In 2001, when reality TV was emerging as an exciting new genre, hundreds of people auditioned to be part of a show that would require them to give up their lives for a year.
The group of 30 people that were selected "duly handed in their notices at work, broke their leases, informed family and friends they were leaving and set off…on their new adventure", said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. The only problem was that the show "didn't exist outside the producer's head".
"The Greatest Show Never Made", out now on Amazon Prime Video, maps out the wild tale of the non-existent reality show – known only as "Project MS-2" – across three episodes.
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'Murky secrets'
The documentary series follows the group of "contestants" after they turned up in London. Finding themselves with nowhere to go, they ended up camped at the house of cameraman Tim Eagle while they gave the producer of the reality show – the improbably named Nikita Russian – time to prove he wasn't bluffing.
As time progressed, the group "kept finding out murkier secrets", said The Telegraph's Poppie Platt, which culminated in Russian showing up and "begging for a place to sleep".
By this point, the group had "sussed him out, and they circled him like an angry mob". But "thank goodness Eagle wasn't too put out by the deceit to keep from filming, because these scenes make for the documentary’s most compelling".
The show features interviews with many of the cast, including Russian himself (born Keith Gillard and now known as N Quentin Woolf), whom the producers managed to track down with the help of a private investigator.
He "comes across as a nervous, unhappy figure", said Platt, and blames his deceptions "on a childhood characterised by mental illness and trauma".
'One of the most bizarre documentaries I've ever seen'
The Greatest Show is "less a documentary about the fake reality show than it is a profile of the Svengali who orchestrated it" said Emily Baker for the i news site. Accordingly, Russian "is the headline act".
In the first two episodes Russian is a "shadowy figure" with "satanic intentions". But as the show progresses it turns out he was "just a chancer who worked in Waterstones part-time".
For Baker, the documentary is "riveting, at times unbelievable and ultimately hopeful" and ends up being "one of the most bizarre yet optimistic documentaries I've ever seen".
'Not just good and bad binaries'
It would "be easy to tell this story in big, affirmative good and bad binaries", said Joel Golby in The Guardian. "Nikita Russian is bad, all the contestants are good" but The Greatest Show is "more interesting and nuanced than that".
It is a show that is of its time period, Golby added. From the very first moment it is "very, very – almost painfully – of 'The Year 2002'", he said, with all the naivety about the genre of reality TV that entails.
"What a time it was, back then, to wear an unbadged England shirt and listen to Liberty X and dream about meeting Davina," Golby concluded. "The only really surprising part is this didn't happen more."
The Greatest Show Never Made is out now on Amazon Prime Video.
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