There's a great article in the new Entertainment Weekly in which reporters interview a bunch of past reality-show participants about their experiences. And guess what? It turns out that on most of these shows, the "reality" is altered, shown out of context, even predetermined by the producers! (But you knew that part already.)
More to the point, you've probably been wondering what happened to the stars of The Joe Schmo Show and Joe Millionaire after their brushes with fame came to an end. Well, now we know that too, and it isn't pretty:
Matt Kennedy Gould, who eventually learned that the entire point of Spike TV's The Joe Schmo Show was to fool him into thinking he was on a "real" Big Brother-style contest, seemed to have a good sense of humor about the whole thing. But afterward, life wasn't so great:
"If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't do the show at all. Honestly, the show really made me feel dumb.... And after the show I got $100,000 and signed a development deal with Spike. I went to California, and I was supposed to do all this stuff, and I just didn't do it. I was so embarrassed about the whole premise of the show that I never wanted people to think, 'Oh, here's this guy who didn't even know the show was about him. It's a big joke, and now he's some reality star trying to be a TV host.' So I holed up in an apartment in Santa Monica, and spent a lot of the money on marijuana and alcohol. I lived there with a girl who broke up with me. The next day I flushed a half ounce of pot down the toilet, packed my car, came home to Pittsburgh, and I got help."
Meanwhile, the whole point of Fox's The Bachelor satire Joe Millionaire was to fool women into wanting to be with Evan Marriott because they thought he was rich, even though he wasn't. And since then, he hasn't done too well with the ladies:
"They needed a guy that was in construction but didn't have kids.... They said they would pay me $50,000, and I said, 'Where do I sign?' I wasn't looking for the love of my life. But I picked the best girl of the 20 they gave me to choose from. We got back to America and I've never seen the girl since, except for the reunion show.... It absolutely destroyed [my dating life]. I can't tell you how many numbers I get where the girl doesn't want to date, she just wants to have me call so she can tell her friends, 'Oh, that guy Evan Marriott — because he did that to those girls — I blew him off when he called for a date.' "
The moral of these stories? Don't ever go on a reality show. Unless, of course, you want to be famous for doing nothing, and make a lot of money without working. But how many people like that can there possibly be?
Photo of Evan Marriott: Entertainment Weekly
Previously:
Video Weekend: Top 7 Reality-Show Contestants Who Weren't There To Make Friends