Primetime Overkill

You are Contestant #0451. VOXZERO Entertainment Holdings owns your face and every rerun of it, and tonight the network needs you to walk down a flooded back street full of robots, cyborgs and rival contestants who also signed without reading.



The camera hangs high, the rain doesn't stop, and the horde pours out of every alley at once. Four weapon drones hover over your shoulders and shoot on their own. Your part is the close work: a mono-katana to start with, a rocket hammer once the sponsors warm up to you. Click for a combo, hold for the heavy swing. Dash through an attack at the last possible moment and the director slows everything down, because that clip will sell.

A word from our partners

Between episodes you pick cards. Back in the dressing room you spend your fees on contract clauses. Helix Bioworks will fit you with a second heart, legal in this jurisdiction (mostly). Skyline Kinetics sells legs whose warranty is void if you stand still. Orbital Bancorp pays you to show up; showing up alive costs extra. Kessler Armaments has no sense of humour and does not take returns.

Rack up enough kills and the network lends you something worse than a gun: a mini-nuke legally classified as fireworks, or a pocket black hole, rented by the second, that swallows the street, the horde and the sponsors' kiosks before it closes.

Live, in front of everyone

The host likes you best when you're bleeding and says so on air. The chat roasts every miss and holds a vote, very democratically, on whether to send in the hounds. Rivals with stage names come after you for screen time. Cars blow up and keep burning, shop windows go, trash bags burst, and if one of the network's camera drones gets in your way you can shoot it down. Nobody sweeps up afterwards.

Season 1 is the street. Rooftops, the underground and Akihabara are on the network's schedule, ratings permitting.