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The works discussed transpose the conceit of The Most Dangerous Game to the world of commercial broadcast entertainment, pitting characters against each other in competition for the ultimate prize: their own lives. Round Four discusses how the game show has come to represent the political and personal dangers of citizenship in an America governed by a late-capitalist consumerism that has morphed into a new brand of totalitarianism that turns people into trivial objects and trivial objects into subjects of the highest importance. The “reality” of these games and their rules represent a simulated and heavily mediated environment posing as real to conceal a sinister truth. In order to challenge the dominance of this inverted world order, the protagonists must first defeat totalitarianism’s synecdoche: the game show.

Programmes broadcast during and after the eightieth anniversaries formed the most public interface where new televisual representations of the conflict collided with the war's history and memory. In the twenty-first century, however, a new television programme pushed the boundaries of what had been done by previous documentaries about 1914-18 and stimulated a controversy all of its own. The Trench (BBC, 2002) was the first documentary about the First World War to present its history in a reality-experiential format. Twenty-five male volunteers from Hull lived in a recreated trench to analyse elements of the British infantryman's experience of fighting in the autumn of 1916. Viewers witnessed a world that was never about dry facts, dates and academic squabbling, but about survival in extreme circumstances. The programme was widely reviled by the British press, testament to the fact that in Britain any televisual treatment of 1914-18 must not stray from the accepted three documentary cornerstones of archive film, veterans' testimony and historians.

This chapter considers the representation of the straight girl and the queer guy within varying documentary media forms, considering the notions of social agency and performativity. Foregrounding both documentary theory and performance studies, the documentary biographical film drama Carrington (Christopher Hampton 1995, UK), offers a historical precedent in the representation of the straight girl and queer guy, all the while foregrounding notions of devotion and intensity. The context of the social actor is further examined in more recent documentary case studies such as Fag Hags: Women Who Love Gay Men (Justine Pimlott 2005, Canada), My Husband Is Gay (Benetta Adamson 2005, UK) and My Husband Is Not Gay (TLC 2015, US), framing the intense relationships between straight girls and queer guys – in many instances relating legal marriages and questioning issues of fidelity. Also the performative potential of reality television is explored in Would Like to Meet (BBC 2001, UK), Boy Meets Boy (Bravo 2003, US) and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (Bravo 2003–7, US), through examining the confines and opportunity of television formats.