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 250-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 premiere 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.
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