Use code BILLIAM50 to get 50% OFF First Box and free wellness shots for life with any active subscription at bit.ly/3mRGw4N

Honestly Matt's story of being such an average and genuinely good guy that he ruined an entire TV show meant to trap him and turn him into a degenerate is the hero origin we need right now.

Matt got straight up used in a modern day "Truman Show" and is still going strong. I can respect that.

The fact that spike TV didn’t know what to do when their prank target wasn’t a deplorable piece of shit is simultaneously hilarious and depressing

"Before you call me a sexist A-hole, I have a girlfriend with A-cup breasts" absolutely killed me. I had to pause the video I was laughing so hard.

"It's not the bee costume that will define your career but how you wear the bee costume that will define your career"

I can't confirm this for everyone, but my husband personally knows a guy who wrote for Manswers back in the day. He said he made it his goal to pitch the most ridiculous ideas he could and see what he was able to get in the finished product. So there was at least one person playing 4D chess behind the scenes lmao

Is it me or does Manswers feel like something that would've been a hilarious gag in a GTA? It has so much GTA energy.

“You’re dead to us” throws plate in to fireplace. Even with context it’s still wild lmao

When I was 8 I secretly stayed up late and spike was on basic cable. I click it on and it’s the episode of 1000 ways to die where a guy goes to a sex dungeon and gets put in a latex gimp suit but he’s allergic to latex and swells up to death while getting tortured by a dominatrix. I’ll never forget that.

Please don’t forget the SPIKE TV classic, “A 1000 Ways to Die.”

As a bisexual woman, as a tween I tried to convince my friends I watched Manswers for the "science".

27:10 Matt's heart broke when Brian told him, "yes i'm an actor too, but our friendship is real." He was visibly shaken and that reveal hit just as hard as when "Earl" was booted.

I refuse to believe that Manswers wasn’t just a secret dumping ground for all of the fake commercials that didn’t make it onto Tim & Eric Awesome Show

The Joe Schmo dramatic twist at the end was kinda touching honestly lmao. They may not have intended it but damn that's wholesome. Matt is awesome.

Interesting how Joe Schmoe is very similar to jury duty where they prank this man in a weird cruel way but the man himself show that the average person is kind

"Hey Kip! Don't even respond, you've got the Matt man, I'm the sickest dude here!" Like that is such a fucking great line. Matt is a real one, freaking god bless

‘It’s not the bee costume that defines your career. It’s how you wear the bee costume that defines your career.’ - Matt, 2003

The only friend I had who liked Spike used to punch holes in his walls, and he used to call his mom buy her first name.

Matt is the MVP of “Reality” TV His use of “Ally” so early is one of the sweetest things I’ve seen in a while

Breaking a plate with the person's face to a "you are dead to us" is so extra, I love it. I've heard about that show before and sounds fun. Wish Matt well.

Deadliest Warrior will always have a special place in my heart. It was peak "frat boys getting real nerdy about their keg arguments".

You dont understand how patiently I was waiting for "CAN YOU FART SO HARD YOUR BALLS EXPLODE?!" The satisfaction was unmatched.

One of the craziest things about Spike is that there were the only network that was willing to give the UFC a platform to broadcast on during a time when senators, such as John McCain were referring to mixed martial arts as human cockfighting. If it weren't for Spike TV, and UFC wouldn't even exist today and that's crazy

i remember being like 13 and my 15 yr old brother had a few friends over and they were watching tv. they watched Manswers for maybe 10 minutes then they all said , "this is fucking stupid" and switched to watch spongebob

SPIKE TV is like a GTA V TV channel in real life

"My name's not the Hutch. My name is David Hornsby" How in the goddamn did I not recognize Rickety Cricket.

Everytime I see Matt as Joeschmoe it genuinely gives me hope that we would help each other instead of kill each other in the event of civilization collapsing

Theres a haunting realization to be made here, that Manswers pioneered Tuber voice and editing, and its still also being used to market provacative content for young boys to stumble on.

