Writer-director Daniel Minahan was a co-writer and second-unit director on Mary Harron’s excellent I Shot Andy Warhol, so perhaps the idea of shooting one’s way to fame was planted in his mind then. The concept of Series 7 is that we are watching a reality TV show called The Contenders, in which the contestants are literally struggling for survival: they have to kill all the other contestants to win.
This is the seventh season of the show, and the front-runner so far is Dawn (Brooke Smith), a ratty, foul-mouthed woman with badly dyed hair who has managed to murder her way to the finals. Now returning to her home town for the ultimate shoot-out, she’s up against such characters as a middle-aged nurse, an old man, a young kugel and a self-destructive artist — oh, and she’s eight months pregnant.
How this all plays out is blackly comic, getting sicker and sicker as the movie progresses. The structure is that of three episodes of The Contenders, shot just like a real TV show, with interviews in which the contestants evaluate each other, plus all the additional visual paraphernalia: the theme tunes, the intros, the bumpers, the recaps, the flash-forwards, the re-enactments — everything except the ads.
Even at a time when reality TV has swept the world, though, the viewer has to suspend some disbelief. Not because the characters and situation aren’t compelling (they are), but because of the premise of the TV show. Satire, to be effective, has to be grounded in the society it is commenting on, and Series 7 has caught brilliantly the fascination with the real lives of real people unfolding in public: the United States has been doing television about actual policing or disaster situations for a long time — not to mention the personal traumas so often aired on Oprah and The Jerry Springer Show. What is odd is that participation in The Contenders seems to be coerced; contestants are selected by some lottery system, which jars with the fact that one of the most remarkable elements of the whole reality TV boom is the willingness, even eagerness, of people to jump in and bare their lives and souls.
That aside, Series 7 works very well. These flawed characters are revealed before our eyes, their worst traits exposed as the febrile situation gets more and more tense. Yet, amazingly, some real emotion also leaks into the unreal world of reality TV, particularly in the storyline about the conflicted artist, Jeff (Glenn Fitzgerald), and it is rather moving. In a televisual universe in which issues of life and death are treated as entertainment, and the viewer’s most vicious instincts are pandered to, the ghost of humanity still hovers.