You know, in the 70s and 80s we had… fantastical, unrealistic schlock movies like… Deathrace 2000, The Running Man… and these were largely veiwed as entertaining, but campy, implausible, ‘created for hollywood’ world scenarios, designed to just make a high stakes plot…

… based around a high stakes, life and death, reality TV game show … with nationwide audiences, run by the government, used as a national religion style bread and circuses for the masses, in a totalitarian future US.