THE idea behind The Truman Show sounds ingenious. A baby, Truman Burbank, is born in a special enclave—a giant television studio somewhere in California—and grows up inside TV without realizing it. He thinks he is in the real world, but is actually surrounded by actors in the made-for-TV coastal town of Seahaven, which comes complete with pristinely Norman Rockwell houses, fake sun and moon, and a sizable bit of ocean. Everything in Truman’s life is fictitious: his job as an insurance salesman, his cheery neighbors, his rough-hewn best friend, and his pretty wife, Meryl, a dedicated nurse.
The whole thing is the idea of a combination TV producer and mad scientist, Christof, who, from the control room, devises the day’s events: when, for example, Truman is to be caught in the rain (a rain that, at first, maladroitly concentrates on him alone), or when his father is to drown in a sailing accident, though not when he is to fall in love with a young woman, Lauren, who wants to clue him in on the truth. Christof has her denounced as psychotic and whisked away; it is given out that she has moved to Fiji.
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