Source: New York Daily News - nydailynews.com

THIS 'JOE' IS SCHMOKIN'

Fake 'reality' show is gaining viewers

By RICHARD HUFF
DAILY NEWS TV EDITOR
Monday, October 13th, 2003

It was an elaborate ruse, but it worked.
That's because, on Spike TV's "Joe Schmo Show," Matt Kennedy Gould didn't catch on that he was being duped.

When the show was taped over the summer, Gould was unaware that he was the only player in a fake reality show called "Lap of Luxury." The others were actors, cast to fit every reality-show stereotype.

"We always set out to do for reality TV what 'Spinal Tap' did for music," said cocreator Rhett Reese, who was among the writers of "Monsters Inc." and "Dinosaur."

"Reality TV was a bit stale," said Reese's collaborator Paul Wernick. "You had the same sort of eviction scenes in every show. We really thought this was ripe for parody."

Viewers think so, too.

The audience for the series, which appears Tuesdays at 9 p.m., has grown 61% since the premiere in September, and talks about a second season are underway.

"Joe Schmo" is part of the reality trend started by "Joe Millionaire," which gave the genre a twist.

As viewers watch the cast conspire against Gould, they also see how the producers have to adjust when he reacts in ways they didn't expect.

"It was like producing live television," said Wernick, who also worked on "Big Brother." "There was a fair amount of time we were flying by the seat of our pants and had to throw out the script."

Getting their contestant was also a challenge.

Rather than hold a mass casting call, which would have drawn the reality-show regulars, who try out for all the shows, the producers went into the field to find people not searching for the exposure.

"He's probably the most real reality show contestant that anyone has ever seen on a reality show," Wernick said.

But that created its own problems. For example, early on, the producers realized they could manipulate Gould's emotions by altering the outcome of the contests.

"When most reality-show producers see tears, it's a great emotion," Wernick said. "When we saw tears, we said, 'This is way too emotional.'"

Like the people behind "Joe Millionaire," Wernick and Reese are sketching out ways they could pull off the stunt again.

Said Wernick: "We will find another Joe Schmo."

Here's a VIDEO of "The Joe Schmo Show":

Source:capitalnews9.com

http://www.capitalnews9.com/shared/v...3&mswmext=.asx

Here's a review of "The Joe Schmo Show":
Source: The Sacamento Bee

TV REVIEW: 'The Joe Schmo Show' does wicked parody of reality TV

By RICK KUSHMAN, The Sacramento Bee

"The Joe Schmo Show" is a new reality show that isn't really a reality show, except it is. And, no, that doesn't make sense, but welcome to the fun house that's reality TV.

This dopey little gem from Spike TV - a 10-episode series that is seriously funny and mesmerizing in the manner of all good train wrecks.

The star of all this is Matt Kennedy Gould, a 27-year-old pizza delivery man and regular guy - a Joe Schmo if you will - who says he's "slacked off a little bit" and now wants to make some money on a reality series called "Lap of Luxury."

What Gould doesn't know is the game is fake. Doesn't exist. All the other cast members are actors and the whole thing is staged to see how one guy reacts.

There is a lot of "The Truman Show" in this, but there's more "Survivor," "Big Brother" and every other elimination game on the air these days, except this one gets some big-time laughs.

And, in truth, "The Joe Schmo Show" is as real as any of them. It takes a contrived-but-idiotic situation and lets us watch what happens. In this case, we're watching Gould "play the game," as every cast member says repeatedly on every reality show everywhere, and we're watching the actors trying not to mess up, which they do.

Also, probably more than the producers realized when they started, this series reminds us that this whole mess-of-a-genre dances over the real/fake line so much that no one cares anymore. Plus, it tells us a little bit about ourselves in the process. OK, not really. I just threw that in.

Gould reportedly is unhappy about being played, but his gripe seems pretty empty. He went in expecting cameras and a contrived situation and is shown behaving exactly as he expected to if "Lap of Luxury" were real. And in this case he gets his own TV show.

