Broadcast Muse By Desson Howe Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, March 26, 1999

Matthew McConaughey and Jenna Elfman take public displays of affection to antoher level in "EDtv." (Universal) Director: Ron Howard Cast: Matthew McConaughey; Jenna Elfman; Woody Harrelson; Sally Kirkland; Martin Landau; Ellen DeGeneres; Rob Reiner; Dennis Hopper; Elizabeth Hurley; Adam Goldberg Running Time: 2 hours, 3 minutes Contains sexual situations, partial nudity and crude language

Despite some good laughs, which comic writers Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel can engineer in their sleep, the movie's too slick and obvious about its intentions.

Howard and his collaborators mostly cut their comedic teeth on sitcom television – that never-never land that creates miniature cliffhangers every 15 minutes, helps the funny stuff along with canned laughter and tells its audience everything they need to know.

So when such moviemakers make light of the MTV "Real World" culture, there's not enough separation between church and state, if you know what I mean.

Cynthia Topping (Ellen DeGeneres), program director at the NorthWest Broadcasting Company, is looking for a show to recapture the viewers her station lost to the Gardening Channel. When she meets Ed (McConaughey), a sweet-natured, thirtyish video store clerk in San Francisco who loves Burt Reynolds, she finds her golden boy.

Ed, a straight-shooting born charmer with a Texas twang, agrees to be filmed, live, 24 hours a day on cable TV. As the show begins its daily broadcast, the players in Ed's personal life are caught in the spotlight: his mother (Sally Kirkland), his wheelchair-bound stepfather, Al (an amusing Martin Landau), and his jerky, manipulative brother, Ray (a completely unamusing Woody Harrelson), who's two-timing sweet, little Shari (an appealing Jenna Elfman).

When Ed steps in to save Shari from his brother and to confess his love for her, the ratings go through the roof. His fast-moving relationship with Shari, as well as significant appearances from Dennis Hopper and Elizabeth Hurley, add to the buildup, but I won't get into the details. Suffice it to say, Ed becomes America's flavor of the month.

McConaughey, who gets to show the Texas swagger he displayed in Richard Linklater's "Dazed and Confused," wins you over with his easygoing, dudelike presence. There is a priceless moment when he wakes up for the first time on the air, forgets where he is and scratches himself in places he shouldn't.

But his impact is undercut by the "EDtv" scheme of things. Our Ed is a plaid-shirted salt of the earth, a noble, blue-collar victim on America's prime-time altar – or something to that effect. For some reason, he never seems to remember the cameras are catching every embarrassing, private moment. This is awfully convenient for the "EDtv" show, but hard to believe.

"We're not as dumb as you think we are," Ed tells the executives in a later, more triumphant moment. That statement becomes more debatable than, I think, the filmmakers had in mind.

There seems to be a TV-based patina over everything, including an enormous number of product placements, from soda items to canned beer. "EDtv" is too darned easy to "get," too obviously ironic, too morally readable, too strategically "wacky," as if everything was pretested with focus groups and sneak preview audiences before making it to the word processor.

To evoke a universality of reaction, to show how America is reacting to Ed, Howard and his writers give us the usual sequence of Jay Leno routines and USA Today headlines. They also cut frequently to TV viewers across America, all of them feverishly tuned in to the show, of course. While some of their reactions are amusing, the gay couple, the heterosexual black couple, the gaggle of dormitory girls, the nice girl from Iowa ("I think he's cute") and the rowdy, goateed restaurant workers, all seem like Nielsen archetypes rather than real people. And if you can't connect immediately with one or more of them, you might feel as tuned out as I did.