Series 7

"Series 7," a new film written and directed by Daniel Minahan, contains three episodes from the seventh series of a TV show called "The Contenders." In "The Contenders," six people are chosen at random from the population of a randomly selected city. They must then kill each other until only one person is left. The last person standing becomes the new "Contender"; after surviving three times, the Contender is allowed to go free and resume a peaceful life in our larger society. "The Contenders" thus combines simplicity, drama and violence in a ratio which has produced massive popularity. Hotel messageboards give punchy words of support to local Contender heroes, every man and woman on the street can deliver an opinion as to who is best equipped to kill his or her foes, and local law enforcement, medical and governmental authorities give the staff of "The Contenders" free rein to go televisually berserk.

Nah. It would never happen.

Right?

It's an interesting question, to say the least. We roundly condemn television about yahoos on an island or pathetic women attempting to marry a multi-millionaire as sensationalist, trite, exploitative and manufactured — yet even those who most deride such "reality TV" watch it, anyway, repeatedly. Like "Network" before it, "Series 7" takes occasional potshots at its characters but reserves its harshest indictment for its audience. This is a hilarious, wrenching, disturbing film, and one of the finest satires to appear onscreen in quite some time.

Of course, "Series 7" would not work at all if it wasn't perfectly made. But from top to bottom, this film is technically impeccable. The project is palpably Minahan's baby, and you can tell that after numerous stints producing for network TV, he knows just how to work every televisual cliche for maximum effect. While the reigning champion of reality TV remains "Survivor" (which was begun after production on this film had ended), "The Contenders" resembles more of a cross between "America's Most Wanted" and "The Real World," as its camerawork shifts between "AMW"-style action trailing (the director of photography was an "AMW" veteran) and "Real World" react-to-this-footage interviews. Note-perfect promos, with taglines like "The rules are as simple as life and death," act as framing devices that make sure you know that you're watching TV, or some exact facsimile thereof. The music, by Girls Against Boys, fulfills every televisual requirement smartly and appropriately: the love theme, the angry music, the main into song. More interestingly, "The Contenders" hews to the current televisual doctrine that you can show all kinds of horrific, casual violence, but the vagina of a woman in labor must be blocked so no one is offended. The verisimilitude is astonishing; were it not for the fact that you're in a move theater, you'd swear you were watching a kick-ass TV show. Yet the marriage of the shocking content to hyperslick production transforms the cliches from tired into hilarious.

Minahan specifically casting avoided Big Movie Stars, to keep the illusion of real-person reality TV intact. This is still a talented cast, and the actors all do a splendid job. Two performers deserve special mention. Brooke Smith plays the main character, Dawn Lagarto, eight months pregnant and two-time survivor, who just has to kill five more people to gain her freedom. She doesn't attempt to make her character sympathetic, and (in classic reality-TV fashion) her very authenticity makes her likable. She's a sarcastic, cynical, maternally oriented killing machine; when she calls one other contestant and tells her, "I'm gonna [expletive] annihilate you," she turns to the cameraman and says "She hung up." As much as you root for anyone while watching "Series 7," you root for her.

Merritt Weaver plays an 18-year-old contestant, and her complete comfort in front of the camera seems to presage a generation of people so comfortable with constant televisual scrutiny that they can look cute anytime they need to and give soundbites like, "My boyfriend Tony picked out this [bulletproof] vest for me. It's supposed to be top of the line, and I think it is very thoughtful of him, and I think it shows how much he cares about me." Moments of painful incongruity like this one crop up regularly in "Series 7," and they are almost always laugh-out-loud funny.

But the real genius of "Series 7" is what it doesn't explain: How did this happen? How did the producers get the right to draft people into a death match? When one contestant tries to opt out, and Will Arnett's wonderful voiceover explains that he has been hospitalized due to "a self-inflicted knife wound to the back," why isn't everyone horrified? Why are the witnesses of "Contender" killings so blase about their interest? There's no context supplied, and we have to imagine what context there could be, what nation could possibly approve and support an enterprise like this one. And the scary thing, the genius thing, the thing that means "Series 7" is not just an amazing black comedy but a searing indictment of American televisual culture, is that we, the audience, eventually realize "The Contenders" could live and thrive in a society almost exactly like ours.

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