‘The Joe Schmo Show’ Has A Whole New Joe

Sometime between The Truman Show and Jury Duty, the Spike cable network premiered The Joe Schmo Show. It was 2003, and reality TV was in a boom time where no premise was too outlandish. You could feed contestants testicles or chain them together or drop them in a foreign location to try to find their way back to the U.S., and no one would have you arrested. Schmo did something more daring than any other show in its class: It showed the viewer it was completely fake.

In the first season, Matt Kennedy Gould believed he had been cast on a Big Brother-ish show called Lap of Luxury. In fact, he was the only person involved in The Joe Schmo Show who didn’t know he was the main character of the universe, at least as far as the production was concerned. Everyone he interacted with was an improv actor playing out loosely scripted scenarios to film Gould’s unguarded reactions. (Some were actors you may now know: David Hornsby — Rickety Cricket of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and David Brittlesbee of Mythic Quest, played Steve, the cast asshole; Kristen Wiig played Dr. Pat Lane, a marriage counselor dispensing highly suspect advice.) Part of the fun for the viewer was seeing how producers tweaked their plans on the fly to accommodate Gould’s genuine sweetness and likability. To avoid detection by savvy marks, subsequent seasons spoofed shows like The Bachelor and (loosely) Dog the Bounty Hunter, but the Schmo banner hasn’t flown in over a decade — until now.

In this latest iteration, Ben Frisone — a 28-year-old from the Baltimore area who works as an electrician for the county — finds himself in the cast of The GOAT. Though he’s never heard of the show, his fellow contestants tell him it’s a 25-season Korean sensation débuting in the U.S. for the first time, and they sure seem familiar with all its gameplay and lore! Though Frisone is supposed to be thrown off by a chaotic opening challenge after which one rule violator named Barbara is immediately eliminated from the game and marched out screaming, one of the first things he says to the group is that he’s sure she was an actor. 

Producers see that Frisone is sharper than they’d anticipated, and we get a cut to the control room as they scramble to direct the actors around Frisone to start making their performances MUCH smaller. Still, they can’t switch up everything on a dime, and before long, Frisone is at the Denouncement Ceremony, looking at crude caricatures of all the contestants painted on symbolic vases, waiting to see whose will be smashed by the Holder of the Horns while the two nominees look on from Capricorn’s Clamps.

I talked to Frisone last week about his casting on the show, one food-based threat he issued to an annoying fellow contestant and how it is that we keep hearing The GOAT is a fake show when there actually is a real one. 

How did this opportunity come along?

I met a girl online, and she turned out to be a recruiter. She was very interested in the fact that I was just a normal dude with a blue-collar job. She was like, “Would you be interested in being on a reality television show?” I was like, “Yeah, why not? It sounds fun.” I wasn’t avidly looking to get on a show, but she was like, “I’m going to send a picture of you to these people and see if they like your look.” I was like, “Sure, go for it.”

How long was the process of getting you on the show?

It was quite a while. I did a good amount of Zoom interviews. We did an IQ test. We met with a therapist. It was a lot of screening. I’d say it was at least a couple of months.

Were you surprised to have to take an IQ test?

Yeah. I looked up what the IQ test was, though. It was an older version. The main goal of the test was to make sure that the person, whatever they answer here, they stick with that answer later on. I probably didn’t do too well on the IQ test, so they were like, “All right, we can totally fool this dummy.”

Where were you online when you met this recruiter?

I was on a dating app.

That explains why you say in the first episode that you thought it was going to be a romance show. You say in the premiere that you were relieved that it wasn’t, but how relieved were you really?

I think I said that after I had got in the house and noticed that there was an old person there (senior citizen contestant “Agnes”). I’m not opposed to dating shows, I guess, but I do like to compete.

On your Instagram, at least one of your co-stars — Zach Zucker, who plays “Ryan” the YouTuber — commented on one of your posts two years ago. How long has it been since you shot the show?

