Series 7: The Contenders

Daniel Minahan's Series 7: The Contenders (2001) examines how reality shows have desensitized their audience to such a state wherein murder is accepted as entertainment. With such a narrative conceit, it's obvious that Minahan's film wants to question the nature of illusion, artifice, and responsibility vis-a-vis his chief protagonists.

Eight-month pregnant Dawn Lagarto (Brooke Smith) is the worthy victor on The Contenders, Series 7, and she must face five new challengers in order to be free from the obligation of competing. However, this new season takes place in her old hometown and will reunite her with her old flame Jeff Norman (Glenn Fitzgerald), an artist and dying cancer patient who once shared a romance with Dawn in high school. Now, however, they must struggle to articulate their feelings while negotiating those who want them dead, as well as Jeff's loyal wife.

Minahan successfully avoids trangressing outside his chosen genre, maintaining an emotional fidelity to his satire, so the film never adopts a new tonal quality or transitions become reality and satire without conviction. Yet it is the script that disappoints, since characters are sometimes touchingly portrayed, and other times they come across as crass and broad caricatures. The nurse especially suffers this condition, since she goes from one who condemns Dawn's out-of-wedlock pregnancy in one contemptuous instant to one who overlooks those she murdered while taking confession in church. These sorts of ideological critiques feel a little too pat and contrived for this film, and leave the nurse as only a surface character, when her actions suggest that she should be the antagonist with better character arc and development. The same problem occurs in the young girl's comically overbearing parents, which denies the film any emotional investment since the satire is drawn too broadly.

While it is an obvious target to lambaste reality TV as uncaring about real lives, it's an effective film overall. I feel I may be too generous in handing the film my current score, but the effective scenes do overpower the weak ones overall, and the ending works quite well (where the ending is reconstructed due to "lost footage"). And the artifice of the musical cues work incredibly well. There's a great film in here; as it is, it's merely a good one.

Series 7: The Contenders: 7/10