Léonie-Marie est une journaliste parisienne qui travaille pour une émission de téléréalité, Confessions amoureuses. C'est pour elle un travail alimentaire que son mari, critique littéraire, réprouve. Elle part faire un reportage dans le Jura dans une communauté de quatre femmes et quatre hommes qui pratiquent l'amour libre.
Television executive Katy (Eva Mendes) develops what she hopes will become the most watched television show of all time, the ultimate game show called Live! where six contestants play Russian roulette with a revolver with six chambers loaded with one live cartridge and five dummy cartridges. During the show, after the cylinder is randomly turned, the six will fire the gun one by one pointed at their head, without intermediate extra turning of the cylinder, until one is killed. At first the idea is to give each of the six contestants $1,000,000, but while there are more applicants at the auditions than expected, they are suicidal people. This is not desired, the contestants should want to live; therefore the prize is raised to $5,000,000 each for the surviving contestants, while the family of the killed contestant does not get any prize.
In order to prevent a Third World War, the superpowers decide to introduce “international peace games,” a deadly miniature battle fought between small teams of drafted teenage soldiers from each country and broadcast on TV around the world as the most popular reality TV program.
In the year 2072, set in a dystopia Rome, Italy, WBS TV's chief of programming, Cortez (Claudio Cassinelli), is fuming at the constituently high ratings enjoyed by a rival American TV show, 'Kill-Bike'. The show has features gladiatorial fights to the death on motorcycles, and has made a hero of a man called Drake (Jared Martin) the unbeaten champion. Cortez is all the more bitter because it was he who discovered Drake in the first place. WBS's current answer to the American show is 'The Danger Game', a simulation game showing the hallucinations of a contestant experiencing the approach of violent death. Fear, panic, and screaming at the extremely realistic simulations triggers a further increase in the intensity. Unfortunately for the station, even this spectacle fails to compete against the American show.
After the graduation had been disrupted by Louis and Beans and Ren dumping her clueless boyfriend, the Stevens family and Beans are tricked into going on a "vacation" which turns out to be the set of a new reality tv show called "Family Fake Out", which all of their hometown friends and other locals are watching back in Sacramento. It is set on the fictional island of Mandelino, which, however exotic the producers make it up to be, is really only a short distance off the California coast.