This is one of those industry announcements that makes me quickly glance at a calendar to make sure it’s not April Fool’s Day and I didn’t hallucinate the past few months, but everything appears to be on the up and up on that front, so here goes: HBO is making a Wimbledon mockumentary called 7 Days in Hell that will be written by the co-executive producer of Girls and will star Andy Samberg and Kit Harington (Jon Snow from Game of Thrones) as bitter rivals engaged in a week-long on-court battle. Yup. Happening. From THR:
The one-off HBO Comedy Event is described as a sports mockumentary starring Samberg and Game of Thrones breakout Kit Harington as fierce tennis rivals in an epic, seven-day match at Wimbledon. Samberg will play Aaron Williams, a superstar tennis “bad boy,” while Harington is set as Charles Lloyd Poole, an Andy Murray-type prodigy and certified truck driver who takes on Williams at Wimbledon 2004.
A few other notes:
- The project features a loaded cast, with everyone from Fred Armisen to Will Forte to Lena Dunham to Karen Gillan to Michael Sheen to Howie Mandel to Mary Steenburgen popping up at some point.
- There’s not much by way of plot description so far, but I’m guessing the “7 days” part of this is based on the Wimbledon rule quirk that there’s no tiebreaker for the fifth set of a match, meaning it lasts however long it takes for one competitor to beat the other by two games.
- More like “You know love, Jon Snow,” right? Because they call zero “love” when they keep score in tennis. And zero is kind of like nothing. And there’s that one quote from the thing. You know, the show you like. Get it? Like a topical reference. Boom. Nailed it.
I think we’re about done here.
