Lisa Fredrickson ditched her Seattle day job more than 30 years ago for a career as an improv actor/teacher. Then in 2021 she undertook her strangest role yet: acting in Season 4 of “The Joe Schmo Show.”
“Joe Schmo,” which previously aired in 2003, 2004 and 2013, was the original faux reality competition years before Prime Video had success in 2023 with “Jury Duty.”
In “Joe Schmo,” the unsuspecting Schmo is a regular Joe or Jane who thinks they’ve entered a reality competition show — this time it’s the first American season of a supposed Korean import called “The GOAT” — but all the other contestants are actually actors performing for the benefit of the Schmo.
For Season 4 (9 p.m. Jan. 21, TBS), filmed in May 2021 and shelved until now, Fredrickson got recruited to play Agnes, the show’s oldest contestant and one of 11 players who improv opposite the Schmo, the real-life Ben Frisone, an electrician from Baltimore.
Fredrickson says clown performer Chad Damiani recruited improv actors for “Joe Schmo.” (Damiani also appears on the show as Louis Lewis, a surly producer.) But Fredrickson’s initial reaction was to be wary.
“I didn’t want to do some prank show,” she says. “I don’t want to use my positive improv for bad (purposes).”
Fredrickson was gratified to discover “Joe Schmo” ultimately celebrates the show’s Schmo when he learns he’s been duped, presumably in the last of 10 episodes.
“When you’re pretending with someone, it’s different than improvising,” Fredrickson says. “You’re acting opposite a real human who doesn’t know you’re improvising. That’s a really different thing to wrap your head around.”
“Joe Schmo” producers wrote an outline and plotted when each fake contestant would be sent home. Cast members rehearsed the competitions using only their characters’ name and never shared their real names until filming was done to avoid the possibility of making a mistake that would clue the Schmo into the true nature of the program.
Fredrickson says producers had a character breakdown for Agnes but also allowed her to make changes.
“Her original job was in some kind of world I didn’t feel comfortable with, so I made her a woman from Queen Anne in Seattle,” Fredrickson says. “She’s somebody who’s been a caterer all her life and she makes casserole cookbooks, something (Ben) would never have seen.”
Fredrickson calls the experience both fun and scary.
“When Ben showed up, we were all star-struck by him,” she says. “We’d been rehearsing and then all of a sudden this guy we’ve all been talking about is there. He was really like our movie star. If anybody ever thought this was about us making fun of somebody, it wasn’t like that. He had high status in our minds.”
Producers wanted Agnes to hit on Ben, which Fredrickson found daunting. Ben never took Agnes seriously.
“He made choices we weren’t expecting,” Fredrickson says. “I think they tried to make him pick a certain alliance and then he came to me and it’s like he looked at me like a mother figure.”
Producers had to rewrite their plans on the fly.
“They had all these people in there trying to make everybody be real and be something that makes (Ben) a little nervous or uncomfortable in different ways,” Fredrickson says, “but he didn’t get nervous because he was a real competitor, whereas I kept forgetting we were on a competition.”
During the show’s eviction ceremonies, Fredrickson is among the cast members who can’t stop giggling over terrible line drawings of each contestant printed on vases. (The person who is evicted gets their vase smashed.)
“Those likenesses of us were so ridiculous looking,” Fredrickson says.
“Joe Schmo” Season 4 executive producer Dave Kneebone (“The Eric Andre Show”) says the laughter became concerning to producers.
“Over and over again, we told them, ‘You have to treat this seriously,’ ” Kneebone says, “and they couldn’t keep their wits about them. We thought, ‘They’re going to blow this.’ But over time, it ended up that it didn’t really affect the outcome. Ben thought it was nervous laughter or that they were crying.”
After growing up in Federal Way, Fredrickson moved to Seattle, lived on Queen Anne in the ‘90s and started taking improv classes at Unexpected Productions in Pike Place Market in 1989 while selling building materials as her day job.
“To me, improv is this magical thing and it totally changed my life,” Fredrickson says. She quit her day job “and like Joseph Campbell says, I decided to follow my bliss.”
In 1994, that took her to improv at SAK Comedy Lab in Orlando, Fla., while working at theme parks during the day. She also started getting acting work in TV commercials, which she continued when she moved to Los Angeles in 1999. Guest starring roles on prime-time series followed, including a line on “Desperate Housewives” and a role as the sister of “the moth guy” in Fox’s 2001-02 superhero comedy “The Tick.”
She continues to get work in commercials (“That’s basically my traveling money,” she says, “which lets my husband and me go to Paris”) and teaches improv five or six days per week, including at Impro Theatre in L.A.
Fredrickson says the hardest part of being on “Joe Schmo” was coming out of the filming of the series.
“We had so much fun,” she says. “Going back to real life, I could not walk into a drugstore without feeling like I was being watched. And I’ve never (improvised) for so many hours in a row.”