Good Afternoon, Good Evening, Good Night

By 2008, Joel Gold, a psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital in New York, had treated five patients who believed their lives were a reality television show, and he had heard of a dozen more. One travelled to New York to check whether the World Trade Center had really fallen, because he suspected the attacks were a plot twist in his own storyline. Gold gave the condition a name: the Truman Show delusion. The film's writer, Andrew Niccol, reportedly took it as a compliment.

That says something about Peter Weir's film. Movies rarely shape how people imagine the world. This one did it to people for whom imagining was already a struggle. And in a milder form, it did it to the rest of us. Almost everyone who has felt watched online, or suspected that a friend was performing their life for an audience, has borrowed this film's language to say so.

Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) lives on Seahaven Island, a sunny seaside town where everybody smiles. He doesn't know that Seahaven is inside an enormous soundstage, that his wife and his best friend are actors, or that his whole life has been broadcast live, round the clock, since the day he was born. The show's creator, Christof (Ed Harris), has staged his father's "death" at sea to give him a fear of water, so he'll never try to leave. As the show nears its 30th anniversary, the set starts to fail. A stage light falls out of the sky. Rain falls on Truman and nobody else. His dead father turns up in the street and is bundled away. Truman starts to notice.

The art: a perfect film about a perfect fake

Niccol's first script was a darker science-fiction thriller set in New York. Weir thought it was too bleak and set out to make it lighter. Niccol wrote many drafts before Weir was satisfied, and that made the film much better. The Truman Show is funny first and frightening second, which is the only order in which the idea works. If Seahaven felt sinister from the start, you'd wonder why Truman hadn't noticed. Because it's charming, you understand why he didn't.

The town is real. Weir's wife, Wendy Stites, introduced him to Seaside, a master-planned community on the Florida Panhandle, and its pastel streets do most of the work. The design team drew on Norman Rockwell paintings and 1960s postcards. Many shots are framed like adverts, with characters leaning into the lens, wide-eyed, and the interiors are brightly lit to remind you that in this world everything is for sale. Laura Linney, as Truman's wife Meryl, studied 1950s Sears catalogues for her poses. Meryl delivers product placements with a perfectly straight face, which is one of the film's best running gags.

Carrey is extraordinary. Weir cast him after seeing Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, saying the performance reminded him of Chaplin, and he uses him that way. Carrey's rubbery energy is all there, but kept just below the surface, so Truman's cheerfulness looks like a habit he's been trained into. You can feel the effort it takes. Carrey took a pay cut to do it. The Academy nominated Weir, Harris and Niccol, but not Carrey, which looks worse every year. Harris replaced Dennis Hopper after shooting began, and he plays Christof as a man who honestly believes he's given Truman a better life than reality could. That's why he's frightening. He isn't evil. He's sincere.

The music is a mix of Burkhard Dallwitz's score and pieces by Philip Glass, who appears in the film playing his own "Truman Sleeps". Then there's the ending. Truman sails into a storm Christof has ordered up to drown him, hits the painted sky, and finds a staircase with a door at the top. Christof speaks to him from the sky, the voice of a god who is really a producer, and offers him safety. Truman answers with his daily catchphrase, takes a bow and walks out. The worldwide audience cheers. Then the film goes back to some of the viewers we've been watching all along, and within moments they're looking for something else to watch.

Its flaws are small. Sylvia (Natascha McElhone), the extra who tries to tell Truman the truth, is more symbol than person. The "Free Truman" campaign is sketched in a few cutaways. The film's faith that walking out of the door means freedom is the most dated thing in it. It's an 8.8 because it's nearly perfect and because it's about the right thing.

The prophecy: everyone is Truman, everyone is Christof

The film opened in June 1998. Big Brother debuted the following year. Weir and Niccol thought they were making a parable about television, but they ended up describing the next three decades.

The life broadcast round the clock. In 2007, Justin Kan, then 23, began streaming his whole life on a site called Justin.tv, using a webcam fixed to his cap. What Christof did with a soundstage full of hidden cameras, a twenty-something did with a hat.

The man who wasn't in on it. In 2023, Amazon Freevee released Jury Duty, a docu-style comedy in which one real man, Ronald Gladden, sat on a fake jury where everyone else was an actor. The producers described it as a sitcom with a real person at its centre who doesn't know he's surrounded by actors. Unlike Truman, Gladden was let in on the secret at the end. Viewers loved him for the same reason Seahaven's audience loved Truman: he was the only sincere person on screen.

The cameras. Seahaven's hidden cameras are now on our own front doors. In 2023 the US Federal Trade Commission alleged that Ring, Amazon's doorbell camera company, had let employees and contractors watch customers' private videos, and Ring agreed to a $5.8 million settlement without admitting wrongdoing. In 2025 Ring launched a feature called Search Party, switched on by default, that scans neighbours' outdoor cameras for a missing dog. The neighbourhood has become the set.

The weather. Christof could make it rain on one man. We still can't. A US Government Accountability Office report in December 2024 found that studies of cloud seeding estimated anywhere from zero to 20 per cent extra rainfall, and that the effects are hard to measure.

What the film got wrong, and it's the most important thing, is who builds the dome. Truman was captured as a baby and adopted by a corporation. We volunteered. In the 2020s the cameras pointed at children, at kitchens and at people's breakdowns usually belonged to the people in the frame. Christof's job has been split up and handed out: part of it went to the recommendation algorithm, and part of it went to us, as we edit our own lives into content. The film ends with Truman stepping out of the dome. Nobody imagined that the next generation would take the stairs going the other way.

The reading

The Truman Show is the best mainstream American film of the 1990s about the future, and it doesn't look like a film about the future at all. It's a comedy, a love story and a religious parable, and it contains no gadgets. In 2025 the Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry. That was overdue. As prophecy it's close to perfect, and its one big mistake is the most revealing thing about it. It assumed we would want to leave. Its final joke, the audience reaching for another channel, is the truest thing in it. The audience was never the prisoner. It was the warden, and it was bored.