He used charm, others’ personal tragedies and fake celebrity endorsements. How Christopher LaVoie cast his reality show and reeled in successful entrepreneurs and his own star son.
In the fall of 2017, Christopher LaVoie‘s reality show, What a Dad, was at the top of the ratings — and then he did one last thing to make it even better: After the cameras were off, he called each of his “guests” by their real names and went to school for a few days with them.
LaVoie has a show-business pedigree — a father who has acted in TV and several movies, a mother who had a starring role in “The Exorcist,” and two of his sons who are artists.
But this father of three wasn’t content to hang out with his kids on the couch or in their bedrooms. His son is a musician, and even though he’d never performed in public, he was the front man for a local band. In other words, he spent a lot of time around his son, putting him in front of thousands of people in a huge arena.
Chris LaVoie was a natural. He’d been a star already, doing standup in clubs for about 15 years, and then the TV show “The Chris Gethard Show” debuted in 2010. After three seasons, LaVoie was the most popular figure in Philadelphia — a crowd who followed him all week and cheered every time he returned home to South Jersey.
Then, in 2012, he had another hit — by making a reality show — with What a Dad.
“I figured I had seen it all a million times, so what would a different show accomplish?” he said.
Chris LaVoie had a lot to show the cameras. He was an actor, a musician and a dad — he’d played football in high school and college at Rutgers. He’d made
