Models of (IM)Perfection: Parodic Refunctioning in Spike TV’s the Joe Schmo Show and Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Tale of Sir Thopas”

In August 2003, MTV Networks, a division of media giant Viacom, launched its newly formed network Spike TV. Touting itself as the “first network for men,”1 Spike TV offers a line-up of shows, movies, and reality programs geared to male viewers, including Star Trek, Most Extreme Challenge (MXC), CSI, and an extensive run of James Bond movies. It also offers a small selection of original programs that initially included Stan Lee’s Stripperella cartoon (starring the voice of Pamela Anderson) and the Ren and Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon. Its most popular early, original program was a reality program called The Joe Schmo Show. Debuting on 2 September 2003, the show garnered immediate attention from the press and on-line blogs, largely because it billed itself as a faux reality program. In fact, Joe Schmo is a parody of contest-based reality shows, created to appeal specifically to a male audience. While the parody in Joe Schmo generates humor, it surpasses comedy for entertainment’s sake to offer self-consciously, through metafiction, a critique of reality programs and their viewers. In blatantly exposing the mechanics of reality TV, the show draws attention to the fictionality inherent in all reality TV. Joe Schmo’s critical use of metafictional parody recalls Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century “Tale of Sir Thopas,” a parodic rendering of Middle English romance. Like the creators of Joe Schmo, Chaucer self-consciously employs metafictional parody as a means to critique a popular genre, in this case Middle English romance, and the consumers of such texts.