by Rich Elias, Mar 25, 1999

• 123 Minutes
• Rated PG-13
• 3 1 /2 Stars

It's not a new idea. What is new is that Hollywood suddenly seems fixated on it. "The Truman Show" and "Pleasantville," two comic fantasies, toyed with the interplay between TV and reality. Despite their differences, both movies showed "real" characters getting lost in a TV world. And both showed "real life" triumphing over TV life because it's so much more unpredictable, more bittersweet, more human - even though "Truman Show" and "Pleasantville" managed to steer these ideas toward a safe, totally predictable 100% Hollywood happy ending.

"EDtv" reaches its Hollywood ending by a different route. A producer for True TV (Ellen DeGeneres) picks an ordinary guy named Ed and puts his ordinary life on television 24 hours a day. As in "The Truman Show," the "entertainment" comes from watching "reality," whatever these words mean. The difference is that Truman Burbank doesn't know he's on TV; Ed Pekurny (Matthew McConaughey) signed a contract to allow a camera crew to follow him from his crummy apartment to the video store where he works to the bar where he hangs out with brother Ray (Woody Harrelson) and Ray's girlfriend Shari (Jenna Elfman).

Within a few days on the air, millions of viewers are watching Ed all day. Ratings soar when Shari gets interested in Ed. Director Ron Howard cuts away to kids in dorms, men in bars, everybody watching Ed and Shari. But she's got a problem with a romance conducted in front of a TV camera. Soon afterward the polls show viewers think Shari is too stand-offish for good old Ed.

At this point the script by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel reaches way beyond "The Truman Show" and "Pleasantville." Ed agreed to turn his life into TV. Now TV is transforming that life. He's a celebrity. Police have to hold back crowds in front of the video store where he works. And ratings determine the fate of his relationship with Shari. Instead of just turning the camera on, the TV moguls start to shape Ed's life to make it, well, more like TV. This includes throwing gorgeous Elizabeth Hurley his way for a steamy interlude.

"EDtv" makes the point that TV is not a passive recorder of reality; it transforms what it sees, turns Ed's life into a sitcom. The father who abandoned Ed's mother decades ago suddenly turns up (it's Dennis Hopper) to complicate everyone's life. Why does he turn up? To get on TV, naturally.

But "EDtv" goes one step further. You may remember an old PBS show titled "An American Family," about a family that allowed a TV crew to document their lives for a month. Some month! Their gay son came out of the closet, and Mom and Pop decided to split up. (Albert Brooks satirized the show in his movie "Real Life.") Would any of this have happened without the cameras watching them? It's hard to say. What we can say, however, is that television makes privacy impossible. Worse, it invades the space a person needs to sustain an inner life at all. Behind all the comic shenanigans that mae "EDtv" a winner of a comedy, this is the idea that puts it over the top: the movie shows us how radically invasive television actually is.

That's why I rank it higher than "Truman Show" and "Pleasantville." It shows us how television inevitably turns everything it focuses on into . . . television. The distinction between reality and TV, which these other films depend on, is meaningless here. Of course, Ed isn't a "real" character; he's somebody Ganz and Mandell dreamed up for Ron Howard to film. So his story is ultimately shaped by the imperatives of another medium, the Hollywood comedy. And we all know how Hollywood comedies have to end. But one last twist in the script suggests that the screenwriters carefully thought through the implications of their theme. The movie works better as a comedy and satire than last year's trips into TV land.

Ron Howard gets the most out of a strong ensemble here. McConaughey gives Ed a dose of goofy charm. Woody Harrelson delivers one more amazing performance. (He is so good at portraying crazies that you have to wonder about him.) Jenna Elfman looks right as Shari, cute but a little frowsy. Martin Landau gets a joky part - he's Ed's stepfather, in a wheelchair clutching an oxygen canister. Ellen DeGeneres and Rob Reiner face off as Ed's producer and the network head. Everyone gets good lines and at least one good scene.

0 The movies have always enjoyed taking a whack at TV. "Network" and "Broadcast News" come to mind here. Maybe it's Hollywood's way of taking revenge on the upstart medium which reduced the moviegoing audience by two-thirds in the early 1950s. "EDtv" is about as intelligent an illustration of Gabler's thesis as we are likely to get: it's a comedy which shows how "entertainment conquers reality." But it's still a movie, and if that means it can't delve as deeply as Gabler or Neil Postman in "Amusing Ourselves to Death" or Warren Bennis and Ian Mitroff in "The Unreality Industry" (all highly recommended), all I can say is . . . that's entertainment.