Where The Joe Schmo Show Succeeded
When the first Survivor appeared on TV, I was cynical. But after I had watched an episode, I had to admit I was hooked. It was a lot more than what network executives thought it would be. Survivor was intended to be a game. What it turned out to be was a fascinating study of the human condition. The best and the worst of humanity was displayed for us to witness and dissect. And the most interesting thing of all was the guy who won Survivor was the guy who never lost sight of the fact that it was merely a game. That is the misnomer of the “reality show” and Richard Hatch saw through it instantly.
Reality television isn’t real, not on any level. It was clearly evidenced by the second season of Survivor, when the cast members trooped off the plane. Apart from the two token older people, the tribe members were all fit and attractive to maximize the sex appeal factor of the show. I knew then what made the show work for me was gone. It was just another show starring the beautiful few. “Ohh, look at him, he’s so hot! What’s going on? Who cares? He’s hot!” Ratings soared, because when it’s all said and done, people would rather be titillated than intellectually engaged for an hour. Over the next couple of years, reality television degenerated into glorified whack-off material. People on beaches and in mansions prancing around shirtless or in bikinis and engaging in thinly veiled sexual innuendo. How many reality shows have hot tubs? I rest my case.
Then along came The Joe Schmo Show. Again, I was cynical. But flipping through the channels I stopped on the “reality show that’s not real”, and I was hooked. The Joe Schmo Show centered around Matt Kennedy Gould, a 27 year-old law school dropout, the only “real” character on a fake reality show. It was a simple premise designed to humiliate someone in front of a national television audience, and then stuff a hundred thousand bucks and a couple of vacations into his hands and say “no hard feelings”.
At first I was laughing at how much of a goober this guy is. I mean, the scenario was so ridiculous, the actors so predictable, the games ludicrous… how could this guy be so clueless? My fiancée had said that this guy was an actor as well, pulling the reverse whammy on the actors of the show. A brilliant observation. I mean, guys like Matt don’t exist in real life, do they?
It turns out they do. People stopped laughing at Matt and started rooting for him. In a medium that is full of phonies, it is most ironic that a fake reality show would produce not only a real guy, but a guy with the qualities that we thought had died a long time ago. Encouraging and nurturing, but strong and opinionated and ready to defend everyone around them when they’ve been wronged. Top it off with a bashful farm-boy charm and a heap of naiveté, and people were tuning in to cheer Matt on.
But after giving it some thought, why would Matt necessarily catch on to this spectacle? What The Joe Schmo Show had done brilliantly is parody other reality shows to the point that any one of the silly over-the-top games that they played on the show could have turned up on a legitimate reality show. And the actors are simply composites of players on other reality shows, cast for their particular personalities to maximize the conflict factor on the show. If we had no foreknowledge that the cast members were actors, would we have caught on so quickly? I seriously doubt it. Joe Schmo was billed as TV’s most elaborate experiment. But I suspect that the test subject wasn’t Matt. It was the audience and their insatiable appetite for these ridiculous shows. It ended up asking the question how real is reality television?
So-called “legitimate” reality shows cast their contestants based on how they want the flow of the show to go. That means conflict and sex appeal. Caricatures and personalities hamming it up for the camera is what we end up getting; Assholes, bitches, and wiry gay guys because they make for interesting TV. So while reality TV may not be scripted, it is rarely surprising because they fit the show around the people they pick.
And in my opinion, that’s what makes reality TV unreal. What is so real about reality TV when the members are hand-picked based on how big their boobs are, or how obnoxious they are? It’s all about demographics and positioning. Not about people. So why do people end up watching? It’s like the old journalistic mantra, “sex, sin and suffering”. “Will Cody fondle Chanrda’s boobs? Will Dylan get jealous? And who wound up fucking in the hot tub? Find out next week!”
And it took a fake reality show for us to figure that all out.