This era of Spike gives the exact same energy as the later versions of the PlayStation Magazine with things like "rate your girlfriend" and all the sex chat hotlines

I never knew the name of Manswers, but I vividly remember “Can Boobs stop a tiger attack?”

Ok.... but I'm going to flip this on its head by saying as a gay kid, i loved Spike TV. The amount of shirtless men this channel showed off was literally something that fueled my gay awakening. Like yes there was a lot of boobs, but honestly, the attractive men showcased so nonchalantly on this channel did something to me.

Interviewer: "It says here you were a television announcer?" Manswers Narrator: 😏

Manswers goes from being funny when you were a kid, to being cringe as you get older, and then it eventually wraps back around to being ironically funny as an adult.

"It's not the bee costume that will define you're career, it's how you wear the bee costume that will." -Matt Truly inspirational words.

You can’t forget TNA wrestling had its home on spike tv for almost a decade between 2005-2014

As a teen girl, I always mockingly called Spike TV "the Man Channel," but at the same time 1000 Ways to Die was my guilty pleasure. I had such a morbid fascination with it and it always seemed to be my go-to to put on (somehow reruns of it always happened to be on at just the right time lol) whenever there was nothing else good to watch after school or while I was doing chores on the weekends. That, plus their frequent Star Wars marathons were probably responsible for actually getting me really into Star Wars. I don't think I ever watched Manswers, though, so I had no idea just how outrageous it was, but oh boy, you weren't kidding when you said they ripped off Powerthirst, which was another weird staple of my teen years. But yeah, for as jaw-dropping all the misogyny in Manswers was, sadly that really seems to be about par for the course for 2007-ish era culture... not that things are necessarily that much BETTER now in certain ways, but it's wild how much of a time capsule this channel is for the mid 2000s-early 2010s.

I remember they tried doing a Joe Schmo 2 with a woman being the target but she saw through the BS so quickly that they had to come clean with her and ended up bringing in a dude to finish out the season.

1000 ways to die as a kid made me genuinely terrified that I would spontaneously combust or get cut open on a slip and slide

I knew SpikeTV as the channel WWE Raw was on, so every Monday, all the guys were over, Spike TV on one television set and Tekken on PS2 going on the other set. You just uncoverd a bunch of memories I had hidden behind the drywall of my brain. The Joe Schmoe commercial bumper where he says "I can't! I want to, but I can't!" must have play ten thousand times while we wathed Raw, it tunred into a proto-meme in our group.

Bar Rescue was Spike TV’s best show because it’s actual quality and introduced us to the world of the man the myth the angry blood vein on the side of your head, Jon Taffer.

Fun fact: David Hornsby is a recurring character and writer on Always Sunny and was involved with the show as early as the pilot. He was originally going to play Mac in the pilot but couldn't for a reason I'm not remembering.

Spike TV feels like the SCP of TV channels tbh.

Spike honestly feels like such a massive fever dream looking back at it in retrospective. It truly was in many ways a bunch of nonsensical television that could've only existed in the period that it did, but to say it wasn't memorable would simply be incorrect. Matt is a true one though, he's the reason that the first season of The Jo Schmo Show worked as well as it did, and was that lightning in a bottle that they could never re-create despite their attempts to. Also, I hope I speak for those out there in that you absolutely NEED to talk about *MXC* (Most Xtreme Elimination Challenge) at somepoint during this look back at Spike TV. It was such an integral part of my younger years, despite being a complete comedical overdubbing of the Japanese game show "Takeshi's Castle". There's still quite a few lines from that show I quote to this day with my friends.

Spike TV was the youtube content farm of the 2000's.

Matt is adorable. Kind of happened with The Jury too , the guy didn’t make fun of anyone and straight up embraced the side that was meant to be super weird.

I remember thinking Joe Shmo was both morbidly curious and needlessly cruel to him, but yeah I remember thinking this was just the Truman show IRL.

I'm stunned I haven't seen more Manswers clips in compilation videos or stuff like KZfaq Poops. I had forgotten how ridiculous they were but all these little clips along with the guy's yelling is comedy gold.

That season of Joe Shmo is unironically my all time favorite reality house show thats ever been made. I normally cant stand that shit, but that was honestly great. They literally could not have found a better guy to be the joe shmo.

