‘Sing Your Face Off’ review: Landry Fields, Lisa Rinna, and utter insanity

We will at least give a little bit of credit to ABC right now for one thing: Actually trying to program Saturday nights. Save for “SNL” over on NBC, no network has tried to reasonably do anything with this night in quite a long time. Few people are around to watch it, especially in the summer.

However, ABC still gave things a go this weekend with a “competition” show entitled “Sing Your Face Off” that is completely ridiculous. The idea of the show is basically to watch celebrities impersonate and sing as other celebrities, and then be scored by a panel of people that includes the resurfaced Darrell Hammond and Debbie Gibson appearing in around her billionth reality TV show. Also, there’s David Alan Grier. In between the judges and the five contestants, you’ve got two former “Dancing with the Stars” contestants (Grier and Lisa Rinna), and also two former “Celebrity Apprentice” contestants (Rinna and Gibson). That’s a lot of “I like being on reality TV” thrown into here.

The show is just about what you thought: Incredibly cheesy, and at times you feel bad for some of the contestants that it’s come to this. Some of these people have done cool stuff! Why dress up for this silliness? But, we have to give them some credit for really going along with the gimmick of the show and having a good time when they really didn’t have to. This sort of show requires no shame, and these people really commit to the impressions. Whoever thought basketball star Landry Fields would be better than Jon Lovitz at impersonations? Then again, we feel like Jon had the biggest challenge of the night trying to be Elton John. We could sit here and go through lengthy discussions about the fairness of every aspect of this competition, but there’s literally no point. We’re watching a show here that tries to sell you on its contestants instantly transforming into other people.

In total, watch this show maybe if you are extremely bored and there is nothing else on that you want to watch, or if you’re a big fan of some of the celebrities. John Barrowman does a great job hosting, and that may sweeten the deal a little bit (though at no point does he impersonate the Dark Archer and threaten to destroy the Glades). In the end, though, this is still a silly show that feels like overkill when there are so many other singing competitions out there, and also a show in “America’s Got Talent” where you can watch people do genuinely good impersonations. Save your TV-watching time for Sundays, when there are so many other and better options. Grade: D+.

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Photo: ABC