Andy Samberg and Kit Harrington serve up a sports comedy detailing the longest match in history, and it’s as packed with stars as it is with laughs

What’s the name of the show? 7 Days in Hell

When does it premiere? Saturday 11 July at 10pm EST on HBO.



What is this show? Disguised as an HBO sports documentary, this is the fictional account of the world’s longest tennis match, which took place in the summer of 2001 and lasted for seven straight days.



Who was in the match? It was a face-off between Aaron Williams, the Andre Agassi-like adopted brother of Serena and Venus, and Charles Poole, a British child prodigy who is as dumb as “a child with brain damage”.

Who plays these two? Williams is played by Andy Samberg and Poole is played by Kit Harington, of Game of Thrones.



7 Days in Hell – Kit Harington and Andy Samberg slug it out in Wimbledon spoof Read more

Does Jon Snow know anything about comedy? Well, it’s hard to tell. He doesn’t have to do much but be stone faced and stare at the camera, which is kind of what Harington does best. He’s serviceable in the role, but clearly not as good at comedy as Samberg.

Do you get to see Harington with his shirt off? Yes, and it is impressive, though in context it is extremely creepy. In fact, there is a fair amount of male nudity in this movie. In 45 minutes you see at least 20 different scrotums, most of which are animated.



Animated scrotums? Trust me, it pays off in a major way.

What’s the show’s pedigree? Murray Miller, a producer on Girls and former writer of King of the Hill and American Dad, wrote the 45-minute special.



Is this show any good? At first I was worried that the joke about this long-running tennis match would get very old very quickly, but 7 Days in Hell does an admirable job keeping it fresh. It starts off as a spoof of HBO Sports-style documentaries with a narrator (Jon Hamm) getting very dramatic with the biographies of the two players and creating huge stakes for things that don’t seem very important. There is a good mix of people like Serena Williams playing herself and Will Forte and Fred Armisen playing tennis experts.

With the standard rise, fall, and rise again narrative arc that many of these documentaries follow in place, the absurdity of the situation starts to take over. The show borrows comic elements from actual tennis stars (like Williams’s Björn Borg-style underwear line that sweeps Europe) and pokes fun at the game itself with a hilarious point that seems to go on and on even as the two men are crawling around on the court trying to win. There’s even a thinly veiled Tanya Harding storyline just to keep things really juicy.

Once the queen of England gets involved and there is a sex tape, things have really gotten out of hand, but there are enough genuine laughs throughout that the 45 minutes never seems to drag. The film fulfills the mockumentary promise it starts out with, but ends up becoming a whole lot more, mostly thanks to an all-star cast.



Who else is in it? Lena Dunham, Mary Steenburgen, Michael Sheen, Howie Mandel, Chris Everet, June Squibb, David Copperfield, Soledad O’Brien, John McEnroe, and a whole bunch of other people.

Should you watch this show? Yes, you should. It’s funny the first time but is the kind of thing you’ll catch yourself watching again and again as HBO replays it to death in the months after its premiere. Even then, you might still laugh harder than a tennis player grunts.