Spike TV was wild. A friend and I were about 13 I think we were watching Manswers and they had something about a pressure point on the side of your temple if you hit it in a specific way ‘you die in three days’ and I thought it’d be so funny so do the friend, three days later he wasn’t responding to texts and I started freaking out but turned out he was grounded lmao

Shoutout to 1000 Ways to Die for permanently altering my brain chemistry when I used to obsessively watch it at age 13, lol.

I liked Gary the Rat. He was my pubescent furry awakening, as well as the awakening of that "I can change him!" impulse that ultimately leads down a dark road in real life.

I can’t wait for you to explore MXC, Pros vs Joes, the short lived 1,000 ways to Lie, Spike Guys’ Choice Awards, Blade: The Series, Surviving Disaster, Super Dave’s Spike Tacular, and the god awful The Playbook

MXC and Ultimate Warrior were after school staples for us when we were teenagers. I’ll always remember SPIKE fondly.

Absolutely wild to think this is where the game awards started.😂

seeing the manswers logo brought back a memory for me: I was visiting my dad and step-family when I was ~14, I was a night owl so I was up at 2 am watching TV when my step brother who was 13 came out and said he wanted to watch the TV too. He flipped through the channels and stopped at a hot blonde in skimpy clothes. We watched like 15 minutes before I thought "wow. this is trash" and changed the channel. that was my brush with late night spike TV.

In the back of the 11th grade english teachers room had a space for seniors to play Mario Kart and a TV that was set to Spike. Most Extreme Elimination or those recorded accidents with c-list celebrities commentating was usually on.

Who can forget the classic adult spinoff of the Ren and Stimpy show. Such quality programming from a creator who's never done anything wrong.

"Why are women on it then?" Money, it's usually money. Hell, I remember when they wanted to get rid of Page 3 in the UK and a bunch of the women that appeared on it said it made them feel empowered cause they set the terms of what they were willing to do and it was well-paying. I imagine it's similar in this case where it's not the most illustrious career option but it pays decently and they can say no to anything that's too far.

Manswers feels like if someone made a whole TV show based on that old Powerthirst energy drink viral video.

MXC Most Extreme Elimination Challenge was always my favourite of the Spike offerings, and i still say "Let's go" in the same tone as Captain Tennille

The manic editing and bat shit crazy acting on Manswers is the adult equivalent of those elsagate videos

Spike did shed that "action packed AND manly" image in 2015 when they rebranded and three years later, in the lead up to Spike being relaunched as Paramount Network, they went on a tangent about their past shows and also live streamed on Facebook a video of their logo being destroyed via requests from viewers..... Spike was an emotional rollercoaster lol (the brand does currently exist as the legal name for Paramount Network as well as two dedicated FAST channels on Pluto TV)

24:41 Rickety Cricket jumpscare

The "Earl" vote out is honestly one of the best reality TV moments of all time over all shows. While the "what is going on" might be more iconic, that vote just hits differently. In this entirely fake reality show, it manages to get the "victim" to fully break emotionally, which manages to break most of the actors because of how genuine the reaction is, but break in such a unique way that really stands out. Its almost to the level where the whole thing seems scripted because of how it plays out.

It took me till the end of the Joe Schmo Show to look at the actors fully and I immediately went "Is that Cricket?!?" then David Hornsby reveals himself and I'm like "OMG it is cricket". Always nice to see actors early career and them outside of what you know them for :)

Nice to see one of my comments I made about manswers so many years ago as an edgy teenager has somehow survived all these years.

Never forget the late night Girls Gone Wild commercials that ran on half hour blocks at like 4am in the morning...

I remember when G4 turned into Spike TV

It doesnt happen often but when we do get a series about 1 person in a show where everyone else is an actor and they dont know it, it always shows the raw humanity of people. How good and wholesome we really want to be. How much we want to help eachother, build connections, and see eachother improve. Love it.

