. The show chose five of those audience members at random, provided two pieces of information and the contestant had to recount the missing two pieces (gesticulating wildly to help him with his memory process.) It’s riveting!
At the end the audience voted one lucky superhuman to win $100,000. I won’t tell you who it was, you can watch the episode to find out:
Adding to the fun was color commentary from Mike Tyson, Mary Lynn Raskjub, and, neurosurgeon Dr. Rahul Jandial, who gave a brief description of what the contestant’s brain was having to do in order to complete the task.
Kal Penn hosted the two-hour show and will continue his duties throughout the new series. Fox has ordered eight hourlong episodes and are currently casting, according to Variety.
Like many reality competitions this one was inspired by a European show, in this case a German competition called The Brain which has sparked similar shows in China, Italy, Brazil, Spain, and France. Endemol Shine, who produced the German version will oversee the U.S. series through their subsidiary Endemol Shine North America.