If William Shatner and a bunch of his oddball "friends" showed up in your town and told you they were shooting a movie and wanted you to be in it, would you believe them?

A whole bunch of people in Riverside, Iowa (population 928), did just that. And the result is "Invasion Iowa," a comedy/reality miniseries that's loaded with laughs.

Riverside is pretty much like any other small farm town in the Midwest, with one exception. It's the self-proclaimed future birthplace of James T. Kirk, captain of the starship Enterprise — Shatner's character in "Star Trek."

Which made Riverside the target for Shatner and the producers, who honed their skills on "Joe Schmo" before faking out an entire town.

The concept is simple: Shatner and a bunch of actors pretending to be the cast and crew of a sci-fi movie ("Invasion Iowa") come to town to begin production on what locals believe is a real motion picture. They're not the only ones taken in — there are clips of newscasts from big Iowa cities stating this as a fact.

But it's all a goof. The real intent is to make a sort of "Candid Camera"-esque show all about taking these nice folks in, signing them on as additional members of the cast and crew.

If it sounds mean spirited, it's really not. Basically, Shatner and Co. act like idiots and the townsfolk react to them.

"We designed everything to the best of our ability not to hurt people's feelings in the end," Shatner said. "So we discarded many of the gags, many of the things that would have hurt feelings. . . . We believe that the people of Riverside look upon us kindly. And I think that the American public will laugh along with us and the people who are watching Hollywood's foibles.

"We're not laughing at them, they're laughing at us."

Shatner plays a cartoonish version of himself — even more so than usual. He's an oblivious, sort of politely overbearing idiot . . . and, almost invariably, the "real" people play along.

Some of this is priceless. During "auditions," Shatner sets the Emmy on the table next to him, even asking one hopeful, "You want to touch it?" Scouting a site at a historic church, he asks with a straight face if he can smash one of the priceless stained-glass windows for a scene in the movie.

And listening to him and his "spiritual adviser" is laugh-out-loud funny.

What's amazing is that as outrageous as the "Hollywood behavior" became and as terrible as the "movie" obviously was, the locals still buy into it.

"Time and time again, I would say, 'They're never going to believe this,' " Shatner said. But they did.

Frankly, I'm sick of mean-spirited reality shows myself, but this isn't one of them. The people of Riverside got exactly what they wanted — they got their 15 minutes of fame and they get to see themselves on screen. It just happens to be a TV screen and not a movie screen.

"We didn't really dash their dreams. They're on national television from Tuesday to Friday," Shatner said. "It isn't a motion picture, but many of my motion pictures didn't last that long. Rather than dash their dreams, we enlarged them."

'Invasion' schedule

The four-part, four-hour comedy/reality miniseries "Invasion Iowa" airs tonight through Friday at 10 p.m. and midnight on Spike TV. And the revelation that it's all a joke comes on April Fools' Day!

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E-mail: pierce@desnews.com