Spike TV has announced that the second season of its hit The Joe Schmo Show reality series will premiere June 15. And this time Joe will be bringing along a girl.
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According to the show's producers, as we speculated back in February when the second season was first announced, the satirical Joe Schmo 2 will parody the reality dating show genre. "My wife's made me watch seven straight relationship shows, and this is my ultimate revenge," series co-creator Paul Wernick joked to Daily Variety. "We know that guys despise reality relationship shows, so what better genre to mess with on behalf of guys everywhere," added Kevin Kay, Spike TV's executive vice president of programming and production.
Similar to last season, Joe Schmo will once again center around an elaborate prank being played on a person who believes they are competing on a new upcoming reality show, when in actuality the jokes on them and the rest of the show's "contestants" are paid improv actors manipulating the contestant through a series of contrived Truman Show-like scenarios. Only this time, instead of centering around a single contestant like last season's Matt Kennedy Gould who believed he was competing on a Big Brother-like fake reality show named the Lap Of Luxury, Schmo 2 will center around two people who believe they are competing along with eight other contestants on a new Bachelor-like reality show named Last Chance for Love.
Filmed in an Agoura Hills, CA mansion, the show will once again be fronted by actor Ralph Garman, who will be playing a fictional arrogant British host named Derek Newcastle.
"We basically skewer every show you can imagine. There's even a little Blind Date and a little My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance in there," David Stanley, another of the program's executive producers, commented to Variety. Which given that in many ways Fiance itself was a member of the second wave of reality parody show programming that was at least partly inspired by Joe Schmo's first season, once again demonstrates that's all fair in love and war... and reality programming.