EDtv<> Ed Pekurny (Matthew McConaughey) is an ordinary guy. A San Francisco video store clerk who appreciates the finer points of Burt Reynolds' Smokey and the Bandit<> performances, Ed sips his beer from a straw, the bottle hanging from his neck in a tacky mini-harness. He eats KFC-and-mashed-potato dinners at his mom's apartment. He hangs around a pool hall with his go-nowhere buddies, vaguely flirts with anonymous girls in tight tee-shirts, and is to all appearances content with his lot. According to Ron Howard's EDtv<>, it's precisely this ordinariness that makes Ed the ideal subject for a new cable-tv documentary show, broadcast 24 hours a day, every day, without editing, commentary, or commercial breaks. (Instead, ads run continually -- like stock market numbers or sports scores -- in banners under the screen image: as the show's ratings increase, the prestige and scope of the advertisers also goes up, from local car salesmen to Pepsi and Sprint.) The show's premise is that viewers will want to see Ed because he's real. Ed is exactly who he seems to be, the uber-schlub. He comes to you uncensored (though, this being a Ron Howard movie, there's no nasty language to bleep), trailed incessantly by a three-person camera-and-mike crew. No hidden cameras, no prudent cutaways. Television viewers get to see it all: hangovers, arguments, confessions, humiliations, triumphs (such as they are), "morning chubbies,'' street heckles and cheers. The movie's premise is less generous than the show's. Like other recent films that have critiqued the popularity of reality-based programming (The Truman Show<>, Holy Man<>), EDtv<> makes a simple point: reality-tv is bad. It does so via a simple narrative structure, with good and bad guys. Ed is the victim of conniving, bottom-line-obsessed businesspeople and the consumers are ignorant dupes, lured into supporting tv that is annoying and intrusive and ignorant at best, abusive and cruel at worst. Warhol's observation that everyone would or could be famous for fifteen minutes has now -- in the age of Springer -- become an ongoing nightmare, progressively aggressive and seemingly chaotic. Or again, and more accurately, it's commercial culture at its most efficient, with exploiters and exploitees working full-tilt together, with plenty of money for producers and advertisers) and plenty of delusions for consumers and those participants who believe Jerry when he tells them they're getting their shot at articulating their frustrations for a mass audience, as if that audience makes their feelings legitimate and empowering. EDtv<> is right on this hot button, but in the most mundane way it could have imagined. Ironically -- given its ostensible challenge to the very idea that media might represent "reality,'' EDtv<> is probably the most realistic. Or at least, it's most immediately feasible, a next-step variation on MTV's The Real World<>, with contracts signed and participants more or less apprised of their rights, but without editing or mood-enhancing soundtrack music (there is, of course, trendy soundtrack music for the film -- by Cornershop, Harvey Danger, Barenaked Ladies, and Morcheeba -- which rather undercuts the "reality'' effects of the tv show). Also somewhat ironically, the movie uses every corny trick in the book to make its points that reality-programming is corny and predictable. EDtv<> underlines Ed's adorable everymanness by cutting frequently to viewers-like-you watching the show in Pittsburgh and New York, on the job and in dorm rooms, in straight and gay households. (This adorable everymanness is also being picked up by entertainment news spots and interviews with McConaughey, who likens his experience as the magazine cover boy during A Time To Kill<> to Ed's awakening to the down sides of fame.) The movie also makes the usual derisive allusions to media overkill, with media whores and commentators like Super-Monica-basher Arianna Huffington, George Plimpton, Jay Leno, and Michael Moore, all playing themselves, all sniping self-consciously at media bombast, and all -- you might assume -- making their paychecks. These reaction inserts are no doubt the easiest way to take aim at tv's legendary crudeness and inanity. But they also betray a short-cut pseudo-analysis, where the laugh comes in the recognizable figure on screen, not in any actual comment or the insight that might be offered. The script by Babaloo Mandell and Lowell Ganz borrows heavily from Frank Capra's Meet John Doe<> (1941). Ed -- or rather, Ed on tv, is conceived by a frustrated, about-to-be-fired cable tv exec, Cynthia Topping (Ellen DeGeneres). She pitches the low-budget show in an effort to raise True TV's ratings above those of the Gardening Channel. Unsurprisingly, career-obsessed Cynthia (repeatedly shown exercising and making herself up alone in her apartment) develops an affection for her creation, leading to ethical qualms and a cheesy moment of redemption. And of course, said moment is achieved at the expense of her unscrupulous boss, Whitaker (Rob Reiner), so overtly hateable that he's uninteresting in about two minutes. Ed does have some folks who appear to be in his corner. But the film can't quite make any of them supportive enough. Which is to say, it leaves Ed to dangle a bit, so that his underdog status is clear, and movie-goers might sympathize without reservation. The problem with this strategy is that the characters around Ed become whiny and two-dimensional; the movie's pretense to celebrate the common person (or at the very least, the common man) turns out to be just more of the same condescension and manipulation you might see in any of the tv shows that the film is supposedly condemning. For instance, Ed's family is grotesque in the way that only movies and tv seem to imagine underclass folks to be. Mom Jeanette (Sally Kirkland) wears housecoats and droopy hair, then dresses up and wears cakey-makeup when the camera crew accompanies her son to her home. Her husband Al (Martin Landau) wears house slippers while driving a wheelchair, breathes oxygen through a tube, and offers observant insights when no one's listening. And brother Ray (Woody Harrelson) is a supposedly typical muscle-head, the kind of guy who works out all the time and wears those gaudy-print drawstring pants and big white sneakers. There's also a broken-down real father (Dennis Hopper), who shows up when the show makes national news: this raises questions about mom's honesty and trustworthiness. In fact, the movie is rather hard on women all around, from Cynthia to Ed's girlfriend Shari (Jenna Elfman). At first she's Ray's girl, for no clear reason except that Ray has to watch their first unexpected kiss on tv (the moment that sends the show through the ratings roof, because it is illicit and soap operatic, that is, because it's familiar to audience members who watch a lot of tv). Then Shari's got all kinds of issues with the camera crew following them wherever they go, not to mention the USA Today<> polls to determine whether she's an acceptable girlfriend for Ed and the fact that the show producers people set Ed up with a lucious, willing-to-sell-herself wannabe star (Elizabeth Hurley). For all its knocking of the tv show's errors in judgment and ineptitudes, the movie doesn't really take clear aim at the ideas behind it. This is understandable, I suppose. The movie wants to have it all ways, to criticize talk-confession-reality media, to debunk media myth-building techniques, and to deliver a charming romantic comedy, all in one big heap of po-mo entertainment. This is a difficult enterprise, to be sure, given that reality programming has, from its inception, invited analysis and included some degree of self-analysis. So EDtv<> looks a lot like what you already know.