My unfortunate attempt at reality TV and a Dream Job.
This is the true story (TRUE STORY!) of hundreds of strangers who decided to stand in a very long line outside a pool hall in Boston to have their dream job interviews taped. To find out what happens people stop being polite and start getting real.
For the people too young to know and the people too old to remember, that was a reference to the opening credits of MTV’s “The Real World,” the reality television show that started it all. And I loved it. Mostly the early seasons, but I stuck around almost all the way to the end. Sorry “Go Big or Go Home,” “Bad Blood,” and the season that was only available on Facebook Watch that I just right now found out about. I didn’t watch you guys.
Overall, I have watched an awful lot of reality TV, especially in the early ought’s when the genre began its takeover. I’m no expert, I’ve just watched a crap ton of it.
I have a special affinity for competitive reality shows. Remember when they were starting to become a permanent fixture in our lives in the early 00s?
We went from Survivor to things that looked an awful lot like to Survivor to, American Idol, to things that looked an awful lot like American Idol to The Apprentice, to things that looked an awful lot like The Apprentice but with a much better prize at the end than a fake job working for that guy.
One of those reality shows that was somewhere in between American Idol and The Apprentice was ESPN’s Dream Job, a competitive reality show searching for the next anchor of SportsCenter that first aired in February 2004. To go out and find contestants, ESPN set out on an open casting tour in September 2003, among the cities on that tour was Boston.
And I was definitely living in Boston in September 2003.
As I mentioned in Part 1 of my Los Angeles trilogy, I stayed in Boston after graduating from college for one, long, brutal year. Desperate to get out of Beantown and on to something else, anything else, I was thrilled to learn that ESPN was going to be in town looking for people for their new reality show.
Well, at first I was thrilled. And then I remembered that I have awful social anxiety, I’ve never felt comfortable talking to strangers, and I was terrified of cameras. Sounds like a winning recipe for reality television!
On the day of the open casting event, which was being held at what was then known as Jillian’s, a massive arcade/bar/pool hall/bowling alley located right outside Fenway Park (it’s now called Lucky Strike Social), I was just about ready to back out and not go. You know, because of the whole social anxiety and fear of public speaking. But I didn’t listen to myself. And I went.
I waited in a very long line for quite a while. The line wasn’t like what you see at these American Idol casting calls with just people for seemingly miles, but it was a significant amount of people. I was joined by my girlfriend at that time who was not even a little bit of a sports fan. She stood with me in line as we were surrounded by nothing but Boston bros warming themselves up for the audition with their best “Boo-yahs,” “En Fuego’s” and all of the other catchphrases guys in their early 20s grew up with as we watched SportsCenter on an endless loop each morning. Seriously, why did we watch the same thing over and over for hours?
It was all dudes, and pretty much all of the same dudes wearing the same job interview suits (I wore a Randy Moss jersey and immediately the anxiety kicked in because I felt severely underdressed), with one very distinct exception — Maggie. She was the person directly behind me in line. Unlike everyone else around me, she was from Chicago, not Boston, and you guessed it, she was a woman. Maybe the only woman who wasn’t a supportive girlfriend I saw that day.
After maybe an hour or two of waiting, me and a bunch of the bros and Maggie were let in to Jillian’s. We first filled out a form and then were told what to expect by someone with a headset. We’d walk into the pool hall and stand as a group of 12 around a pool table while answering questions from one of the producers.
And now it was time. It was time for me to somehow overcome all of the things that make me a terrible reality show participant and get this SportsCenter job!
We walk into the pool hall and there sits a producer dude who is rocking the Ashton Kutcher in 2004 starter kit — trucker hat, zip hoodie, longish dark hair, while sitting in a director’s chair like this is season two of Punk’d. He starts with the easy questions: name, favorite team, etc. I can handle that. Then the pace picks up. Questions are flying and there’s no turns. You just gotta jump in there. I did not jump in.
You know who did jump in, and was amazing every single time? The person standing right next to me. Maggie. So not only was I pretty much non-existent in this audition but the person next to me was absolutely murdering it. I looked twice as bad. She was a million times better than everyone standing around that pool table and two million times better than me.
After a painful 15 minutes of me barely talking and when I did talk, it was NOT good, we all got the “thank you everyone for coming out today” from the Ashton Kutcher dude. Except for Maggie. She got the, “Maggie, can we talk to you for a bit?”
Months later when Dream Job aired on ESPN, Maggie was right there on my TV. That would be Maggie Haskins who made it to the final four of the show. If you cared about Dream Job at all, here’s an Awful Announcing article from 2016 to fill you in on where the contestants ended up 12 years after the show.
I’m very much not in that article because I was not even a little bit equipped for that show or probably any reality show. But I guess I’m glad I tried. I got to find out first-hand that this was not for me, which maybe saved me the time, energy and anxiety of going to any more open casting calls for the rest of my life. And I’m totally fine with that, unless you’re a powerful showrunner who has accidently stumbled upon this and want to turn this blog into a reality show, I’m in.
Tim Hammill is a communications professional in the nonprofit sector. He’s turning 40 on October 20, 2020. He’s writing about the final stretch to this milestone age in 40 Days to 40, a collection of stories, thoughts, reflections and whatever else comes to mind each day. In addition to writing a blog, Tim has also decided to donate his birthday to This Is My Brave, an organization he very recently learned about that brings stories of mental illness and addiction out of the shadows and into the spotlight. If you’d like to support Tim’s birthday fundraiser, go here.
Additionally, there are three other organizations that are close to Tim’s heart: Save the Children, Stand Up To Cancer and the Bridgeport YMCA. Click on each to learn more and to support their work.
