decline in the late 2010s. The South Korean competition show I Can See Your Voice, which premiered in 2015, showed guest judges attempting to guess which of a group of contestants could sing, and which could not, without hearing them sing. The show was successful, and spawned several imitators, most notably King of Mask Singer several months later. King of Mask Singer was a more traditional singing competion show, but with the wrinkle that the contestants were celebrities who remained masked until they were removed from the show, adding an element of guesswork to the competition. The two shows both spawned successful international franchises, I Can See Your Voice and Masked Singer, respectively. Masked Singer has been especially popular, with over 50 local adaptations; its American adaptation was the third highest-rated series overall of both the 2018–19 and 2019–20 television seasons. The success of the two franchises has led to other globally-syndicated franchises of reality competitions based around guesswork, such as Game of Talents (which began in Spain in 2019) and The Masked Dancer (which began in the United States in 2020). 2020s Television development across all genres was impacted in 2020 by the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced many reality competition series to suspend production (and in some cases curtail a competition already in progress, such as Canadian and Malayalam versions of Big Brother), until such time that production could recommence with appropriate health and safety protocols approved by local authorities. Due to their quicker turnaround times, the U.S. networks used reality series and other unscripted content (including those delayed from their summer lineups) to fill gaps in their schedules while the production of scripted programming resumed. Subgenres There have been various attempts to classify reality television shows into different subgenres: A 2006 study proposed six subgenres: romance, crime, informational, reality-drama, competition or game, and talent. A 2007 study proposed five subgenres: infotainment, docusoap, lifestyle, reality game shows, and lifestyle experiment programs. A 2009 study proposed eight subgenres: "gamedocs", dating programs, makeover programs, docusoaps, talent contests, court programs, reality sitcoms, and celebrity variations of other programs. Another categorization divides reality television into two types: shows that purport to document real life, and shows that place participants in new circumstances. In a 2003 paper, theorists Elisabeth Klaus and Stephanie Lücke referred to the former category as "docusoaps", which consist of "narrative reality", and the latter category as "reality soaps", which consist