The show got shot a little over two years ago now. COVID was still a thing.

That also makes sense, because there’s all this talk of your version of The GOAT not being a real show, but since then there has been a real show with that title. Jury Duty wasn’t out then either, but have you seen it since?

I have. I like it. It’s funny, because I feel like I did the same thing everybody does — I’m like, “Man, I totally would’ve known.” It’s a little more tame than our show is, but it was good.

But maybe you really would have known! You immediately suspect Barbara as an actor. Other than what we see on camera — that she’s very over-the-top — did anything else happen that made you think something was up with her?

Just the way she was acting, I was like, “Whoa, that’s a little weird.” I don’t know, something just wasn’t right.

Jonathan Lipnicki, who plays “himself,” is just one of the actors who says in a confessional that he hopes you guys can be friends after all this. Were you still on friendly terms once the truth came out?

Oh, yeah, that all blew over within an instant. I mean, it is what it is. The show’s hilarious. There’s no hard feelings. It’s not like they’re making fun of me the whole time — not in a mean way, at least. We’re all friends. We stay in touch.

Based on what we see right from the start, you’re competing really hard.

I took the challenges pretty seriously, actually. One of the things they said at the end was, “Man, we didn’t think you’d be so competitive.” It’s funny. You don’t think you will either until you’re on the show and you’re in the situation, then you really want to win.

There’s a lot of joking about the vase caricatures, and it does seem like yours is the least accurate. Did you feel confronted by it every time it came out?

No. When we’re in the Denouncement Ceremony, I’m reeling in my head because I’m like, “I’m going home. I’m about to get voted off. I know it.” People perceive me as a threat, so I’m not even in the mindset of laughing at a vase when they come out.

Well, “Jessica” (Chase Bernstein) is, and it seems to be a problem for the first few episodes. Was that something you noticed? She’s standing right in front of you in hysterics.

There was a point where I thought she was crying, but then we all laughed at the vases. Obviously, I noticed that the caricatures were all terrible. I don’t think I really thought anything about her laughing.

You were very young when the first season of The Joe Schmo Show aired. I have to assume this wasn’t something that was on your radar when you were eight, but have you seen it since?

I have. I really like the old Schmos. I think Season One’s probably my favorite Schmo, with Matt Kennedy Gould. Our show is new. They do a much better job at the whole production side of things.

Right, there’s more transparency.

It gives this fresh new perspective on how reality television works, on top of the fact that it’s also a joke on me.

I feel like it must have been hard for the actors not to focus on you and whatever you were doing. Did you ever feel like they were paying more attention to you than they were to each other?

There was a time when I remember saying to myself, “I’ve gotten a lot of camera time, so even if I get voted off, I think I’ll be a big character on this show.” They heard me say that, so then they reeled it in — they started interviewing other people more to make me think other people were getting that attention as well.

At one point Ryan starts really popping off obnoxiously, and the two of you have words. Where did your “I will eat you like a bowl of cereal” threat come from? This seems like a line that was made to be on T-shirts.

Gosh, I don’t know. I say weird stuff. I want to say that’s an original. I don’t think I heard it anywhere else, but it’s just because it’s so easy to eat a bowl of cereal. It’s just, like, a spoon. There’s no work to it. I’d have just dealt with him with no work.

We see you in the trailer eating grapes with a goat that was on the property and has his own secret assignment in the production. Talk about your bond with this animal.

Instant, in one word. Our bond was instant. I love animals. I have a cat now, Elijah. I named him after the goat.

Come on.

Yeah. I looked into Elijah the goat’s eyes to try to think of what it was that he was thinking about. I don’t know, we just hit it off. It was in the stars.

Is he a famous acting goat?

He is a famous goat. He’s big-time. He was in a Super Bowl commercial. I was just thinking about him, because — I’m not lying — if they sold him to me for a good price, I’d buy him.

Don’t you live in a condo?

I’d put him at my parents’ house. We’d figure it out.