Sports icons Andy Samberg and Kit Harington are set to face off in HBO’s upcoming tennis mockumentary 7 Days In Hell. Well, Samberg and Harington will play sports icons in 7 Days In Hell, a comedic account of a week-long match at The Wimbledon Championships (or, as it goes in the British syntax: “The Championships, Wimbeldon”) written by Girls writer-producer Murray Miller. To fill the grass courts around Samberg’s “bad-boy” Aaron Williams and Harington’s truck-driving (or, as the British say: “lorry-driving-whut-whut”) wunderkind Charles Lloyd Poole, 7 Days In Hell has drafted the likes of Fred Armisen, Lena Dunham, Karen Gillan, and Soledad O’Brien. Because if you’re going to make an Andy Samberg-Kit Harington tennis mockumentary co-starring June Squibb and Mary Steenburgen, you just gotta have Emmy-winning broadcast journalist Soledad O’Brien. As the previous king of tennis-related comedy would say to someone trying to make a pretend documentary about a Wimbledon match that lasted for seven consecutive days, and then decided to do so without Soledad O’Brien, “You cannot be serious.”
The announcement of 7 Days In Hell signals the official end of Will Ferrell’s sports-comedy dynasty, an unprecedented championship run that lasted the better part of a decade and encompassed disciplines as wide-ranging as figure skating, stock-car racing, youth soccer, and what Kenny Powers calls “baseball.”