In the last season of Caveh Zahedi’s The Show About the Show, Zahedi’s soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend calls a suicide hotline.
“She said to me that she was thinking of killing herself, and it’d be good for the show,” Zahedi, 65, says to the camera blankly, “And I’m like, ‘Oh man, this would not be good for the show at all.’”
This really happened, because everything in The Show is true. Or, I should say, true to Zahedi, as he is diligent about reminding his audience.
Everything in The Show is either a recreation of something that has happened, as he remembers it, or behind-the-scenes footage of such recreations.
Each episode is about what happened in the making of the last episode. It is a brilliant series, one that can’t be categorized easily into traditional genres. It also ruined his third marriage, made his girlfriend suicidal, lost him friends, and strained his relationship with his young children.
In other words, it ruined his life. At least, for a bit.
Zahedi first took on the project in 2017, hoping that a successful TV series would bring him a bigger paycheck than his low-budget films. This summer, he released the third and final season of The Show. We interviewed Zahedi upon The Show’s conclusion to see if he had any reflections after the eight years it had consumed his life.
The Show is less like a documentary series and more like a podcast, if the viewer were a co-host. Zahedi addresses the audience directly, a bald floating head in front of a simple black backdrop, casually chatting about the process of filming The Show and the latest developments in his personal life. His monologues are cut with reenactments and behind-the-scenes footage as necessary.
If the concept seems dry, The Show is anything but. The first episode chronicles Zahedi’s desperate pitches to various TV networks, finally landing on BRIC TV, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit his sister was connected to. “What if nothing happens?” BRIC producer Aziz Isham asks Zahedi. Zahedi responds, aptly, “Things always happen.”
Zahedi strips all the typical illusions of movie magic from his work. There is no laugh track, no score, and the lead camera often pans out to show the filming crew with their back-up cameras and booms. The show is minimalistic to the extreme, allowing the colorful characters on screen to shine.
The series is quirky and often hilarious, as Zahedi wryly makes fun of himself and those who cross him. But The Show most excels in its devastatingly raw, emotional arcs.
The Show grows darker as the meta-structure starts to unravel and Zahedi lays bare all its messiness. Zahedi and his wife of 16 years, Amanda Field, often argue as they shoot reenactments (usually of previous fights).
“Mandy, there’s nothing that’s going to happen to you because you do this, except that I won’t be furious with you for the next 10 years,” Zahedi scolds in a scene of the sixth episode.
Zahedi, who appears to fall in love with basically every woman who talks to him, also plays out his and Field’s affairs on camera. Their internecine divorce feeds the second season.
The Show never took off in the way Zahedi hoped, and it ultimately cost him money as well as his relationships. Zahedi documents his struggles to get The Show picked up by streaming platforms (they all decline, rightfully afraid Zahedi will lampoon them in his show). When Zahedi’s show finally does receive an inkling of mainstream coverage, he finds himself disappointed. “There’s something sinister about him,” New York Times film critic Glenn Kenny wrote in a lukewarm review.
Still, Zahedi stands by The Show with no regrets. He also maintains that, regardless of the darkness he exhibits in The Show, he is a good person. “I think my moral system is unorthodox,” he told me as we sat down at his favorite Thai restaurant, Boran, in his Brooklyn neighborhood, Carroll Gardens.
“Most people think that they know what’s best for other people, and they tend to act accordingly,” he says, “But I don’t think anyone knows what’s best for anyone else.” Zahedi believes that, at our core, humans are fundamentally good and that imposing moralistic standards only inhibits our freedom to be good.
Most people, Zahedi says, are guided by principles that make the people around them feel “safe and unchallenged.” But Zahedi is something of a devil’s advocate, in a very literal sense. He cites the Vamachara, or “left-hand path,” in Hinduism. “The idea is that the fastest way to God is through sin. By being bad, you reach the good faster,” he says.
In any case, being “good” is often bad for art, which should aim to provoke people to think differently, he tells me. Zahedi maintains he couldn’t have made a good show without sacrificing himself and his relationships. To make an autobiographical show without discussing the unhappiness in his love and sex life would be like “a puzzle with the most important piece missing.”
