Plot
Struggling Seattle plumbing salesman, former fencing athlete, and couch potato Roy Knable lives with his neglected wife Helen, a vitamin product senior manager. After a fight (which involved Helen smashing the family television screen with one of Roy's fencing trophies as a wake-up call to reality), Mr. Spike, a mysterious salesman, appears at the couple's door, offering them a new high-tech satellite dish system filled with 666 channels of programs one cannot view on regular television (with titles including "Three Men and Rosemary's Baby" and "Sadistic Hidden Videos"). But Helen showed up when she discovered a TV set and later plans to divorce. Unbeknownst to Roy, Spike is an emissary from hell who wants to boost the influx of souls by arranging for TV junkies to be killed in the most gruesome and ironic situations imaginable. The 'candidates' are sucked into a hellish television world, called Hellevision, and put through a gauntlet where they must survive a number of demonic satirical versions of sitcoms and movies. If they can survive for 24 hours, they are free to go, but if they get killed, then their souls will become the property of Satan.
The dish sucks Roy and Helen into this warped world, where they are put through a hellish game show, wrestling match, and a parody of Northern Exposure (titled "Northern Overexposure"), in which they meet Crowley, an exiled former co-worker of Spike's, who explains to them how this world works. Through tenacity, improvisation, and sheer luck, the Knables stay alive and escape into different channels through portals hidden within the shows and movies. While watching the TV, their young son Darryl recognizes his parents fighting for their lives as animated mice in a Tom and Jerry -style cartoon in which they are pursued by a robotic cat, after which they become separated. Roy appears in a parody of Wayne's World ("Duane's Underworld") featuring the titular characters as zombies, in which he is nearly burned to death with hot pokers, but manages to escape. Roy eventually finds Helen in a black-and-white gangster movie, and the two escape into a miniseries about the French Revolution ("Off With His Head") in which Roy is captured and nearly beheaded. Darryl, a tech geek, is able to use radio equipment to patch into the miniseries and convince the characters he is God, demanding they let his parents go, which infuriates Spike.
Roy's 24 hours are up at this point, but since he was the only one who signed Spike's contract, this activates a loophole wherein he can make Helen remain in the TV world and use her to lure Roy back in. Spike enters the TV world and kidnaps Helen, changing channels again. She finds herself tied to a cart sitting across the railway track in a town straight out of a Western movie, with Spike gleefully informing her that the 3:10 to Yuma is due soon, and then sadistically adding that it isn’t scheduled to stop. Helen subsequently sees that the cart is stacked with barrels labelled dynamite, meaning she risks being hit by a speeding train and blown up. Spike, in the guise of a newsreader, informs Roy and his kids - watching from their home - that Helen has been kidnapped and is being held captive on Channel One, in an attempt to lure Roy back in.
Roy goes back in and has a gunfight with Spike wherein he is shot. However, the bullet is stopped by Roy's remote control. He and Spike then fight over the other remote and this causes the two to be zapped through demonic and twisted parodies of Star Trek: The Next Generation , Driving Miss Daisy (titled "Driving Over Miss Daisy"), a violent ice hockey game, a crash test dummy demonstration in which Spike cheerfully informs the audience that Roy has neither a seatbelt or an airbag, and finally an episode of Three's Company , the latter of which completely horrifies Roy. Every so often the action switches back to Helen in the Wild West, as she struggles to free herself from her ropes, as the speeding steam train approaches.
Roy finally confronts his enemy in a medieval swashbuckling movie and they proceed to have a fencing match. They then get zapped into a Salt-N-Pepa music video, where Roy gets hold of Spike's remote, sends him back into the swashbuckling movie. Returning to Channel One, Roy tries to save Helen by changing channels, only to find that the demonic production team at Hellevision have locked out any escape options. At the last moment Roy and Helen realise they can escape once and for all by turning the remote off, doing so moments before the speeding steam train crashes through the cart, creating a fiery explosion as the dynamite explodes.
Roy and Helen arrive back in their garden. Their neighbour’s ill behaved and vicious Rottweiler appears about to attack, but ends up getting sucked into the dish just before it destroys itself. In the end, Spike gets eliminated by the Rottweiler on the command of Crowley, and is then succeeded in his executive position by Pierce, a younger upstart intern. Having learned a valuable lesson after his adventure, Roy dramatically cuts back on his TV viewing, quits his job as a plumbing salesman, and opens his own fencing school, in which he advises one of his students that watching too much TV can get you into trouble.
