By Steve Parite

LOS ANGELES (DP) Producers of the NBC hit television show Joe Millionaire are planning a Joe Millionaire II to capitalize on the reality-with-a-twist-of-fiction franchise. And they say if they could do it all again, they wouldn’t have to change a thing.

But the cat’s out of the bag, it’s a one-off wonder, such stupendous duplicity can’t be duplicated, critics and shareholders say. Now that it’s been revealed that the purported $50 million bachelor with 25 deluded beauties to choose from is nothing more than a $19K per annum not-so-smooth operator of heavy, but not hot, construction equipment, where are you going to find the new voluptuous victims? With all the publicity of the first round, the joke’s been played out, they say.

Ah, but you don’t know reality TV, and you don’t know reality babes, the producers slyly reply. The producers contend they can do it all again, with a new Joe, a new fake inheritance or fake Wall Street fortune or fake Silicon Valley or fake pharmaceutical monopoly fortune, and still find 25 “reality babes” to fill the potential-gene-contributor pool.

“Hell, we could place an ad in Variety today and get 50, we could probably get 100 solid, TV produce-able babes who would believe it’s real this time,” says assistant associate vice executive producer Bill Smarn.

Reality babes, Smarn explains, is the term the reality TV cognoscenti— producers, network execs, advertising sales staff—use to describe the women who want to be on reality TV. “Look,” Smarn says in a euphemistic, conspiratorial near-whisper, “certain types of women send in their tapes or show up for auditions. Miami heat dancers, soft-core fetish-film stars with ‘student loans to pay,’ ‘shoe designers’ and former calendar models show up at the auditions listing their occupations as “assistant to a venture capitalist” or whatever. I don’t want to burst your bubble, but these are not the pediatric nurses and schoolteachers we allow you to believe they are,” Smarn instructs.

“First thing you need to know about ‘reality,’” Smarn says pontificating, “is that it’s not real. Even real reality isn’t real, so the reality of our manufactured reality, while not real, is no less legitimate.… What I’m getting at,” Smarn says, “is that these chicks want to be on TV, they want to marry millionaires, they want to be millionaires, they want to be the next big thing or at least get a small part on a soap—they delude themselves. Our part is minimal, we give ‘em one little lie, and they and their imaginations run with it. ‘See here, girls, this guy’s got 50 mil, lives in a chateau, has his own Learjet, and can’t find a friggin’ date. Any of you interested?’ Get real. But it’s that simple. Hell we could start over again with the same damn girls. ‘OK, this time we found a real millionaire; any of you free to spend the next couple of weeks in France?’ Check the fall listings,” Smarn advises, “we’ll be there.”