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EDtv Send This Review to a Friend
The crass voyeurism of the public and the eagerness of television to exploit it are once again targets for satirical comedy in "EDtv," Ron Howard's slick comedy with a script by the team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. There are laughs galore, but as usual in most Hollywood product these days, the film escalates into excess. Romantic entanglement must be worked out and what could have been tough and taut becomes diluted.
Still, one is grateful for the hilarity when it's there and also for the barbed look at media mania. The major difference between this and the more pretentious "The Truman Show" is that in this case the guy chosen to be watched on a TV program 24-hours-a day knows he's on TV. Two brothers, played by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, vie to be selected for the show that Ellen DeGeneres as producer has pitched and been given a reluctant go-ahead by her skeptical boss (Rob Reiner). McConaughey triumphs, and his resentful brother hopes to use all the attention to further his desire to open a fitness center.
McConaughey is funny and charming and Harrelson is amusingly brash. Plot complications arise when the TV subject's girlfriend, appealingly played by Jenna Elfman, can't take the resulting lack of privacy. You could probably dream up the sort of embarrassing situations that the script writers did, and it doesn't take any great insight to know that the show will eventually run out of steam. After all, this is TV and the public is fickle. But meanwhile there's fun in the behind the scenes bitchiness and maneuvering, and Reiner makes the most of being an overbearing know-it-all.
The well-chosen cast includes Martin Landau, Sally Kirkland, Dennis Hopper, Elizabeth Hurley and Clint Howard. Director Howard knows how to keep things jumping, but by the time I left I was convinced that less would have been much more. A Universal Pictures release.
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