The cast took on all the usual reality-show roles, starting with the smarmy host and including the jerk, the beautiful virgin, the cranky veteran, the schemer, the Jerri Manthey and, of course, the gay guy.

"Kip," Gould says to him right off, "you're gay, huh?" Later, Gould beats himself up for the gaffe. "Why did I say that?" he muses. Then he apologizes to Kip. And then, naturally, Gould thinks he's got an ally in the game.

Other times, he wonders which female contestant he might hook up with, though he's way over his head with them in so many ways, including class. "That was very thoughtful," Gould says about one woman, "in addition to her being hot."

It goes like that throughout the two-hour premiere. Really stupid moments, really stupid scheming, really stupid games. What's not to love?

Gould never suspects, but why should he? As ridiculous as it is, the whole calamity falls comfortably within the universe of reality TV. Did anyone see "Mr. Personality"? It was hosted by Monica Lewinsky, if you want to talk ridiculous.

The best fake game involved the standard keep-contact-with-an-object contest, though in this case, the "object" was porn star Tawny Roberts, who, by the way, Gould recognized a mite too quickly.

Gould gets a particularly choice piece of real estate - "This is like a dream come true for me," he says - but ends up throwing producers a curve after the smarmy host (Ralph Garmen) started the game with, "Ready, set, touch that hooker."

And then there is the vote-off ceremony. Garmen pronounces, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, you are dead to us," as he throws the loser's likeness on a plate into the fireplace.

In tonight's episode, the loser then launches a brilliantly idiotic goodbye rant, and all Gould thinks is that it's uncannily like Susan Hawk's "Survivor" tirade. It really is a spoof of Hawk's speech, but Gould doesn't notice because cast members on every reality shows channel Hawk and Richard Hatch and all the roles they've seen stretching back to MTV's "The Real World."

And that's the best joke of the show. You can't parody this stuff, it's already so preposterous. How do you out-silly something like "Who Wants To Marry My Dad?" or even the gold standard of the genre, "Survivor," with its immunity idols and faux wisdom such as "fire represents life"?

In the end, what we see is that TV has homogenized yet another piece of American life - no comment here on the value of that piece - to the point where "real people" who get on these shows know exactly the roles they're expected to play, and viewers at home know every step of the dance.

No wonder Gould couldn't tell what was fake and what was real. Nobody can. And in this case, nobody much cares so long as it's fun.

Thanks for the link KS. I plan to take a look at this tonight. This show appears to be just my kind of stuff. Hope it gets broadcast in the UK.

Source: slate.msn.com

LIFE LESSONS FROM JOE SCHMO
The reality show that's good for you
By Meghan O'Rourke

Within minutes of the start of Joe Schmo, Spike TV's new mock-reality show, Matt, the unsuspecting "schmo," was parading before the cameras wearing nothing but spandex black panties, the waistband tightly crimped beneath his pasty rotunda of a belly. He ran his hand rakishly through his hair and moued for the camera. Later, after losing that day's immunity challenge (which was rigged), he said in frustration, "I got to start getting my head in the game!"—fist pounding his temple, and all.

Ostensibly, Matt's picaresque humiliations are the reason to watch Joe Schmo, which is actually an elaborate hoax: Everyone involved is an actor, except for Matt. With the show, Spike TV, the first network for men, hopes to capitalize on the addictive, vicarious pleasure of watching others' pain. Joe Schmo is also supposed to be a testament to the spiritual mortification your average human being is willing to go through to make a little money onscreen.

Instead, Matt has turned the tables on the producers.

Matt thinks he's competing for a $100,000 prize on Lap of Luxury, a Survivor-style show with "vote-offs" and the like. At first, Matt seems goofy, unthreatening, of a friendly frat-boy vintage; he calls himself "the Matt-man." Prior to being selected for Joe Schmo, he had dropped out of law school, in Pittsburgh, to become a pizza-delivery boy and was living with his parents. With his not quite unwrinkled clothes, his slight buck teeth, mussed eyebrows, and protruding nose, he lends himself to caricature. His hazel eyes bug out and his eyebrows frequently rise in puzzlement. He is less a modern-day Jay Gatsby or Horatio Alger than that amiable guy you went to high school with and always liked—what was his name again?

