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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...

Back in 2003, in the heyday of reality television, Spike TV gave the world The Joe Schmo Show. It was a parody of the genre through the lens of one unsuspecting individual who believed he was on a real series called “The Lap of Luxury,” sort of like The Truman Show. Aside from Matt Kennedy Gould, the rest of the cast was in on the hoax. The other individuals, all trained improv actors, played into well-known reality TV archetypes, including Dr. Pat the Quack. One actress was exceptional and quite neurotic because she was nervous about blowing up the plan. Little did we know then that this incredible improv actress was future comedy star and Saturday Night Live legend Kristen Wiig.

truTV, which recently rebranded itself to focus more on comedy and less on fakery, has announced that it's ordered a new prank show executive produced by David Spade. This isn't another hidden camera series, however. Instead, "Fameless" will make its cameras very visible. It's a series that the network describes as "half sketch show/half prank show," one that "will take a lighthearted look at how far people will go to be famous." What that means is this: a group of actors and improvisers will create a fake show, like an SNL sketch, but then play it out with a real person as one of the contestants. David Spade, who's also going to be in the return of "Joe Dirt" this summer, will appear at least once in the series, which is produced by Electus. If this sounds familiar, that's probably because it sounds a lot like "The Joe Schmo Show,...

After weeks of watching Chase Rogan truly earn his “good guy” title on Joe Schmo: The Full Bounty, the time had finally come to reveal to this year’s “Joe Schmo” that the show he was on was, in fact, fake. But as fans of the series reveled in Rogan’s tearful response to news, one question continued to linger: Could they do it again? Is a season 4 possible?

The return of The Joe Schmo Show on Spike in 2013 was, for fans of the series at least, something they thought would never happen. When the show first premiered in 2003, Matt Kennedy Gould, the original “Schmo”, participated in a show he thought was called Lap of Luxury where, like with The Full Bounty, Ralph Garman as well as a stable of actors (including ...

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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 sucked big time, but Spike's The Joe Schmo Show perfected the genre by making Matt Kennedy Gould think he was...