Lifting TV riffs from The Truman Show and To Die For (with a creepy touch of Videodrome), this black comedy casts Kristen Wiig as the habitually unstable Alice Klieg whose $86m lottery win allows her to turn her life into a television show – literally. Having not turned her own TV set off for over a decade, Alice pays a failing shopping channel to give her a show which is “like Oprah”, but without the guests and with only one topic of discussion; herself. Baring her soul through burger-cake cookery classes, live dog neutering, am-dram re-enactments of childhood slights, and (most importantly) “more swans”, Alice attracts cult attention and lawsuits in equal measure. To her great credit, Wiig manages to make Alice both engaging and annoying without ever rendering her ridiculous, lending heft to the film’s portrait of her mental illness and televisual malaise. It may not have the depth of The Skeleton Twins, which boldly sought humour in the spectre of attempted suicide, but a sharp-ish screenplay by Eliot Laurence and sympathetic (if ironically televisual) direction from Shira Piven keep the viewer ratings up.
