Essentially The Truman Show made more plausible, and made more lowbrow, and made no better in the process. A cable network that bills itself as True TV ("No script, no acting, no editing, all true, all day, all night") sends out a casting call for some ordinary Joe -- an ordinary Jane never enters anyone's mind, in spite of it being Ellen DeGeneres's idea -- who would be followed around by a live television camera, in his normal environment, with his full knowledge and co-operation, twenty-four hours a day. An ordinary Ed, a San Francisco video-store clerk (Matthew McConaughey), turns out to be the chosen one, though it was his brassier brother (Woody Harrelson, a decent match physically) who was applying for the position. His stepfather poses a couple of the questions that went unvoiced in The Truman Show: "What happens when you go to the bathroom?" and "How about sex?" That other movie, whose prior existence must be a pebble in the shoe of director Ron Howard, is of course never mentioned by name, although the Louds of the PBS series An American Family (but not Albert Brooks's lampoon of them, and it, in Real Life) are brought up in order to make the distinction that here there will be round-the-clock coverage and no cuts. The distinction is just talk. The movie -- a Ron Howard movie, after all -- can only be bothered with the juiciest tidbits and highlights (the morning boner, the stolen and then runaway girlfriend, the return of Long Lost Dad -- another unfortunate echo of The Truman Show -- the mid-coital coronary, and so forth), thereby dodging, and at the same time fueling, our doubts about the viability of the concept. Who would watch such a thing? And for how long? All it can do to quiet our doubts is to intercut the reactions of a broad spectrum of TV viewers -- peering raptly at the screen, kibitzing, crying, cheering -- though the effect of this is more in the nature of self-congratulation on its own creative brilliance and popular appeal. With Jenna Elfman, Rob Reiner, Martin Landau, Sally Kirkland, Dennis Hopper, Elizabeth Hurley. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd