Joe Millionaire
Fox's 2003 prank on The Bachelor: twenty women competed in a French château for a bachelor they were told was a millionaire, who was actually construction worker Evan Marriott. If the last woman standing still wanted him after the reveal, the two split $1 million. More than 30 million people watched the finale, and the sequel proved the trick only worked once.
Joe Millionaire premiered on Fox on January 6, 2003, produced by Rocket Science Laboratories and filmed mostly at the Château de la Bourdaisière in the Loire countryside. The women believed Marriott was a millionaire; he was a working-class construction worker, and The Smoking Gun later discovered he had also done underwear modeling. The host, Alex McLeod, barely appeared, roughly five minutes across the six-episode season, while the butler, Paul Hogan, became a minor star; the network called him "the glue that held the show together." The weekly question was which of the contestants were sincere and which were after a wealthy husband.
The tabloid moments made it an event. Runner-up Sarah Kozer was reported to have appeared in bondage videos while in law school, and a walk in the woods was edited with suggestive sound effects and subtitles into an implied sex act that both parties denied. Kozer said the line "let's go somewhere quiet" had been dubbed in from a back massage, and the show's editors later corroborated her account. Marriott chose Zora Andrich in the finale, they split the $1 million bonus, and the relationship did not last. Fox said the finale was the highest-rated entertainment program on network television, Super Bowl lead-outs aside, since the first Survivor finale in 2000. Marriott reportedly earned upwards of $2.5 million from the payout, appearances and commercials before going back to contracting in Orange County.
Fox rushed out The Next Joe Millionaire that fall, moving to a villa in Tuscany with David Smith, a 24-year-old Texas rodeo cowboy who had earned $11,000 the previous year, and casting 14 European women who had never seen the original. It drew fewer than 7 million viewers a week. Fox's entertainment chief Sandy Grushow admitted the show "was a one-time stunt and I think we got greedy," adding, "We tried to sneak it by the American public a second time and we got called on it." Both seasons were later named in a 2005 Writers Guild class action over labor-law violations on reality shows. Fox revived the format in 2022 as Joe Millionaire: For Richer or Poorer, this time with two bachelors and only one secret fortune.
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