"The Joe Schmo Show" returns with a charming, skeptical mark forged in the age of disinformation

The namesake mark of the latest “The Joe Schmo Show” isn’t your “schmo” of 21 years ago. In 2003, the show found its first “Schmo” in Matthew Kennedy Gould, a law school dropout living at home with his mom and dad. 

Its latest is Ben Frisone, a 28-year-old Baltimore-based electrician who owns a condo and smiles sweetly as he admits he doesn’t have a girlfriend. Ben is very concerned about not disappointing his family. To that end, Ben promises to do smart things with his winnings if he comes out on top, “. . . and maybe [get] a kitten,” he adds.

His father Franco describes him as “good through and through,” which he effortlessly lives up to during the intense and entirely fake gameplay for “The Goat,” an American version of a South Korean series all the other competitors claim to know but he’s never heard of. 

Once Ben drops into “The Goat,” he’s surrounded by reality show archetypes. Among them are the physically impressive, charismatic frontrunner Braxton (not his real name), a YouTuber named Ryan (played by a stand-up comic), and former child actor Jonathan Lipnicki—the actual performer who co-starred in “Jerry Maguire”— playing himself as a “Hollywood d-bag."

“The Goat” is powered by physical contests, housemate rivalries and an elimination ceremony involving Illuminati-style capes and denouncements, with those nominated for elimination placed inside stocks called the Capricorn Clamps. None of it is real – not Ben’s fellow competitors, who are all improv actors, or the gameplay stakes.

With “So You Think You Can Dance” host Cat Deeley leading Ben down the proverbial garden path – one requiring both to dodge actual goat scat – the game show within “Joe Schmo” blunders along with enough realistic tropes to string Ben along . . .  just barely. The only real detail is that if Ben makes it through 10 days of this, he’ll get $100,000.

“The Joe Schmo Show” probably isn’t designed to run for multiple seasons in a row — something its creators Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick figured out in 2004 when the second season's “Jane Schmo” figured out its fake romantic competition “Last Chance for Love” was an empty suit. 

The conceit worked back then because the reality genre as we know it had not yet become a TV constant —“Last Chance for Love” was only two years younger than “The Bachelor” — and could only continue to work if it stayed off the air long enough for people to forget "The Joe Schmo Show" existed. It would be a few years before we’d drown in Bravo Housewives or TV would wash up on “Jersey Shore,” and another nine before Spike tried its hand at Schmoery again in 2013, luring a normal guy into a show about would-be bounty hunters (and an insufferable Lorenzo Lamas, an actor who played one on TV) challenged to track down faux fugitives. 

"The Joe Schmo Show" (Courtesy of TBS and Warner Bros. Discovery)

Resurrecting “Joe Schmo” again nearly 12 years after that is less of a response to fan demand than market trends. “Jury Duty,” Amazon Freevee’s unexpected hit from 2023, owes a substantial debt to the original “Joe Schmo Show,” proving that with a few tweaks, it could work again. 

But the world has changed drastically since the previous “Joe Schmo Show” seasons, and Ben proves this by demonstrating a level of distrust many of his predecessors didn’t. For example, the producers orchestrate Ben’s alliance with the most normal-seeming person there — a skilled gamer named Maya — without predicting he’d also find a kindred spirit in a conspiracy theorist called Charles Michael. That colors Ben as the quintessential 2025 American Everyman – he’s non-judgmental, not entirely immune to disinformation, but also questions behavior and developments that might have been plausible a decade ago. 

At just about every turn, our loveable “schmo” suspects that something about “The Goat” isn't on the up-and-up — even at one point outright declaring that the whole show must be an elaborate prank on him. It only takes a few assurances from people he’s put his trust in overnight – who, like "The Goat," are presenting themselves inauthentically – for him to keep playing along.

“Jury Duty” charmed viewers by setting up Ronald Gladden — the only real person not playing a character in the show — to be the hero. Its producers highlighted his kind qualities while setting soft moral tests before him to see what he would do. Some were no-brainers; nobody in their right mind would agree to jump on the end of someone’s bed to help facilitate coitus. 

Regardless, Gladden naturally did the right thing every time. At the finale's reveal, one of the main performers spelled that out and hailed him for it. “Jury Duty” creators Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky worked together on “The Office," structuring “Jury Duty” to follow a sitcom’s blueprint. They made him the sane man in an elaborate joke that co-starred James Marsden playing a self-involved yet somehow likable parody of himself.

"The Joe Schmo Show" (Courtesy of TBS and Warner Bros. Discovery)

Upraising Gladden’s goodness as a guiding force made the comedy funnier and naturally sweetened the show in a way that even won over cynics. It reminded viewers that the world might not be as meanspirited and dour as our politics leads us to believe.

Those who weren't charmed by “Jury Duty" saw in it a few similarities to the way the original "Joe Schmo Show" played up its target's gullibility. That this sourness tinges the latest “Joe Schmo Show” may be unavoidable. It isn’t a mockumentary about a civics process, it’s a satire that throws elements of “Big Brother” and “The Traitors,” shows that encourage duplicity, along with a prop element from the South Korean competition series “Physical 100,” into a blender.

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But Reese and Wernick, along with showrunner Dave Kneebone (who worked on “The Eric Andre Show” and “Nathan for You”), promote Ben’s accepting nature as a winsome character trait while turning the camera on the extent to which reality production teams manipulate outcomes. 

Ben understands classic reality TV strategies and reacts to the producers’ engineered plots by doing the math and planning his moves accordingly. (There are other unplanned chef's kiss moments too, such as when he reacts to a fake confrontation between two other housemates by yelling an adorable "threat" no one believes he'll act on.) They plan for him to succeed or fail at certain junctures but don’t fully take into account what he’s wired to question along the way. In fact, he so frequently challenges the producers to concoct new plans on the fly that they're drawn into an actual competition they cannot lose with the man they're trying to fool. 

That makes this latest “Joe Schmo” a cleaner fun than the version previous seasons presented, even if it doesn’t warm our hearts like “Jury Duty” does. Instead, it proposes we cheer for a game rigged in favor of the good guy, something we see less and less of these days. 

"The Joe Schmo Show" airs at 9 p.m. Tuesdays starting January 21 on TBS.