Monkeyboy’s “Joey” taping experience (contains spoilers)

Episode 2.10 - Joey and the Bachelor Thanksgiving
Taping date: November 4th, 2005
Airdate - November 24th, 2005

I arrived into Studio 24, in the Warner Brothers lot, once again, and was strangely directed to a seat in the middle of the studio. “Great,” I thought, “I’m seated in the middle, I’ll be able to watch everything!” How quickly that optimism changed after a couple hours in!

It turned out that pretty much all of the scenes were taking place in Joey’s new house set which was on the far left. Basically only one scene was even taped on the whole right-hand side of the stage area. Something in Joey’s Apartment about Gina being a “moose”, but I’m not sure if that was just the cast joking around or if it was really in the script. But it was fine by me to watch it all unfold on the monitors above. They hire someone to study the script and change the camera angels on the monitors while the audience watches.

The show opened up with Joey and Alex, on the porch of what they thought would be an empty house. Boy, were they wrong! Everybody was there, Gina, Michael, Zack, and even taking a dip in the pool was Howie! Gina was decorating the place for Thanksgiving and Howie was going swimming in Joey’s pool. He had a huge cockroach on his swimsuit, and when he asked if anyone could see it, they all ran away.

I could see the “cockroach wrangler” with her aquarium, so I guess it was a real living cockroach on Howie’s ass!

Anyhow, Joey’s new next-door neighbor Dean stops by for the first time. Dean (played by Gregory Harrison) is a rich 50-year-old bachelor who lives alone. He warns Joey about Native American artifacts being found in all the neighborhood yards. He said they had to delay construction on his house for a year, when they found some in his backyard.

Somehow, Thanksgiving has turned Gina into something of a nut. She buys Joey and Michael matching Thanksgiving sweaters, insists that they take part in some skits she wrote about her ancestors “struggles,” and doesn’t allow anyone to eat until she says so. In one funny scene, while Alex is waiting to eat, she says that she’s starving, and asks Gina if she can just eat one small biscuit, to which Gina promptly replies, “No!”

Alex regrets spending Thanksgiving with Gina, and says that she could have been at her sister’s house, having her brother-in law walk in on her in the bathroom. “I never thought I would miss that!” she exclaims.

Joey is also invited to Dean’s Bachelor’s Thanksgiving, but at first he declines because of Gina’s dinner. Eventually he can’t resist, when he sees beautiful women there dancing through his kitchen window. Michael at first resists as well, but then some of the most hilarious things happen, as he crashes the party, dances strangely with hot women and awkwardly flirts with them. When Gina and Alex find out about this by seeing Michael dancing with the women through the window, Gina replies, “I told
Him never to do 2 things: 1) never disobey your mother and 2) never dance in public! Then Alex summed it up with: “We can expect this from Joey… but Michael?”

Joey actually left the bachelor party at the end, to come back and have dinner with Gina, Michael and Alex. When Joey came back, Michael was like “Why?” It was hilarious. I guess you had to be there! Joey says that he won’t turn into one of those Bachelor guys, because he has Gina to “break his balls.”

There was a lot of horseplay on set. When Joey was talking to Dean one time, he told him in character, that Gina was “really easy.” When Michael was in costume for Gina’s skit, he was wearing an old lady hat, and in his high Italian old lady accent exclaimed: “MY VAGINA IS SWOLLEN!” It was pretty funny especially coming from the guy who plays such a dweeby character.

A woman in the audience wanted to know if Paulo was single, her dad was visiting her from Orlando and said Joey was his favorite show. Somehow Jim Bentley, the warm up guy, introduced her, and she got to talk to him. Their brief convo ended with Costanzo telling her, “Nice to meet you.” Her dad even gave his blessing for the nuptials.

When Paulo was doing his MC Hammer and other crazy dance moves, Bentley, asked her, “Are you still interested after watching that?” To which she replied: “Yeah. That was HOT!”

One of the guests at the Bachelors Thanksgiving Party was none other than George Hamilton playing himself.
At the end of the episode, when Joey returns to Gina’s Thanksgiving dinner, and asks all the non-Tribbianis present to share their best Thanksgiving stories (not including this one) Howard was disqualified by Joey for spazzily exclaiming, “THIS ONE!!!” Alex talked about having some kind of tapeworm and being able to eat whatever she wanted. Zack said something about his father returning from being in the army oversees, seeing the look on his mother’s face, and then started to cry and couldn’t finish it. George Hamilton then appeared out of nowhere, walking down Joey’s stairs, and said something about Angie Dickinson. That part of the show seemed really random, which actually made it pretty funny.

All in all this Joey episode looks pretty promising, unless they cut out all the funniest parts, which they sometimes do. I might have messed up some of the lines, because I can’t remember everything perfectly but I tried my best. I think it will air on the actual Thanksgiving, at least that was what someone working on the show told Jim Bentley.