But in this particular televised situation, Matt is made extraordinary by his essential goodness. The other "contestants" on the show are radioactive versions of reality-show types: Molly, the busty, virginal Southern blonde; Ashleigh, the dark-haired rich bitch, with pointy elbows and slinty eyes; Earl, a grizzled ex-Marine with ramrod posture; Gena, a no-nonsense strategizer; and horse-faced Ralph, the "Smarmy Host." In contrast to these characters, and to the "real" actors who play them—who at first giggle like seventh-graders about how they've duped Matt—Matt has a distinct social code and a rigorous idea of how people ought to treat each other. He corners Hutch,the crotch-scratching "Asshole," who's been picking his nose at the lunch table, and benignly warns him that he might want to tone down his antics. In the third episode, he draws Molly aside, visibly nervous, to confess that he voted her off during the first eviction ceremony—not, he says, because he didn't like her but because he doubted anyone else would. (He doesn't want her to upset herself wondering who put her name down.) He walks away when other contestants "find" an incriminating notebook under scheming Gena's bed—though, of course, the whole thing was cooked up for his benefit. Yet he's no sap: At one point he bluntly asks Dr. Pat, a marriage counselor, why she's been divorced three times, after she tries to get Oprah-style cozy with him about the woes of his most recent breakup.

Matt's moral backbone might make for disappointing satiric TV—conventional wisdom holds that good people, like happy families, are boring. But Joe Schmo is riveting precisely because Matt talks so honestly to the camera and to his fellow contestants. He tells them everything. In a one-on-one interview after the black panty episode, he confides, "I was worrying about size down there" then blushes and confesses, "I did play with it to get it up." This is more than you want to know—but it's also a kind of novelistic character detail rarely found on reality TV. And he registers everything, zeroing in on each slip in a character's story, deftly nailing Ashleigh's capricious selfishness and distancing himself from it. You begin to root for him to overcome the temptations of everyday compromise; you want him not to take the easy way out, or to connive, or to indulge in histrionics. His openness deflects humiliation. You want it to stay that way.

And so over the last few episodes—the fifth aired on Tuesday—something of a weird conversion narrative has taken place among the actors. Conniving and self-involved at the start (they're not exactly tomorrow's stars), they are growing genuinely attached to—and protective of—Matt. At the end of the third episode, the contestants got in the hot tub, where each had to say something positive about his or her comrades. It was dark, and blue shadowy light from the water flickered over their faces. They found polite enough things to say about one another. But when they got to Matt it was as if they'd come face-to-face with a child messiah—someone unknowing and awesome. One by one, they struggled to tell Matt how good he was. ("I don't think you have any idea of how you present yourself. It's amazing. We're all blown away by who you are.") Ashleigh dropped entirely out of character (so much so that the show's producers later reprimanded her) and, tongue-tied, struggled for words that were nowhere to be found: "I think that you're a very special person. I think that there's … something special. I don't know what. I mean, I think there's something special."

In fact, Matt is so close to perfect—and, with his frank talk about how hot Ashleigh looks in her bikini, so perfect for Spike TV's male audience—that you begin to wonder if the show might be faking us out in another way. Maybe Matt is an actor too, and we're the Joes who "don't know," as the show's motto puts it. (If this is the case, I'd wager that his fellow contestants don't know either.) Whatever the case, without him, the slightness of the show's premise would grow wearying. Plenty of scenes aren't edited crisply enough. And even by parody's terms it indulges in crude stereotypes: The "gay guy" is weepy and histrionic; the women, who are much more attractive than the men, bounce around in bikinis, even when the weather is cloudy (which is more often than not).

If Matt is an everyday guy, Joe Schmo's Truman Show-esque manipulations implicate everyone in a more complicated game. The show's tagline is "The reality show that's not real," but of course, as the show's producers find out, their lab-experiment has unforeseen consequences. There are real feelings, real injuries. When Earl, the ex-Marine (and Matt's roommate), is voted off in the fourth episode, Matt breaks down on the stairs in tears, so overcome that he can't make it up to his bedroom. "No amount of money is worth this," he says. "I should have thought it through before I came here." It's heartbreaking to watch; the actors are visibly shaken. One producer whispers, "We've got to f***ing stop this." Later, in a sumo-wrestling game, Matt rams Dr. Pat with pent-up frustration (she's sleeping with the crass Hutch, he thinks, and the sheer wrongness of it unsettles him) and pile-drives her into the ground. She is sent to the hospital with a real neck injury. Matt looks on, his eyes dulled.

What will happen when Matt learns he's been hoodwinked this whole time? Like Schrödinger's Cat, it turns out there's no observing a human on television without changing him. The Dr. Pat episode reveals just how deeply our understanding of other people's lives affects our sense of ourselves, even (or especially) when we have a strong sense of self. Yet he's acquitted himself well; he needn't fear looking back at his adventures on the Lap of Luxury, despite the show's intention to humiliate him. In this sense, unknowingly, he's outwitted the show and revealed something curious: On another kind of reality show, the distance between him and those around him might not have been so obvious. The show's real sting lies in realizing that it's easier to like someone who needs protection, even as it's easier to laugh at him.

Source: www.canoe.ca

Monday, October 20, 2003

JOE SCHMO SHOW IMPROVES ON REALITY
By PAT ST. GERMAIN -- Winnipeg Sun

Just when we thought we'd never love another reality show -- along came Joe.

All those Survivor tribal councils, Big Brother evictions and Fear Factor food challenges? They've just been laying the groundwork for the one true heir to reality's throne, Spike TV's The Joe Schmo Show.

And here's the best part: It's all fake.

Joe, aka Pittsburgh law-school dropout and pizza delivery guy Matt Gould, thinks he's competing on a reality show called Lap of Luxury. The cruel joke is, his housemates in a posh Los Angeles mansion are all actors playing reality-show stereotypes.

There's Earl, the grizzled middle-aged military man; Molly, the buxom Christian virgin; Hutch, the jerk everybody hates; Kip, the gay guy; Ashleigh, the stuckup rich girl; Brian, the buddy; Dr. Pat, the troubled quack therapist; Gina the manipulatrix -- and, finally, smarmy host Ralph Garman.

Over the course of 10 days and several episodes, the actors have been messing with poor Matt's head, forming alliances, engaging in petty squabbles, fixing all the immunity challenges and rigging the voting so he's constantly bug-eyed at nightly eviction ceremonies, which are structured for maximum dramatic effect.

Immunity and reward challenges are fabulously absurd -- the player who maintains contact longest in a touch-the-porn-star contest wins the right to wear a feather-and-rhinestone 'Immunity Robe' that would shame a Vegas pimp, and the obligatory gross-food chowdown competition featured dog turds on a platter. But with the exception of the paltry grand prize -- a mere $100,000 -- the show is true enough to the reality formula to just pass muster.

The eviction ceremony is an equally ingenious spoof, with Garman taking Survivor host Jeff Probst's solemn "The tribe has spoken," line to a whole 'nother level, sending evictees back to their miserable lives of "working for the man" by smashing their personalized commemorative plates in the fireplace and declaring, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust ... you are dead to us."

We have to agree with an armchair critic who puts it this way: "Best. Show. Ever."

The Joe Schmo Show has its finale on Spike TV Tuesday at 8 p.m., when Matt learns to truth. Or maybe we learn that Matt was in on the joke all along. So much the better.

Spike wisely airs repeats almost every day of the week, but to make sure you don't miss a minute, catch a repeat 10-hour marathon starting at 2 p.m. on Sunday Oct. 26.