On paper, EDtv reads like a B-list Truman Show clone. But with Jenny Jones' talk show now formally accused of being responsible for one guest's murder at the hands of another, with bombing raids over Yugoslavia being jazzed up courtesy of missile-mounted TV cameras, and with coverage of the Columbine High School massacre made alarmingly palatable with decorative video graphics and alliterative tag-lines ("Killing at Columbine High"), it's fair to say that no film since Platoon has hit so close to the American home as EDtv. In America, after all, TV can turn anything into entertainment.

As in most of director Ron Howard's work, EDtv takes an affectionately critical look at contemporary America, via the previously uneventful life of Ed Pekurny (Matthew McConaughey), a blue-collar video-store clerk who sky-rockets to stardom when chosen as the subject of a 24-hour cable TV show ('All Ed. All the time'). Gradually, the show catches on, especially when Ed falls out with his older brother Ray (Woody Harrelson) and embarks on an affair with Ray's girlfriend, Shari (Jenna Elfman). As the series takes off, Ed is locked into a chain of bonus-related rolling contracts, but although the hefty paycheck is most welcome, Ed quickly learns that celebrity comes at a high price.

Howard's 14th film as a director, EDtv is clearly close to his own heart. As a child star, Howard learned at a very early age the debilitating effects of fame and the loss of privacy.

Not surprisingly, today Howard lives and raises his children in Westchester County, some 3,000 miles from Hollywood. But even without this resonance, EDtv is equally important as an informed contemplation on celebrity status in America today - a comment on the misguided notion that a TV appearance revealing one's deepest emotional turmoil is a path to fame and an automatic validation of one's entire existence. Not unlike the countless guests that 'grace' the sets of American TV's most pathetic daytime talk shows, Ed expects fame and money to flow his way once the cameras roll. Instead, all he ultimately reaps is embarrassment after embarrassment - for him, his friends and his family.

Although Howard's film doesn't explicitly tackle talk shows per se, many of its main characters fit the talk-show profile. Ed and co are strictly working class, low on education but headstrong and stubborn - the archetypal lumpen proletariat. In the great American tradition, however, this is a lumpen proletariat with a heart, which gives the film some much-needed emotional power when city-slicker media types in soulless, glass skyscrapers cheerfully contrive to maximise Ed's degradation in a bid to win the ratings war. And as it draws to a close, EDtv becomes almost Capra-esque in its morality, placing Ed's manipulators at the mercy of his 'small guy' heroics.

No one is let off the hook in this skewering depiction of America's fascination with fame and TV. We get peeks at the country's sofa-sitting audience - from college dorms to hardware stores; straight, middle-class living rooms to a pair of gay Manhattan interior designers - and witness the nation transfixed by the life of a nobody distinguished through its depiction on TV.

Viewers discuss what is going to happen next, superimposing the mediocrity of commercial TV onto the reality of Ed's life.

As one of Ed's friends puts it while sitting on a panel show discussing fame in America - his friendship with Ed being enough to qualify him as an expert media critic - celebrity has become "a moral good; its own virtue".

Viewers discuss what is going to happen next, superimposing the mediocrity of commercial TV onto the reality of Ed's life. As one of Ed's friends puts it while sitting on a panel show discussing fame in America - his friendship with Ed being enough to qualify him as an expert media critic - celebrity has become "a moral good; its own virtue".

Given Bill Clinton's recent impeachment trial and the moralistic rantings of several US congressmen, EDtv now has a special significance. The film makes no secret that the sleaziest behaviour pulls the biggest audiences - and that those audiences are becoming increasingly non-judgmental. Which is why the exaggerated expressions of shock and outrage on the faces of Washington politicians, and the national TV correspondents who cover them, are becoming ever-more difficult to stomach. You'd think they never watched TV or something. Jeffrey R Sipe