What on Earth is The Show About the Show?

Mandy: Caveh! Don’t put that in there! 

Caveh: Why not?

Mandy: That is, like, so embarrassing!

Caveh: I know. That’s why it’s good.

Caveh Zahe­di and his wife Mandy could be talk­ing about almost any­thing that hap­pens in Zahedi’s parade of embar­rass­ments, The Show About the Show. Zahe­di, a sort of émi­nence grise of Amer­i­can inde­pen­dent and experimental/​nonfiction media known for the bru­tal hon­esty and off­beat charm of his per­son­al doc­u­men­taries, is an acknowl­edged influ­ence on a host of film­mak­ers includ­ing Richard Lin­klater, Lena Dun­ham, Gre­ta Ger­wig, the Safdie broth­ers, Joan­na Arnow, Zia Anger and John Wil­son. The Show About the Show is his messy, con­vo­lut­ed masterpiece.

How messy? The New York Times ran an arti­cle on Zahe­di in 2019 with the head­line, ​“A Film­mak­er Bared His Soul. It Ruined His Life.” Zahe­di read­i­ly reveals his every anx­i­ety, inse­cu­ri­ty, per­ceived slight, moment of self-abase­ment and betray­al of ideals – and those of his friends and fam­i­ly – no mat­ter the per­son­al embar­rass­ment or pro­fes­sion­al cost. As it hap­pens, the con­ver­sa­tion that Mandy deemed too embar­rass­ing is about them not hav­ing sex. It could equal­ly have been about any of the fol­low­ing: Mandy hav­ing sex with Caveh’s friend Jamie; mid­dle-aged Caveh hav­ing a crush on seem­ing­ly any attrac­tive woman who pays him atten­tion; Mandy smash­ing her gui­tar and pri­mal scream­ing while the couple’s chil­dren are sleep­ing; Caveh try­ing and fail­ing to get The Show picked up; Caveh try­ing and fail­ing to pro­mote the project by get­ting him­self onto Chapo Trap House, Red Scare, Marc Maron, or Joe Rogan, or Caveh men­tion­ing over and over again that he’s so broke that he can’t pay his cred­it card bill.

How con­vo­lut­ed? Osten­si­bly, The Show About the Show is a show about its own mak­ing: each episode is about the mak­ing of the pre­vi­ous episode. Zahe­di impro­vis­es direct-to-cam­era address­es that pro­vide the nar­ra­tive through­line, and mix­es this with snap­pi­ly-edit­ed doc­u­men­tary footage and re-enact­ments (some­times with the orig­i­nal peo­ple involved, some­times with actors) of what­ev­er tran­spired. In fact, the con­cept lasts about three episodes before it starts to break down and the focus shifts to the acri­mo­nious and even­tu­al­ly liti­gious col­lapse of Zahedi’s mar­riage. But Zahe­di still wants Mandy to be in The Show, and he even­tu­al­ly drafts dif­fer­ent actress­es to por­tray her.

The con­fu­sion extends to The Show​’s dis­tri­b­u­tion. Two sea­sons (twelve episodes in all) were hap­haz­ard­ly released on YouTube between 2015 and 2019. Then, dur­ing Covid, Zahedi’s pro­duc­er left BRIC, the tiny Brook­lyn TV net­work that pro­duced The Show, and Zahe­di turned to Kick­starter to fund the third sea­son. As part of the (doomed) Kick­starter cam­paign, he cre­at­ed four new episodes, spo­rad­i­cal­ly appear­ing as much as a year apart. These are some­times labeled Sea­son 2.5 and some­times Sea­son 4.

Sea­son 3 – which will be about the mak­ing of Sea­son 2, at which point the orig­i­nal con­cept had been com­plete­ly aban­doned – will be screen­ing at London’s Prince Charles Cin­e­ma as a 180-minute work-in-progress on 16 March at 10am as part of a wide-rang­ing series of screen­ings and work­shops across Lon­don, Man­ches­ter, Leeds and Birm­ing­ham organ­ised in col­lab­o­ra­tion between the Cre­ative Non­fic­tion Film Week­end and Elec­tric Blue Cin­e­ma with oth­er pro­gram­ming part­ners across the coun­try. I have been warned that it is dark.

But what’s The Show About the Show actu­al­ly about? I’ll try to explain. In the first episode, Zahe­di – pic­ture a pen­ni­less ston­er ver­sion of Lar­ry David – pitch­es a series to BRIC called ​‘Daisy Chain’, in which each episode is about two peo­ple hav­ing sex – A and B in the first episode, B and C in the next, C and D in the next, and so on until in the last episode Z has sex with A and the chain is closed. To make ​‘Daisy Chain’, Zahe­di goes to his friend Alex Kar­povsky (of ​‘Girls’ fame), who tells him a sto­ry about a time he had sex with a woman who want­ed him to hit her. So they get an actress to reen­act that scene with Kar­povsky and then they show it to BRIC. BRIC pass­es. Then Zahe­di comes up with ​‘The Show About the Show’ and BRIC decides to com­mis­sion it instead of ​‘Daisy Chain’. So the next episode is about stuff that hap­pened in the mak­ing of the first episode. It turns out that the actress from the sex scene in episode one, had told Zahe­di a sto­ry about a three­some she and her boyfriend had with a para­plegic woman. So episode two, ​“Para­plegic Three­some,” is about reen­act­ing that three­some. The next episode goes behind the scenes of that reen­act­ment to show the actress who played the para­plegic woman heat­ed­ly ques­tion­ing the whole premise of The Show, which every­body finds impos­si­ble to defend. And so on.

The mir­a­cle of The Show is that, in spite of the fact that it’s impos­si­ble to fol­low, deals with the messi­est emo­tions in the messi­est ways, and is eth­i­cal­ly dubi­ous at the best of times, it’s also com­pul­sive­ly watch­able, even addic­tive. Zahe­di, like New Nar­ra­tive authors, rais­es gos­sip to the lev­el of art. You keep watch­ing because you just can’t believe this guy is say­ing this stuff and you can’t get enough of it. It doesn’t hurt that there are also aston­ish­ing, vivid moments through­out. In S2E2 (list­ed as episode nine on YouTube, just to make things more con­fus­ing), Zahedi’s crush, Ash­ley, sends him a record­ing of a song she has writ­ten about her feel­ings for him. It feels authen­tic, as does Zahedi’s on-screen reac­tion. So it’s a shock to see, over the end cred­its, Zahe­di film­ing it: it was a re-enactment.

What’s the point of all this? To test the lim­its of hon­esty, cer­tain­ly. To play around with form too, prob­a­bly. But it’s deep­er than that. Zahe­di iden­ti­fies com­plete­ly with The Show. He wants peo­ple to love it – and (there­fore) him. At one point Zahe­di quotes, as a per­son­al max­im, Ray­mond Carver’s ​‘Late Frag­ment’: And did you get what / you want­ed from this life, even so? / I did. / And what did you want? / To call myself beloved, to feel myself / beloved on the earth. Well, he’s beloved, in his own way (it couldn’t be any oth­er). But was it worth all the pain and humiliation?

The Show About the Show Sea­son 3 has its UK pre­mière on March 16 at the Prince Charles Cin­e­ma, and Caveh Zahe­di will be tour­ing the UK with Sea­son 1 and var­i­ous events before that. Find details via the Cre­ative Non­fic­tion Film Week­end and Elec­tric Blue Cin­e­ma.