Spike TV is basically a TV channel designed for Beavis & Butthead 🌈

Calling this show weirdly sex obsessed in the age of onlyfans where you have a hard time finding a girl on social media that isnt trying to sell nudes is funny

Spike was awful if you just wanted to watch Star Wars as a kid who was weirded out by adult stuff. Commercial breaks were just so uncomfortable.

Deadliest Warrior fun fact: on the episode with Alexander the Great, he's played by Jason Faunt, who was the red ranger in Power Rangers Time Force, and is also the motion capture actor for Leon Kennedy in Resident Evil.

The show I deeply hope you talk about is MXC - Most Extreme Elimination Challenge. I would always tune into Spike TV primarily for that show.

Early 2000s cable reality tv was a cancer on the earth thk god I was just a kid during this period so I couldn’t fully comprehend the this trash and degrade my intelligence

Unironically comparing Manswers to the Bible is absolutely insane

Sometimes I think about Matthew kennedy Gould. The dude seemed really down to earth and cool. I hope he's doing well

1000 ways to die was the source of many anxious nights at my cousins house over the summer and i never knew it til i was old enough to comprehend anxiety😭 i was miserable those nights

Kudos to Matt, if it were me there I would be way less calm with the reveal that I was a damn lab rat for “Degenerates R Us”

Literally every Manswers question feels like it should have 'I don't know, but it's a bloody good question' after them. They're not even good questions but they fit that meme.

I can only thank them for showing Star Trek the next generation when I was at home taking a break from the death camp we call public school

As someone who was a tween at the height of Spike's popularity I primarily watched it for TNA iMPACT Wrestling and MXC. I also vividly remember Spike and Comedy Central being the two channels that would air the Girls Gone Wild infomercials (which in hindsight has also aged poorly if you know the GGW story). Looking back at it, it totally blows my mind that Manswers was ever made. I hope Pros vs Joes is also covered during this retrospective. Looking forward to the rest!

I thought I recognised David Hornsby in the Joe Schmo segment. Surprised Billiam didn't point out that it's Rickety Cricket from It's Always Sunny!

Manswers sounds like all of Tiktok condensed into one show.

That one show is clearly the closest real life version of the Trueman Show.

Most Extreme Elimination Challenge or MXC is an absolute must for you to talk about.

I remember loving how wholesome Matt was on the Joe Schmo Show, the description of it being both the most incredible but awful thing on television rings very true. Actually rewatched it a few months ago when I picked up the DVDs for like $3, aside from the obnoxious editing still holds up well. Also find it awesome Matt is from my local area and actually have been to the basketball court he was discovered at. Looked him up and apparently he's go the happy regular life he wanted so it definitely inspires me to some degree.

It's so funny to me that I never hear people talk about watching this network as an adult, the stories are always "I was 12 and I watched it in secret" lol

I once stumbled into spike tv because I was watching Star Wars the clone wars and then once it’s over 1000 ways to die started airing………… I was 7

I can’t wait for you to cover MXC (Most Extreme Elimination Challenge). That show is a legit classic.

I watched Manswers when I was a kid and even then I realized it was hella stupid but i do remember one question that i still follow the answer to this day. "Whats the cleanest public restroom stall". The answer was the middle. I dont know if its true but man if it is im ahead of the game

“Manswers” I wonder if Mansplaining became a thing because of this?

Yeah this channel aged like spoiled milk. But as an angsty teenage boy, this was the best channel ever. If there's one program from this channel that actually aged well it's probably Afro samurai.

A bunch of people are saying they watched Spike for WWE Raw, but I only started paying attention years later, when TNA Impact was on the channel

I was so hooked by Joe Schmoe. Our whole family watched it every time a new episode dropped & we were sobbing when he protested & found out what was really happening.

I was raised by Manswers and Deadlist Warrior and i am not ok.

David horsby is actually a famous actor now too he does a lot of side roles, he plays Rickety Cricket on always sunny in Philadelphia and directed a few episodes.

Editing in this video was really good past 2 years your content quality keeps rising

Matt's behavior produced the best possible tv that could have come out of that concept and its great. For a straight white dude in 2003 showed himself to be incredibly socially progressive just out of purely being kind. True king shit.