Artery

• Neal Bell

Now You See Me asks to what lengths will a television network go in order to insure what it might call the “human continuity” in its latest smash reality TV series—a show focusing on people who are gravely, if not terminally, ill? Why would anyone watch the show in the first place? And under such circumstances, if a producer offered you a promising new cancer-fighting drug—and a shot at stardom—why might you really not want to sign that contract?

We spoke with Bell for an hour by phone last weekend.

INDEPENDENT: That oddly prescient ’80s TV news network drama Max Headroom was supposedly set “15 minutes into the future.” The world in Now You See Me has a similar sense to it. It’s not tangential to our time, but a logical extension of it.
NEAL BELL: I hope so. While I was writing it, I actually thought that maybe this premise—a reality show about dying people—was so far out there that it went beyond parody into ridiculousness.

But while I was writing it, a British reality TV star named Jade Goody, who’d been a big hit on several different Big Brothers because she was so apparently abrasive and obnoxious, finally ended up on one in India, where she was diagnosed—on camera—as having terminal cancer.

She quit the show, went back to England and basically sold the rights to her death to a television company, which filmed as much as they could of her final month or two. She got married—though she was barely able to walk down the aisle—to the father of her two children. It was a huge media event in England.

And I thought, well, (laughs) I guess I didn’t make it up. It’s actually happening.

As Lily Tomlin said, “No matter how cynical you get, it’s impossible to keep up.”
I think that’s true. It goes beyond the “stranger than fiction” thing. I think cynicism is exactly the right word. You just cannot calculate the bottomless desire or appetite for the most invasive glimpses into people’s lives.