As part of the introduction of its new prime-time schedule for the 2004-05 season on Monday, NBC announced that this fall's upcoming fourth installment of its Average Joe series will move from the program's previous Mondays at 10PM time period to Tuesdays at 8PM ET/PT.
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Since the program will premiere as part of NBC's fall launch, the fourth Average Joe will have concluded by the end of the year and not have to worry about having to air against the January 2005 premiere of the fourth season of FOX's smash-hit American Idol franchise. Instead, NBC will leave that task to its new The Contender series, the latest reality competition show from Survivor and The Apprentice producer Mark Burnett.
Despite NBC's earlier announcement that its next Average Joe edition would feature a gender-reversed Plain Jane edition of the series, NBC executives at the schedule presentation refused to confirm that Average Joe: Plain Jane would the premise for the fall edition. "All we're going to say today is that Average Joe will be back and there is a twist and viewers will learn that twist in the fall," NBC President Jeff Zucker told Zap2It.com.
In April, NBC Primetime Development President Kevin Reilly had announced that Plain Jane would be produced by Andrew Glassman and Stuart Krasnow, the same folks behind the first three Average Joe series, and follow a similar pattern as the network's first two Joe installments, only with the program's gender roles reversed.
Instead of featuring a beautiful woman seeking love from among a group of average looking male suitors, Plain Jane was announced as featuring a muscular handsome man being romanced a group of normal looking women. As in the Melana Scantlin and Larissa Meek editions of the series, the hunky bachelor would be asked to look past the exterior and search for inner beauty -- with a similar assortment of twists, turns, and introduction of not-so average looking women expected as part of the series.