From our perspective, the most important person on Season 4 of The Joe Schmo Show was Ben Frisbone. After all, the Baltimore native was the center of the most "scripted unscripted" show on television, as an entire reality series was fabricated and staffed with actors to make him believe it was completely real.
Behind the scenes, though, was a man perhaps even more important than the on-screen character: Dave Kneebone. The executive producer has cut his teeth on absurdist comedy, having worked on Comedy Bang! Bang!, Nathan for You, and Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! But Joe Schmo was his first foray into something completely different, his first "reality" series. But, for this tightrope act, he was supported on both sides by reality TV veterans: Big Brother showrunners Allison Grodner and Rich Meehan.
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"It was playing with an extra ace in your deck," Kneebone tells Parade in an exclusive interview. "Because they come with so much experience. They've seen it all, literally. They've seen it all in terms of how house competition reality shows work, about how the casting process works. They are the top of the class in terms of being veterans in this space, which was new to me. So I relied heavily on their guidance throughout the entire process."
Indeed, it only seems appropriate that a duo behind a show that teaches us to "expect the unexpected" help handle the many curveballs from all sides of The Joe Schmo Show. And, after 9 episodes of fake alliances, one wood chipper incident, and plenty of nonsense goat lore, it all culminated in one final moment. Through a convoluted jury vote and tiebreaker, Ben had been given the solitary power to determine who would get the $100,000 prize: Himself, or his closest ally "Maya" (AKA Natasha Mercado). In a true moment of selflessness, Ben chose to give the money to his opponent. And, according to Kneebone, the outcome was never in doubt.
"Everything was riding on the fact that he was going to do this thing and give away the victory," he reveals. "It was Rich Meehan's idea, ultimately, to put the token there with this vase. Assuming that he did this heroic thing, which is to give away the victory to his ally, then he would find this token. Based on kind of the guy he was like, I had full confidence in him by the end of the time. He's a real stand-up guy. As much as in a modern world, things like honor and being a hero, we think of as ephemeral and fake and not really present in this world. But you look at Ben in that moment, over those 10 days, and I knew that this guy had the makings of a hero, or we wouldn't have been there with him. And so we didn't know until the end. But I was confident. I felt that he would do the right thing."
Read on for our full conversation with The Joe Schmo Show showrunner Dave Kneebone.
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So you primarily work in the world of scripted television. How did you get brought onto an unscripted project like The Joe Schmo Show, and what was your reaction upon getting the offer?I come primarily from a scripted background. I'm affiliated with Abso Lutely Productions and Tim and Eric and kind of absurdist sketch over the years in. About 10 or 12 years ago, we were involved in a show called Nathan for You, which was kind of a hybrid. It was very scripted in terms of like, "Here's our objective, we're going to go pull off this big stunt." But dealing a lot with the kind of unknown and interacting with real people and in uncertain ways. So that was sort of my getting my feet wet in how to do big social experiments and how to pull off a production like this. And when TBS and Viacom started talking about bringing the show back, I think they were like, "This is great." There was a lot of enthusiasm. The show's creators, who went on to create Deadpool, were busy. They were doing the Deadpool & Wolverine movie. And there was a search for a producer with experience, both comedically and dealing with social experiment, unscripted stuff, to come in and help kind of be the creative cattle prod in the project. And that's where my name came up, through friendships that I had at TBS. And so they were looking around for somebody who would be willing to try it. Because it's such a high-stakes, kind of terrifying tightrope walk to make a show like this. And I think a lot of sensible people would say, "No way. That's insane."What was the biggest thing that surprised you about working on The Joe Schmo Show versus the expectations you had going in?Well, the casting was a huge thing for me. The kind of extensive nature of the casting process was surprising as we went along with it. Because you have to really search. As soon as you start looking for the right person to be your Joe Schmo, you realize how difficult it is to find the ideal Joe Schmo. Because you can't bring somebody on to this show who wants to be on a reality television show, right? You have to snare somebody who is who is not looking to be on a dating show or a competition show. Because we're looking for a certain kind of human quality in this person that we found in Ben. And Ben was one of many, many, many, many, many, many people that we looked at. But almost immediately, when we started looking to Ben. It was, "Oh, this guy feels he feels familiar. He feels like me or my brother or a friend of mine, and a good guy." And so that immediately I was like, "This guy feels special." And that process was a long and painstaking process, because you've got to get it right. You got to get that piece of it right, because the whole show sinks or swims on Ben.While this was your first time working on a reality show, you had some big names supporting you in the form of Fly on the Wall Productions. They're headed up by Allison Grodner and Rich Meehan, who are the veteran showrunners of Big Brother. What was it like working with them?It was playing with an extra ace in your deck. Because they come with so much experience. They've seen it all, literally. They've seen it all in terms of how house competition reality shows work, about how the casting process works. They are the top of the class in terms of being veterans in this space which was new to me. So I relied heavily on their guidance throughout the entire process. Like designing the games. We were very diligent about, "How do the alliances within the house work?" And Rich and Allison have an incredible mind for how those things operate. And it was just it was like going to a master's degree program in reality show television.It gets referenced a handful of times throughout the show that you had a "writers' room," planning out what would happen that day. What was the process like of "writing" the show, and changing things on the fly based on how Ben reacted?So any show like this is fairly scripted, even in its unscripted nature. You know that certain points have to happen for comedic effect, for dramatic effect, for tension. And so we would write to those moments. "In Episode 3, there's this big moment that happens. In Episode 5, this big moment happens." And so we would write around there. What can each character bring to this scene, or this moment, or this kind of dramatic arc? And then we would drop lines. We would drop scenarios. We also had the benefit of working with some of the greatest improv performers and comedians in LA to make this. And so we were in great hands on the actor side. There is just so much natural talent in that house. The writing skills, particular to this show are people who are funny, who are good at building funny scenarios. And so it's not even like funny dialogue writing. It's funny scenarios. This person and this person in this conflict, that's a funny thing, and then we figure out how to make that transpire. And so Dan Swimer is a veteran of Sasha Baron Cohen's projects. Bri LeRose worked in the writers' room on Arrested Development, which, though scripted, has that feeling of an unscripted documentary. And Chad Damiani, who is also in the writers' room, is one of the great modern clown and improv comedians in Los Angeles. So we just had a real Swiss Army Knife approach to how to write the show.You talk about casting. When and how did Jonathan Lipnicki get involved in the project?