Tuesday TV Touchbase: The Joe Schmo Show

Today is April 1st which is April Fool's Day, a day known for pranks and deceptions. So appropriately enough, today's Tuesday TV Touchbase is about a television show centered around an elaborate prank.

One genre of TV that you will not typically find on the Touchbase is so called "reality TV" or "reality competition shows". 

But during that time in the evening when Andrea and I seek to kill our last remaining brain cell with ubiquitous reruns of Big Bang Theory on TBS, it was impossible to avoid promos for a show called The Joe Schmo Show. 

The premise of this series is that a person is selected to compete in a reality TV show, completely unaware that all the other contestants are actors playing archetypes of reality show stars and the show is scripted to center around that person who is not an actor. 

In this case of this season of The Joe Schmo Show, that person was Ben Frisone from Baltimore, Maryland.

This is NOT the first go 'round for The Joe Schmo Show; the series ran for 2 seasons on what was then the Spike TV channel and returned for 1 more season in 2013.  

For this 4th iteration of  The Joe Schmo Show, Ben has been selected to compete in a reality competition series called "The Goat USA", an American version of a show that is very popular in South Korea.  😏

(No, it's not. The whole thing is made up!) 

Ben has to compete in a series of stunts and challenges to win the grand prize of $100,000. 

Ben has no idea he is the only person on the show who is NOT an actor.

The only person other than Ben who is using their real name is the host of "The Goat USA", British TV presenter Cat Deeley. 

In addition to the actors pretending to be competitors, there is also a back room of directors and writers watching everything and making changes on the fly in case Ben doesn't do what they expect him to do.  

Now I will be honest, I did not watch this show but I was intrigued enough by what I knew through my powers as "Media Man"* to want to see how this plays out.

*"Media Man" has the power to described the plots and premises of movies and TV shows he has not seen before. 

So I watched the season finale of a TV show I had not previously watched.  

I was able to pick up the basics of what had gone before pretty quickly.  

"The Goat USA" has an actual goat and Ben is "the goatkeeper" who has formed a bond with the goat.

Speaking of forming bonds, Ben is really close to Maya, the "gamer girl" archetype. In the B-roll  confessional, actor Natasha Mercado who plays Maya seems a bit worried about how Ben is going to react when the scam is revealed. She kind of likes the big lug and it seems he's quite fond of her as well. 

Well, this is gonna be quite awkward, ain't it? 

Of course, the end of competition on "The Goat USA" ends with Ben and Maya as the two finalists.  The other competitors will vote for which of the two will be the final winner by "the festooning of the baubles" on the horns of a giant goat head.

Of course "the festooning of the baubles" ends in a tie which is not allowed. According to the rules, in the case of a tie, the final arbiter of who wins is...  the goatkeeper. 

To quote Ben, "That's some messed up shit!" 

In a big dramatic moment, Ben select Maya as the winner of "The Goat USA"!

Then slowly and carefully, host Cat Deeley begins to raise the curtain for Ben to finally see the truth. 

• There is not a show called "The Goat USA". 
• Ben is actually on a show called The Joe Schmo Show.
• And everyone around him is an actor.
• Yes, even Maya. 

And Ben's reaction is well.... kind of anti-climatic.

Yes, he's gobsmacked by the revelation that this whole thing was a big fake out but he seems to roll with it with a large degree of equanamity.  And perhaps the reveal that "The Goat USA" is a fake is the first thing about "The Goat USA" that really made sense. 

It is a profoundly absurd show and there was a point earlier where Ben wondered if this was some sort of prank on him. The writers had to really scramble to get him away from that line of thinking. 

Ben is a really nice guy and these actors have come to genuinely like him.  So the roll out of the reveals is incremental as the actors tell Ben how much they really like him so please don't kill us.  

It also helps to ease the blow that Ben is going to get $200,000 instead of $100,000.  Yeah, that's more money but still seems anti-climatic. If the producers had found $50,000 more in the budget, then Ben's prize could've been described as a quarter of a million which would've been more dramatic.  

The show ends with a montage that shows Ben and the cast hanging out afterwards.  So yay, they're still friends.

At least for that photo shoot.  

That is that for this week's Touchbase 

Until next time, remember to be good to one another and try to keep it down in there, would ya? I'm trying to watch TV over here.