(WARNING: There are spoilers)

The Truman Show is a brilliant television satire that was truly ahead of its time, and only seems to gain relevance with age. When it was first released back in the summer of 1998, it showcased the ultimate "reality show," back before the term "reality show" was even coined. Although something as grand as "The Truman Show" will probably never happen, the massive popularity and abundance of reality shows makes it feel like that it's only a matter of time before someone actually does create something similar to it. Because of that, The Truman Show has attained an almost prophetic scariness of how a man's right to privacy is involuntarily and unknowingly violated for the sake of mass entertainment. There is also something quite Orwellian about how Truman is watched every second by thousands of cameras scattered around his studio town.

The Truman Show captures a fundamental truth about all reality shows: despite the fact they are not formally scripted, they are just as orchestrated as any fictitious TV show. This is best exemplified by the scene in which Truman (Jim Carrey) and his best friend Marlon (Noah Emmerich) are talking about Truman's slowly unraveling life. Marlon then reunites Truman with his "father," whom Truman believed to be dead. Behind the scenes, the show's creator, Christof (Ed Harris), is directing the scene with total control. He wrings every tear from the audience's eyes with complete emotional manipulation. Then all of his workers applaud him for a job well done.

The film satirizes the public's insatiable need for bigger, different, and more elaborate entertainment. As Christof says with the movie's very first lines, "We've become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions. We're tired of pyrotechnics and special effects." It also shows how the allure of TV has taken over people's lives: while watching "The Truman Show," two parking garage guards completely neglect their jobs, a mother ignores her crying baby, and there's even a man who has a TV installed by his bathtub so that he won't miss a minute of Truman's existence (that same man is so involved in the show that he forgets to leave the tub and goes to sleep there). Clearly, Truman's life is more important than theirs. With the movie's very last lines, one of the guards dispassionately says, "What else is on? Where's the TV Guide?" This demonstrates that even after the most ambitious, complex, and audacious television program ever created has just reached its moving and intense conclusion, the TV-viewing public quickly becomes bored again and continues to clamor for even more entertainment.

CONTINUED IN PART 2...