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EDTV is a comedy about making a TV show about the real life of Ed (Matthew McConaughey), a dim bulb video store clerk in San Francisco. The camera crews follow him whenever he’s awake. Whatever happens, happens. The wit level is established early when the first joke is Ed scratching himself as he wakes up. Soon after, the world watches him clip his toenails.
Unlike The Truman Show’s Truman, Ed and his family and friends are aware they’re on camera. They exult in their instant fame and economic rewards. But they also expose their intimate moments, as well as their peccadillos and family scandals. For example, brother Ray (Woody Harrelson) is a crudely ambitious hedonist and goofball; mom (Sally Kirkland) and stepdad (Martin Landau) are guilty parties in an ugly separation and divorce.
Worse, the ratings and poll driven TV execs (Rob Reiner, Ellen DeGeneres) and audiences keep cheering them on to more entertaining outrages, like Ed abandoning boring girlfriend Shari (Jenna Elfman) for a sexy British model. TV parties in every bar, bedroom and prison rec room watch raucously as Ed and the lady have (well, almost) steamy sex. In the end, Ed and Shari escape via a brutal violation of privacy equal to any played on them.
Ed’s creators are pop entertainers director Ron Howard and writers Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel (the City Slickers movies, Multiplicity, A League of Their Own). Ultimately, they’re against an obvious evil (intrusiveness equals destruction of privacy and dignity). It’s a worthwhile point in a world on the verge of a new tech revolution small digital video cameras. But their own pathetic search for laughs makes for a painful two hours.
The movie is about the TV world itself from the suits who program it and the cretinous characters in its sitcoms to the parasitic comics and pundits who comment on events and the insensitive public that guzzles it all down like the whooping studio crowds on Jerry Springer. The contempt for the human race is palpable.
Is this the audience Hollywood perceives as its audience? The characters, raunchiness and scurrilous gag level of EdTV seem aimed at it. It’s a movie without a moral center, without a decent place to hang your ethical hat.
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