The new twist here is the way in which the critiques of town life and TV get mixed together, giving us actors as villains, conspiring with the audience to deceive the non-actor star. It's the complete paranoid dystopia. In fact, Canada's Dionne Quintuplets really did live this nightmare in the 1930s. The Truman Show follows a long line of Hollywood films that satirize television. It's an easy target, a symbol for much that is wrong with US society.
TV is presented as shallow and manipulative, wedded to a moronic and passive audience.
Although the audience within the film roots for Truman, it is also titillated by the deception played on him. All cinema and TV create an illusion of reality. The Truman Show's satire of that illusion might, however, help an audience question the extremes of dominant cinema. The latter ventriloquized in her best sultry manner to chilling effect. Her freeform songs have all the coherence of classical lieder, despite mercurial changes in emotional and musical mood.