YMMV / EDtv

• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: Fans agree that the film would have been too long if it had kept all, or even most, of the 45 minutes of deleted scenes. Still, they tend to mourn the deleted subplots that flesh out Ed's family and introduce a rival TV personality.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The television channel which comes up with the idea for EDtv is named "True TV", and its intent is to constantly air what happens in a normal person's life. A case of Defictionalization occurred in 2008 when the actual television network CourtTV changed its name to "truTV", which places a heavy focus on "caught-on-video" reality programs, just like the film!
• Older Than They Think: When it was released, the film was criticized for being a derivative knockoff of The Truman Show. Most people who saw the film didn't realize that EDtv was based off a little-known French-Canadian film called Louis 19, which was made five years before either film was released and dealt with the same subject matter.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • What the hell are Rust Cohle and Martin Hart doing on a reality show?
  • Greg Sestero of The Room (2003) fame plays one of the people watching Edtv.
• Values Resonance: In 1999, this film portrayed a world where an individual who tries out for a casting call, and has his life turned into a circus for the benefit of television audiences. Ten years later, in the wake of the Reality Show concept being played to death, EDTV seems oddly prescient about the entire genre. (Though, of course, reality television and its effects on people already existed in the 90s, it was just less prevalent.)
• Vindicated by History: The film bombed at theaters when it was released and was generally written off by critics as a poor man's The Truman Show, but has gone on to become a foretelling look at the reality television craze of the 2000s.

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