The End of The Joe Schmo Show
This may seem strange, this may seem out of character but I'm going to write about watching the end of The Joe Schmo Show on Spike. For those who aren't familiar with it, its a reality show within a reality show. The twist, and there's always a twist, is that there's only one person who isn't in on it. There is one guy, only one out of the everybody who doesn't know that its all a fake.

Everyone else involved with the show is in on the joke.

And you could see how, at the end of the show when he just found out that it was all a huge and elaborate hoax. The instant when he learns about the true reality around him and realizes that he doesn't know the people, that they just tricked him mightily.

And really the best thing about watching it was realizing what an honestly nice and sincere and genuine guy the Schmo is. His real name is Matt Kennedy Gould, something the emcee says alot, always Matt Kennedy Gould. Watching him finally find out is a fascinating philosophical process, initial discovery followed by realization upon realization and the further push of actually winning a hundred thousand bucks and some other nifty cool stuff.

The follow up show about the making has been pretty interesting as well. The lengths that they all went to in order to carry out the charade, the morphing of the script in response to his own interactions. They had a general storyline to run but it could get a little outside the lines from time to time. And there's more and more, the heavy psychology of toying with his emotions and messing with who he was. The show should be run for college students and dissected.

Its really just an amazingly bizarre show. Watching and hearing him talk about the show now that its over is kind of freaky. I'd be interested to see how much time went by from the end of the show and the beginning of the aftermath part. A day or two filled with lots of explanations and meeting all of the these new strangers again.

Another pretty crazy aspect of the show is watching how the crew reacted, how they went from running the show to really being on Matt's team, experiencing his ups and downs with him. Sure, it smacks of The Truman Show but its a whole different exploration of it.

And the nicest part is that he really is just an incredibly nice and endearing guy. Shame he's such a big lover of basketball but so what, everyone's got their faults. And sure, there's that burning core of cynicism deep within me that pumps out thoughts like, "This guy's an actor too, he's just playing his part a bit longer. Its not even really fake real or fake reality or whatever." But I think I'm going to believe it anyway because I think I like to believe it. I like thinking that this guy really is as nice, as good as his character appears to be. That his true reaction to some of the situations they put him in was really who he was.

All I can say is watch it. It'll blow your mind.

I'll try to get back to the vitriol, the wild ranting and spam invectives now.