Would The Truman Show have been better as a mystery thriller?

The 1998 film The Truman Show is considered one of the best movies ever made (or if not perhaps in the top 100, somewhere in the top quarter of all movies at least, depending on who you ask).

The film takes the approach where its setting is made clear to the viewers from the very beginning, from the very first shots. In fact, it's outright explained to the viewer in great detail, so there is absolutely no ambiguity or lack of clarity. The viewer knows exactly what the situation is and what's happening, and we are just witnessing Truman himself slowly realizing that something is not as it seems. There isn't much suspense or thriller about the movie because of this, and it's more of a comedy-drama.

The environment in the movie is also quite deliberately exaggerated (because there's no need to hide anything from the viewers, or try to mislead them in any way). The town doesn't even look like a real town and more like an artificial amusement park recreation "town". And that's, of course, completely on purpose: This isn't even supposed to look like an absolutely realistic place. (Of course Truman himself doesn't know that, which is the core point of the movie.) In other words, the movie veers more towards the amusing comedy side than on the realistic side, deliberately. The viewer's interest is drawn to how Truman himself reacts when he slowly starts suspecting and realizing that everything is not right or normal, and how the actors and show producers try to deal with it.

But one could ask: Would it have made the movie worse, the same, or perhaps even better, if it had been a mystery thriller instead? Or would that have been too cliché of a movie plot?

In other words:

• The viewer is kept in the dark about the true reality of things, and knows exactly as much as Truman himself does. The true nature of what's happening is only revealed as Truman himself discovers it, with the big reveal only happening at the very end of the movie. Before that, it's very mysterious both to Truman and to the viewer.
• The town is much more realistic and all the actors behave much more realistically, so as to not raise suspicion in the viewer. Nothing seems "off" or strange at first, and it just looks like your regular small American town with regular people somewhere in some island. It could still be a very bright and sunny happy town, but much more realistically depicted.
• The hints that something may not be as it seems start much more slowly and are much subtler. (For example, no spotlight falling from the sky at the beginning of the movie. The first signs that something might be off come later and are significantly subtler than that.)
• For the first two thirds of the movie the situation is kept very ambiguous: Is this a movie depicting a man, ie. Truman, losing his mind and becoming paranoid and crazy, or is something else going on? The movie could have been made so that it's very ambiguous if the things Truman is finding out are just the result of his paranoia, or something else. The other people in the movie are constantly "gaslighting" both Truman and the viewer in a very plausible and believable way that he's just imagining things.
• The reveal in the end could be a complete plot twist. The movie could have been written and made in such a way that even if the viewer started suspecting that Truman isn't actually going crazy and the things he's noticing are actually a sign of something not being as it seems, it's still hard to deduce what the actual situation is, until the reveal at the very end.

Would the movie have been better this way, or would it just have been way too "cliché" of a plot? Who knows.