The Joe Schmo Show 4—which filmed in 2022—will finally, actually be on TV

TBS’s revival of The Joe Schmo Show for a fourth season finally has a premiere date: Jan. 21, 2025.

That’s a day that seemed like it might never actually arrive, as the revival, hosted by So You Think You Can Dance’s Cat Deeley, actually filmed way back in late spring/early summer 2022.

TBS announced the revival in May 2023 and released a full trailer.

Some thought the show’s return was a response to the conceptually similar Jury Duty, which was released a month earlier, in April. But as the trailer for The Joe Schmo Show season four indicated, filming was long over.

So why the delay, exactly? The absolute lack of information has led to a lot of speculation. (In January 2024, I reached out to Warner Bros. Discovery publicity to ask about its status, and never received a reply.

In August, Warner Bros. Discovery announced that it was taking a $9.1 billion write-down on its cable networks, including TBS, which was the company saying that they are now “were worth $9 billion less than they were just two years ago,” as the L.A. Times put it.

That was just another nail in the Hellraiser face that is Warner Bros. Discovery’s coffin. Since the two companies merged, things have mostly been a disaster, except probably for whoever’s getting rich off of it.

Warner Bros. has, infamously, trashed shows and even completed projects, like Batgirl, to get big, juicy tax breaks. Was that what happened to The Joe Schmo Show? Did someone see it—it’s now produced by Big Brother production company Fly On The Wall Entertainment—and decide it was garbage and would never be seen?

Or was there an issue with the fake show-within-a-show? It’s called The Goat—and Amazon Prime Video had a reality TV show called The Goat that it released this year. (It was not very good, alas.) The trailer is heavy on goats. Are they the same show? Was Amazon pissed?

The star of TBS’s The Joe Schmo Show 4, Ben, with an actual goat, while competing on a fake show called The Goat.

A person who identifies themselves as a post-production producer/writer on both The Joe Schmo Show and The Goat posted anonymously on a message board and said no: “The similarities are just a coincidence”.

That person also said that, at one point, Fly on the Wall was “pushing TBS to make an official declaration that they are not going to air it, and if that happens, the production company would be able to shop it to other networks.” They also predicted—now we know, incorrectly—that it’d been written off on TBS’s taxes.

What the post makes clear is that even people who worked on the show had no idea what happened to it—a very strange fate indeed. Interestingly, the person also wrote this:

it is the BEST, funniest, most heartfelt and outright beautiful show I have ever worked on. The Joe, Ben Frisone, is the most lovable, charming and clever dude who kept us on our toes. The episodes were being rewritten the night before shooting because he kept almost figuring us out. The series had the most incredible arc over the course of ten episodes. We were all in tears during the finale. I am so heartbroken that it still hasn’t seen the light of day.

[…]

Also, in the same way season 1 had future stars like Kristin Wiig and Rickety Cricket (can’t remember his name lol), some of the cast of this are INSANELY talented and will definitely be famous one day. I’m hoping one or more of them blow up soon and put pressure on the powers that be to release their “lost” show. My money’s on Zack Zucker, whose standup variety show Stamptown has been selling out venues all over the world. Many of the cast members are part of LA’s clowning community, an incredibly committed group of performers.

Anyway, that’s all the insight I have! It boggles my mind that they wouldn’t release this completed show, especially after the success of Jury Duty.

That’s great to hear. The original Joe Schmo Show was brilliant TV that produced an unlikely hero in Matt, and gave Kristen Wiig her first TV role.

It sounds like season four, with an entirely different producing team, might actually recapture that magic. However, one person who interacted with the production wasn’t impressed.

That’s original Joe Schmo Show host Ralph Garman, who said in a 2023 THR interview that more than a year earlier, in April 2022, showrunner Dave Kneebone “called me and said they were bringing it back, and that they weren’t interested in having me host again, which was obviously disappointing. But they had an idea where they wanted to do a cameo appearance with me in the new show. Obviously, I was a little crestfallen because I was hoping to come back in my usual capacity.”

Cat Deeley will host The Joe Schmo Show 4, and its fake show-within-a-show, The Goat

Despite being rejected as host, Garman said he’d consider the cameo, and Kneebone told him, “Well, we have to know sooner than later because we are already in production, and we’re coming up at the end of filming.” Garman said the production should talk to go to his managers with an offer, but they never heard from anyone.

Until, that is, a production assistant called Garman—about 10 days after the call with the showrunner—and said, “Hey, Ralph, we have to get you tested for COVID because you’re shooting tomorrow.”

He had no idea; again, he hadn’t heard from anyone. Garman said “I don’t know where the breakdown in communication was, but they came back with an offer, which, frankly, was adding insult to injury,” so he declined. “There didn’t really seem to have been too much effort or thought put into my involvement.”

Let’s hope there was more effort and thought put into the show itself.