8 Best Secret-Identity Reality TV Shows: Will ‘The Anonymous’ Join Them?

“They look like angels, but they’re really the devil,” one woman says of this show’s male contestants, who are either nice guys or womanizers. If the ladies can figure out who’s who, they get $100,000, but if the “fboys” fool them, they get the prize. It’s a game of deception and deduction with small swimsuits and big money.

On this outrageous trivia competition — with a title we’ll leave to host Howie Mandel to utter — contestants don’t have to know the right answer as long as they can convince the others that they do. The other players, meanwhile, have to determine who’s a liar to get back in the hot seat for a chance at $1 million.

If Catfish were a reality competition, this would be it. In this series, contestants are sequestered in separate apartments, and they can only make friends and influence people through a fictitious social media network. The catch is that the contestants don’t have to use their real identities — and often don’t!

People with one degree of separation from A-listers get the spotlight in this show, in which every contestant has a famous family member. (Season 1, for instance, boasted a sister of Simone Biles and a cousin of Zendaya.) And it’s up to each contestant to figure out the celebrities to whom the others are related.

In this game show, an ABC offering in the 2000s and a Netflix title in the 2020s, contestants work together to increase the jackpot that one of them will win. Well, they don’t all work together. In every season, there’s one mole who’s sabotaging the group, and the contestants most oblivious to the mole’s identity get sent home.

Who doesn’t love a masquerade, especially one with famous folks going incognito in a karaoke competition as other celebrities sleuth out their identities? But the real stars of the show, arguably, are the Emmy-winning costume designers, who hide the contestants under disguises both outlandish and intricate.

With three challengers all claiming to be the same person — think “I’m Spartacus,” “I’m Spartacus,” and “I’m Spartacus” — celebrity panelists are tasked with deducing who really has the identity of the experience in an affidavit. (And sometimes all three challengers have a story to tell!)

This game show isn’t terribly innovative — anyone who’s played the party game Mafia will recognize how secret “Traitors” are trying to stop the “Faithfuls” from winning the prize. But add reality-famous contestants, a Scottish castle setting, and an equally Scottish host, and you have an Emmy-nominated hit.