True, but rarely does a TV show document one’s unhappiness in real time and portray the subsequent fallout on screen. In fact, that is the very premise of “Joan Is Awful,” an episode in Black Mirror, a show that imagines the dystopian possibilities of technology and surveillance.
For the record, his ex-girlfriend, Ashley, agrees with Zahedi. In 2019, she told The New York Times that art is worth whatever pain it causes, and Zahedi’s show is worth the pain it caused her. Zahedi says that he is okay with causing any amount of suffering through his art, short of violence.
His practice of radical honesty comes from his obsessive commitment to art. It does not come from showmanship or exhibitionism, as one may suspect. Upon meeting him, I was surprised at how reserved he is. “I think a lot of people, when they meet me, are disappointed because they feel like I’m not as friendly or fun in person,” he admits.
It’s true. I was struck by how different he was from the person I knew from The Show. They hardly seemed to be the same person; the Zahedi I knew stumbled over his words in his excitement to walk back a funny moment. The man in front of me wasn’t cold exactly, but unsmiling and unwilling to engage in small talk. He’s exact and doesn’t say more than necessary. He’s a man who goes to this restaurant regularly and orders drunken noodles almost every time.
I thought it’d be easier to interview a man infamous for oversharing. When I asked, desperately, if he had any fun new stories to share, he replied, “I don’t walk around thinking, like, ‘I really want to share this story.’” Fair enough.
Zahedi thinks he’s running out of stories because he’s told so many. But he refuses to let The Show be his swan song. “As I get older, I’m more aware of death,” he says. Now, he is more productive than ever.
After releasing the final season of The Show, Zahedi is now juggling many projects, including an adaptation of Ulysses, a documentary about the artist Joseph Cornell, and multiple podcasts (including “Conversations I Want To Have Before We Both Die” and “Recording Myself And Everyone Around Me Destroyed All My Relationships So I’m Doing a Daily Audio Journal Instead”). This is in addition to his teaching gig, which is his sole source of income, as none of his projects make any money.
He also has not one, but two girlfriends. (He’s in an open relationship.) He says he’s in love. Against all odds, he’s happy. It’s “an unstable situation,” as he calls it. But Zahedi gave up stability a long time ago.
But Zahedi doesn’t think he’s any more special than anyone else. In fact, he believes the beauty of The Show is in how it projects everyone’s “unspecialness.” In a clip from Episode 23 of the third season, Zahedi engages in a Q&A with the audience at a screening of The Show in London. Zahedi tells the crowd that if their lives were projected on screen, it would be equally scandalous.
This is also a central message of Black Mirror’s “Joan Is Awful.” Joan is involuntarily chosen to star in a show about her life not because she is particularly awful, but because she is a “totally average, nobody person.”
Maybe this is what makes The Show stick in the craw: His televised psychodrama is uncomfortably real. A mixture of horror and awe bubbles beneath the surface when you watch your totally average, nobody life being narrated by a small balding man you’ve never heard of. The Show is a funhouse mirror that amplifies your hidden insecurities. The viewer can’t stop watching Zahedi self-immolate because we feel the flames licking at us.
The goal of his art, Zahedi says, is to prompt his viewer to understand him as deeply as they would if they were tripping together—that is, to become him. Sharing this deep, pantheistic understanding is how he and Ashley fell in love. “We’re on the same page that we’re all God,” Ashley says in an episode of season three. In this particular episode, Ashley spends over 40 minutes explaining how she came to hate Zahedi, The Show, and herself.
“I don’t know, I guess I kind of got sucked in.”
You can watch Caveh Zahedi’s The Show About The Show on Gumroad. The first two seasons can also be viewed on the BRIC TV YouTube channel. The rest of his work can be found at his website, cavehzahedi.com
If you or a loved one is struggling with suicidal thoughts, please reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by dialing or texting 988.
The post He Made a TV Show That Ended His Marriage appeared first on The Daily Beast.
