Gould was playing basketball with friends at a Jewish Community Center in the South Hills section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania when a casting director for SpikeTV's The Joe Schmo Show spotted him. Gould auditioned for the show, and was selected as its main protagonist.
As far as Gould was concerned, he was competing in the reality show Lap of Luxury for a $100,000 prize to be awarded to the winner. At the end of each show, one of the show's actors-contestants was evicted. Halfway through the season, an older contestant with whom Gould had bonded was "voted" off the show, causing Gould to break down and begin questioning whether voting off friends was worth monetary gain. Matters were complicated the following day when Gould accidentally injured one of the actors, Kristen Wiig, later of SNL fame, in a sumo wrestling contest. Upon Wiig's return to the show, Gould insisted on giving the contest's prize to Wiig. Gould's acts of vulnerability in the former instance, and generosity in the latter, caused the producers to shift the show's focus and tone significantly away from mockery and towards praise.
The truth was revealed to Gould in the season's finale, which garnered the most viewers for SpikeTV for a non-wrestling show to that point. Gould received the $100,000 prize for which he was "competing," along with a plasma television and separate vacations to Tahiti and to a spa resort. Upon the truth being revealed, Gould cried out, "What is going on?!?" Spike TV would later air this cry at the end of its other original productions.
When asked about whether he had ever intuited the truth, Gould said that he "just chalk everything up to the oddities of reality television" and that he thought he "was on the weirdest reality show in history of mankind."
In August 2008, Entertainment Weekly interviewed Gould about his experiences on the show. Gould said that the show made him feel "dumb" and that he "wouldn't do the show at all" if he was given the choice whether or not to do it again.
Read more about this topic: Matt Kennedy Gould
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