By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

From the previews, I figured “Ed TV” was just a cheap knock-off of “The Truman Show,” so I didn't go.

I rented it recently, though, because there just wasn't much to choose from, and I was pleasantly surprised. Whereas “Truman” was a cute sit-com built mainly around the comedic personality of Jim Carey, “Ed TV” was a biting satire with snappy dialogue and interesting social commentary.
Of course, it didn't hurt that the movie absolutely nailed a societal ill that has long been near the top of my list — hero worship.

It's a story about an average (maybe even a little below average) underachiever who accepts a chance to have his everyday life filmed for a new experimental television show.

It's a farfetched premise, but not really all that farfetched. People pay good money to look into the lives of other people through voyeur-cams on the Internet. Why not a cable TV show that takes the concept a step further and follows a regular person through his everyday ups and downs?

The cameras follow Ed to his brother's pad, where all of America discover's that the brother has a sleep-over guest who is not his regular girlfriend. The consequences of this, and the fact that the girlfriend happens to be watching “ED TV” at the time, is a voyeur's dream, and the show takes off, making Ed an instant celebrity.

Fans “love” him.

And that's where the underlying message begins to take shape. A hundred million people don't fall in love with Ed because he is a great person, a person of talent, integrity and all the other qualities we all would like to have. They fall in love with him because he is famous.

Suddenly, Gallup is taking polls about whether Ed should keep his girlfriend or throw her over for some model, or whether he should spend time with his deadbeat biological dad, who shows up unexpectedly to bask in the spotlight.

At some point, on a talk show that obviously represents the “Politically Correct” genre, a sociologist points out that fame has become a virtue unto itself. No longer do we become famous because we are special. We become special, in the eyes of the masses, merely because we are famous.

How true!

The only way they could have made the point more perfectly would have been if they had killed Ed off. Then the audience would have been treated to film of thousands of brokenhearted fans piling flowers, cards, prayer books and the like in front of the video store where Ed worked, and in front of his apartment.

Instead of a guy who had no ambition other than to collect his pay and spend it at the local beer hall, Ed would have been eulogized as one of the great thinkers of the 20th century, a giant of our time, the last best hope of future generations.

Like Diana, JFK Jr., Elvis and a multitude of others, he would have been deified. Lonely, pitiable middle-aged women would have used closets or small rooms in their trailers as shrines to Ed, to display their collections of autographed souvenirs.

Television and other mass media portray public figures, whether in politics, sports, big business or entertainment, as heroes or villains, and we who make up the great unwashed play our parts to perfection, worshipping or reviling according to the demands of the script.

And we long for our own 15 minutes of fame, willingly playing the fool in order to attract the attention of a camera at a ball game, on a game show, at a disaster...

How empty we must feel our real lives to be, that we willingly hand the strings to the Puppetmasters and dance to their manipulations.

Will we ever reach the point that we are not so malleable, not so ready to believe that having one's face on the cover of Time makes one any smarter, stronger or better?

If the answer to that is no, then maybe we need to stop taking our newborns to the pediatrician once a month, and set them up with their own agents instead.

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