Joe Schmo Show

The Spike TV prank series still holds up as one of reality television’s best shows, and biggest surprises, thanks to its star Matt Kennedy Gould.

From the start of its first episode, The Joe Schmo Show had many terrific moments, but really, it exists to show us one thing: when the schmo is told that he or she is a schmo, and has been lied to for months and months by producers and by people he or she trusted. That …

Nostalgia is dangerous in reality television. So much of our relationship to great shows over the past 13 years–or 21 years–has been because a show has been new and surprising, and hit all the right notes for that moment. That was definitely the case with The Joe Schmo Show, which had a brilliant first season …

Joe Schmo: The Full Bounty is surprising because it has managed to be almost as good as the original 10 years ago, and because the show’s producers and cast were able to pull off the same prank 10 years later. How did they do it? I talked to the show’s executive producers, John Stevens and …

After nearly a decade since the debut of its first season, The Joe Schmo Show returns for its third season on Spike tonight. The original introduced us to Kristen Wiig and to a format that simultaneously parodied the worst of reality television and embodied the best kind of reality TV–a high bar to reach. While …

A decade after The Joe Schmo Show, the Truman Show-style reality series in which everyone except one person is an actor performing as part of a scripted narrative, will return to Spike in 2013. Titled Joe Schmo: The Full Bounty, it will feature a man who thinks he’s auditioning to be “America’s next bounty hunter.” …

Of the gifts reality TV has given us, it has given us a lot to laugh at and mock. The 2003 Fox series Joe Millionaire formalized that mockery by satirizing The Bachelor, pretending its star was a millionaire when he really was not. It ushered in an era of prank reality shows, most of which …