Watch The Joe Schmo Show $100,000 prize by surviving humiliating trials and those inevitable,

Watch Spike TV tonight for The Joe Schmo Show marathon starting at 1 pm EST.

The Joe Schmo Show was a reality TV show parody in September 2003. The targets, “regular schmoes” such as Matt Kennedy Gould, were led to believe that they were contestants on reality shows. Unbeknownst to the show’s main characters, everyone else on the show, including the host, is actually an actor. The show itself is in fact an elaborate hoax designed to elicit comedic reactions from them.

Spike TV’s first season of The Joe Schmo Show is a real-life variation on the Jim Carrey comedy The Truman Show, in which Carrey played a man unaware he is the star of a television series, living on an enormous set and surrounded by actors playing family, co-workers, neighbors, etc. 

Joe Schmo fools a gregarious, likable 27-year-old fellow, Matt Kennedy Gould, into believing he’s part of the cast of a reality-TV program called Lap of Luxury, competing for a $100,000 prize by surviving humiliating trials and those inevitable, once-per-week evictions of unlucky contestants. What Gould doesn’t know is that his competitors–all living in the same house under the watchful eye of an ubiquitous production crew–are all actors playing sundry reality-TV stereotypes: the token gay guy, the good-looking sweetheart, the good-looking bitch, the clown, Mr. Macho, the borderline-pariah, etc.