I was watching a reality TV show in which a very large number of people were competing for some prize-- like, maybe a hundred of them. They were mostly just average people but there were a substantial number of celebrities thrown in as well. All of them were tossed into, basically, the Village-- I mean the Prisoner one, not the Shyamalanadingdong one. Stripped of personal identities, they were set against each other in challenges... but the rules for the challenges weren't set out, the goals were unclear, and in fact it wasn't even certain when challenges were happening. All the players know is that, at times, their behavior is being judged by the producers, who are watching them all the time from hidden cameras, and that at the end of the day one person-- exactly one-- disappears without any comment from the production team. None of the players know what happened-- in fact, often the viewers were not shown what happened, or why. As a result, the players are mostly involved in trying to find out what it is that they are being judged on. Is success measured by selling other players out? Is it based on attempts to escape? The viewers are sort of doing the same thing, trying to figure out what the point of the game is, even as players disappear one per day-- seven per weekly episode.
And then there was a break at the mid-season, with a shocking cliffhanger, in which Michael J. Fox-- who has been one of the celebrity contestants all along, looking young and vital again-- is being visited by his young son. (I think all the contestants had a family member with them for the day, in this episode.) And he's showing his son a trophy room he's assembled, pictures he's taken of all the girls he's had sex with. It was way out of left field, like, ew, he shouldn't be showing his little kid this stuff.
But then it got even more left-fieldish, because suddenly, an animated ventriloquist dummy came swinging down out of a closet in the room and struck Michael right in the face with a hammer. CRACK. Blood goes everywhere and Michael falls down, quite obviously dead, and his son starts to scream and the evil, possessed mannequin flees into the darkness and suddenly I (and all the viewers) realize what has been happening to the contestants that have vanished. They are being murdered by a possessed mannequin. I mean, did I really just see Michael J. Fox get murdered by a ventriloquist dummy? I did. We did.
Holy crap, this is really not the show I thought it was.