EDtv (1999)

Directed by Ron Howard. Starring Matthew McConaughey, Jenna Elfman, Woody Harrelson, Ellen DeGeneres, Rob Reiner, Martin Landau, Sally Kirkland, Elizabeth Hurley, Clint Howard, Viveka Davis, Dennis Hopper, Adam Goldberg, Wendle Josepher. [PG-13]

TV producer DeGeneres plans a new reality show that will follow around an average guy (McConaughey) twenty-four hours a day. Standing in the shadow of the recent, similar, and far better The Truman Show (its cutaways to viewers watching the action verge on plagiarism), here’s a story that has a premise but no idea what to do with it—the satire is obvious and self-conscious, the gags are almost never funny, the characters are barely relatable, and the script eventually tries to make the viewer really feel for our “hero” as he exasperates over his loss of privacy and damaged relationships. The actors do what they can, but the characters they play are built out of such stale traits that they must have fallen off a sitcom assembly line. Released right at the time that reality television was starting to take off in the States, consider this a missed opportunity to skewer a fad that refuses to die.

36/100