The Onion gave itself a simple task: make fun of reality television, a drama already reviled and full of self-parody.

Satirical treatments of reality often strike for the grim and moralistic. In Series 7: The Contenders and in Dead Set, contestants end up killing each other, and the viewers are implicitly indicted as accomplices to inhuman carnage (explicitly, in the alternate ending for Series 7, where enraged audiences beat contestants to death for their reluctance to murder one another).