Madis Games

before it was like, "what a horrifying thing to do to a human being! to take away their autonomy and privacy, all for the sake of profits! to create fake scenarios for them to react to, just to retain viewership! to ruin their happiness just so some corporate entity could harvest money from their very humanity! how could anyone do something so evil?"

agshjfsj you know what? sure. I can do this from an in-universe perspective too

for anyone too young to know this: watching The Truman Show is a vastly different experience now, compared to when it was on air.

firstly, you'd better hope it stays up on amazon prime, because it aired 24/7 for multiple decades, so the size of it is astronomical. there's a reason the other streaming services dropped it - the server costs alone are ridiculous. but even on prime there are ad breaks in it that it never used to have, because back then all the advertising was product placement, but modern advertisers want mid-roll ads, and they really break up some of the most emotional moments imo.

(and don't get me started on the music licensing btw - all of the changes are bad, but the song swap in episode 9775 killed me dead. awful)

not to mention that the vhs, laserdisc, dvd, and blu-ray releases have been out of print for years. and if you want to try torrenting it, to get it in even barely decent quality you're gonna need at least 300TB of free space, and that's not including the deleted scenes and director's commentary tracks, which are a whole other thing.

secondly, everyone has this parasocial thing where they feel like they grew up with Truman, because their mom kept it on in the house when they were a kid or w/e, and we need to just. get over it. I mean, he's just a guy. you're not special for liking him; everyone likes him.

like, some of you guys are worse about this than you were with Steve from Blue's Clues, and that's saying something. you've gotta move on.

and people need to be nicer to the actors who played his friends and family, too. like I know the ones who were adults at the start have a lot to answer for, but the kids were pushed into this by the industry just like he was! and they don't deserve to be cancelled on twitter just because their dad got them into acting as a 3yo or w/e. like. come on.

thirdly, because of the way the show ended, we need to actually address the fact that we don't know what happened to him? like, Truman wasn't some actor who quit, he was lied to about his whole life, and now nobody knows where he is! and after the SAG-AFTRA strike when the crew and extras were fighting to get paid for the work they did on that show, did fucking anybody think about Truman? if anyone's owed residuals, it's that guy.

I just feel like nobody's taking it seriously that he's not a celebrity? he's a kid who got shoved into a machine, and after what happened to him, it'd be completely fine if he never showed his face in public again.

(though personally, I want him to just so he can sue the shit out of everyone involved in his upbringing. but that's just me.)

anyway on a fandom level, if you want to help, the Truman Archival Project is looking for some eps that were lost due to corruption, and some scenes that got cut later. there's a list on the wiki, but there are a lot of gaps and old tape formats that need converting, so if you can help, go do that!

and Truman, if you're out there - I hope you're living a good life. whatever comfort and entertainment you bring to people really means nothing compared to the value of you getting to live a normal life. I hope you're having a good time, wherever you are.

when it comes down to it, what was done to you was awful. nobody deserves to have their most private moments shown to millions of people without their consent.