‘7 Days’ in hilarious mockumentary hell
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It’s very possible that you’ll never watch another sports documentary again without breaking out in spasms of laughter as you remember some of the over the top, raunchy, and out and out juvenile humor of HBO’s “7 Days in Hell,” premiering at 10 p.m. Saturday.
It is just about the funniest self-contained hour of TV this year.
Andy Samberg plays a tennis bad boy named Aaron Williams who almost made it to the top of the heap but plummeted to earth and kept on spiraling downward on a slippy-slide of booze, cocaine, porn and very bad manners.
His post-tennis life included creating a men’s underwear line with a singular aeration feature, working on a Scandinavian TV show called the Swedish Hit Show (say it quickly), pornography and prison.
This generation’s once and future tennis king is cut from a different cloth. Charles Lloyd Poole (Kit Harington) is dumb as a box of crumpets, lives in fear of displeasing his overbearing mother (Mary Steenbergen) and has learned to say the word “indubitably” in answer to any question for which he doesn’t have an answer.
Which is to say, every question he’s asked.
What if the two greats were to face each other on the court? It would be epic, and epic it is: a seven-day epic, as a matter of fact, at Wimbledon.
Written by Murray Miller and directed by Jake Szymanski, “7 Days” is jam-packed with cameos from the tennis world (Serena Williams, Chris Evert, John McEnroe) and some of the other funniest people on the planet beside Samberg and, yes, Harington: Howie Mandel, Lena Dunham, Will Forte, Fred Armisen and, as chain-smoking a British TV host (and obvious pedophile), Michael Sheen.
Want more? How about magician David Copperfield, TV news woman Soledad O’Brien, Oscar nominee June Squibb as a potty-mouthed Queen Elizabeth, former “Doctor Who” companion Karen Gillan, and, to narrate, Jon Hamm?
The film has streakers, male and female, computer animated full frontal nudity, Samberg in a series of ridiculous wigs, erectile dysfunction sight gags and hilarious one-liners.
It’s outrageous the way “Spinal Tap” is outrageous: Oddly believable, because “7 Days” mimics (and mocks) aspects of real, and dead serious, sports documentaries.
The difference, of course, is that “7 Days in Hell” is dead-on funny.
Funny as hell, in fact.