Spike TV William Shatner has coffee with the local townspeople at the Kwik-N-Easy in Riverside, Iowa, in Spike TV's new reality show, "Invasion Iowa." Click photo for larger image. "Invasion Iowa" Where: XXXXXX When: 9 tonight through Friday on Spike TV. Starring:William Shatner

The producers of "The Joe Schmo Show" strike again with Spike TV's "Invasion Iowa" (9 p.m. today through Friday), but the results are not nearly as entertaining.

This time out, the goal isn't to dupe a person or couple, but the entire town of Riverside, Iowa, self-proclaimed birthplace of the original "Star Trek" captain, James T. Kirk, played by William Shatner.

Shatner and a supposed movie crew descend on Riverside to purportedly make a sci-fi movie, casting some locals as stars and hiring others to work on the crew. Really, though, the natives are mostly there to be the butt of "look-at-the-yokels" jokes.

When Shatner introduces "Shats" -- color-coded berets that signal the wearer's mood -- the locals start wearing them. They fall for Shatner's accolades of their bad acting and revel in having a celebrity in town, even when he's eating food off their plates at a local diner.

Shatner, in full ham mode, narrates portions of the program, including his meeting with a table full of gray- and white-haired elderly women.

"I was entering the lion's den," he says dramatically. "This was their lair. This was their cave. The lions began to purr. These were women full of wisdom and grace -- nobility, really."

Spike TV made just the first two episodes of "Invasion Iowa" available for review, but it seems inevitable that the series will end up as a big valentine to Midwestern values, especially when the truth is revealed in Friday's April Fools' Day finale.

In both editions of "Joe Schmo," executive producers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick plucked a schmo from obscurity, locked him or her in a house and made the schmo think he or she was on a reality show. Viewers knew the schmo was actually a patsy surrounded by actors playing his or her fellow contestants. Both "Schmo" editions were grand send-ups of the reality genre, aping their style, music and camera and editing techniques.

But more than anything, Reese and Wernick defied expectations, taking a potentially cruel concept and making it entertaining, funny and ultimately kind of uplifting.

"Invasion Iowa" just isn't as funny, perhaps because it's too grand an undertaking with too many variables. Rather than sequestering the cast in an opulent house, the makers of "Invasion Iowa" must work within the strictures of a small community, limiting their control of situations.

In addition to Shatner, who seems more than happy to play the role of a cheap egotistical Hollywood star, real actors play Shatner's goofball spiritual adviser, a witchy studio executive, a kleptomaniac actress, an undisciplined body double and an incompetent assistant.

Clearly the idea is to send up Hollywood stereotypes, show the characters exhibiting bad behavior and see how the locals react. But the producers appear to hold back, perhaps out of fear of being discovered for the elaborate practical joke the show is, so they don't get much in the way of entertaining reactions.

There's not much in the way of a story, either, and the story lines they concoct for the Hollywood characters are weak. The whole endeavor falls flat. It's an attempt to be outrageous that, instead, turns out to be pretty boring.