[Laughs.] It's so funny. From the earliest iterations of the pitch deck. I think the idea came from Rich and Allison probably originally that, in the kind of early pitch materials, "Some celebrity is in there. Wouldn't it be funny if it was Jonathan Lipnicki, the kid from Jerry Maguire?" And I thought, "Yeah, that's pretty good," and we left that just kind of in the deck. And then we got later on in the process, we're like, "Oh, we have to actually cast this character now. Who should that be?" And right away, we're all like, "Well, let's call Jonathan Lipnicki!" And so I did, and I called his reps and a day later, he was on. We were on a Zoom and we were talking, and he immediately got it. He thought it was funny. He started improvising around the kind of tropes of the character, of being this douchebaggy, kind of creepy Hollywood guy. He was so wonderful at it. By the way, he's the most lovely guy. He's incredible, and so. And because he's an established actor, he's a famous guy, we assumed, "Okay, we got him for one episode." By the time he was done with this episode, we're like, "We should have written him in longer," because he was great. And I think he would have stuck around and done a bunch more of the show, probably. But yeah, he was always the guy, and we just went and got him. It was a stroke of luck.Admittedly, this is a bit of a loaded question. But what surprised you the most about how things played out this season?Well, two things really. One is immediately, once we got him into the world. So when you're when you're creating a reality for someone, you're building, building, building. And then at some point, you're like, "Okay, he is fully immersed in this world. Now we can really go with the silly comedy stuff." Once he really bought in, it was immediately evident to us how competitive and how much of a game player he was. And we were not prepared for that. We didn't realize how competitive and how committed to winning this fake game show he would be. Because, remind you, he wasn't looking to be on a game show. He didn't know what he was signing up for. It just so happens that we accidentally cast this guy who was ultra-competitive. We're like, "Oh crap." Day one, we really were sending people back to the writers' room to get in front of him, because he was thinking two steps ahead of us. That's genuine. And then the other thing was we had him in our world, and he was buying into the characters, and he was really playing the game. He caught us out on when we did some dumb things. Like with the wood chipper episode, that was a silly idea. From the get-go, we were trying something. We thought this might work. This might go badly, and he called it out directly. "This is a prank show on me." You could have heard a pin drop in the control room. It was the most hair-raising stressful moment of my life, for sure. Because this is millions of dollars. We are halfway through this production. There are a lot of people whose jobs are here, counting on the fact that this guy doesn't blow up the show today. And so having to walk him back into the mindset of the show after he fully was like, "This is a fake show and it's all prank on me," that's the worst case scenario. And so, to me, that was the adjusting there and bringing him back into that world took a lot of very quick thinking and a lot of really great performing on the on the part of our cast members. But we were able to save it. He got back in and, by the end of the day, he was back on track. But that was a terrifying moment for sure.So you're able to lead Ben all the way to the finale. And you present him with a choice: Give the money to himself, or his closest ally. Were you surprised at what he ultimately did? Did you have tokens in both of those urns just in case?There wasn't a token in both urns. Everything was riding on the fact that he was going to do this thing and give away the victory. The long version of this is I was vehement that he has to find a token, because he was looking for those tokens so hard, and there weren't any tokens to be found unless I handed one to you. So I want him to have the satisfaction of finding a token. And it was Rich Meehan's idea, ultimately, to put the token there with this vase. Assuming that he did this heroic thing, which is to give away the victory to his ally, then he would find this token. And so there was a lot of people very tense, "Is he going to do the right thing?" right up until the moment that he did it. But we knew, based on kind of the guy he was like, I had full confidence in him by the end of the time. He's a real stand-up guy. As much as in a modern world, things like honor and being a hero, we think of as ephemeral and fake and not really present in this world. But you look at Ben in that moment, over those 10 days, and I knew that this guy had the makings of a hero, or we wouldn't have been there with him. And so we didn't know until the end. But I was confident. I felt it that he would do the right thing.I mean, that's the show in a nutshell, right? You're not manufacturing an outcome, but you're trying to guide this person to make the decision that you want.We do our best to kind of steer him down this road. But he's his own man at the end of the day. And he would have been fully, by the way, fully within his right to say, "It was a great game. Maya, sorry" and take the money and run. You couldn't really blame him. But we knew, and I hoped, we had built this thing to say, "But there's something better in store for you if you do this unbelievably kind of selfless thing."Lastly, let's say The Joe Schmo Show gets renewed for another season. Would you be interested in working on it again, and is there a genre of reality show you would want to spoof next time around?Oh yeah. If they called me again to do this, first off, I would have to take a meditation retreat someplace and calm myself down and get in the right emotional headspace. Because it is such a roller coaster and stressful roller coaster. But I would love to do another one of these. And we do have a really great idea for what that would be. But I'm not going to tell you what it is. It would be amazing. It would be different.
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