The pilot for Lifetime’s “UnREAL” culminates in an act of manipulation so skilled that the villains of “Dangerous Liaisons” might hiss in envy. Rachel (Shiri Appleby), a producer on a “The Bachelor”-like reality series, is struggling to extract an exit interview from Britney, who has been booted from the competition in the first round. But Britney won’t give in: she’s determined to deny the editors the requisite humiliating meltdown. “He’s such a great guy—and I’ve had a lovely time on the show,” she purrs, then drops the act, her eyes gone cold. “And I’m going to repeat that on loop until you let me go home.”
“Stop rolling!” Rachel mutters, putting on a charade of her own, behaving as if she were so disgusted that she’s about to quit. “Can someone get me a drink, please?” she screams—and within minutes she’s got Britney downing shots and sharing girl talk. As the two women bond, Rachel inserts undermining jabs, using intel from Britney’s psych file to throw her off. “From one slut to another!” Rachel says, raising a toast. “Did you just call me a slut?” Britney snaps, her mouth twisting with paranoia. Far away, in the control room, Rachel’s boss, Quinn, smiles, watching the footage: “O.K. I can use that—I can use that.”
Judging from the first four episodes of “UnREAL,” a fictional series set behind the scenes of a show called “Everlasting,” the job of a reality producer is, however the participants may justify it, a grifter’s game. It’s a profession for people whose personality disorders make them adept at exploiting the personality disorders of others, who possess the compartmentalization skills of those shrinks who rubber-stamp torture techniques for the C.I.A. (Eating disorders? Daddy’s death? An on-set date rape? It’s all fodder for the story—or something to be covered up.) Like a slaughterhouse exposé, “UnREAL” is designed as an audience intervention, forcing viewers to taste the cruelty in their reality-TV bacon. The fact that the show itself also tastes like bacon—at once sweet and salty, greasy and irresistible—is no accident.
“UnREAL” is hardly the first show to criticize reality TV—from the British version of “The Office” onward, the mockumentary sitcom has taken shots at the genre, even as it cannibalized the form. A few years back, the smart soap opera “The L.A. Complex” featured a plot arc in which a former teen star, Raquel (Jewel Staite), agrees to go on “Celebrity Halfway House” only to find herself backed into the “villain’s edit.” The science-fiction anthology series “Black Mirror” included several ugly fables about the genre; “The Comeback” was a tragicomedy about a middle-aged actress who was burned by the cameras. In varying ways, each of these shows captured something of the allure of reality fame, the impossibility of seeing oneself as others see us, until it’s too late. Few people feel much sympathy for the pain of reality stars anymore, since the genre has been around for more than a decade. As a character in the great dirty comedy “Airplane!” once said, “They bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, ‘Let ’em crash.’ ”
“UnREAL” takes a fresh route into the subject matter by dramatizing the lives of the producers, especially Rachel, who, despite appearances, considers herself a feminist—she’s the type who might watch “Everlasting,” but from an ironic distance. Airing on Lifetime (the channel for women!), the show is, like the one it tweaks, a pink and glittery concoction, full of catfights and love triangles. Even better, it was co-created by someone who knows the score: Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, who was a producer on “The Bachelor” for nine seasons. A Sarah Lawrence-educated film student who worked first for the feminist producer Christine Vachon and later for the fashion photographer David LaChapelle, Shapiro took a classic paycheck gig when she moved to L.A., working on “High School Reunion,” a terrible show that I may have watched all of. When that job ended, Shapiro discovered that she had been trapped by her own naïveté: she was contractually obligated to work on “The Bachelor,” whether she liked it or not. According to interviews that she has given while publicizing “UnREAL,” she left the franchise—by fleeing to Portland—only after threatening to kill herself if she wasn’t released from her contract.
In collaboration with Marti Noxon, Shapiro created a biting portrait of a series that clearly resembles the one she helped oversee, in which dozens of women compete for a British hotel heir—although “UnREAL” may be lawsuit-proof, given that few people would want to claim that these characters were based on them. The details are juicy. In the control room, producers put up photographs of all the contestants, then tag them “Wifey,” “Crazy,” or “Desperate MILF.” They get cash bonuses for nailing down a villain, someone to edit into the “mean girl” slot. United by cynical camaraderie, the staff operate a bit like the guards on “Orange Is the New Black,” their conditions parallel to those of their charges. Like the contestants, the staff have signed onerous contracts; they have to work for days on end, sleep-deprived, in an isolated environment; they party and hook up to blow off steam. But the structure they work within normalizes cruelty, making them betray and abuse their charges while pretending to bond with them.
Rachel, in her schlubby jeans, unkempt topknot, and “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like” T-shirt, has styled herself to seem unthreatening, a best buddy hovering among the gem-toned ball gowns, whispering bad advice. Between her and her “c” word of a boss Quinn (Constance Zimmer, her venality at eleven), the show could easily devolve into a mere cruel soap, its own guilty pleasure. But it makes one crucial move: it cultivates sympathy for the bachelorettes. Lounging on sofas, anxiously primping for the next fake party, the girls of “Everlasting” might be soft satirical targets, like the Kardashians. But, rather than portray them as dummies, all daddy issues and narcissism, “UnREAL” allows the women to be individuals, vulnerable and distinct. Then it shows how little control they have, no matter what they do. Some are romantics, suckers for true love; others are “players,” like Britney. Many of them sense, uneasily, why they were cast: the “Desperate MILF” knows that she’s too old; the virgin senses that her looks don’t match. But the show is a trap: regardless of what they do—go wild, be dignified, stay girlish, be honest, lie your head off—they all get crunched by the show’s misogynist algorithms.
One of the slyest subplots involves the show’s prefab ethnic uniformity. From the first episode, Quinn makes it clear that neither of the two black contestants on “Everlasting”—the Spelman graduate Shamiqua and the more “street” player Athena—can win. (“It is not my fault that America’s racist,” Quinn says, shrugging.) Behind the scenes, Jay, an ambitious gay black producer, who is aiming to win the “villain” financial bonus, offers the two women a private deal: if one of them is willing to play the “black bitch” role, he’ll guide her into the Final Four. Athena bites. In a party scene, she trips a white “cowgirl” contestant, then tricks her into blurting out a sound bite that can be edited to seem bigoted. Shoving her competition, she plays the role that she knows is required to launch her own Omarosa-style brand. Then she gets cut anyway.
The producers have their own love triangles, some stronger than others: one plot involves Quinn, who is screwing her married, coke-snorting boss. As charismatic as Zimmer is, with her Rula Lenska rasp, a little of this toxic coupling goes a long way. But Rachel’s own slow romantic drift toward the Bachelor, a spoiled charmer who is there to plug his new chain, is at once smart and unnerving—even she isn’t immune to that sparkling ring.
I’d like to say that I’m not so easily hypnotized, but the truth is that it takes only five minutes of watching “The Bachelorette”—the gender-flipped version of “The Bachelor,” in which dozens of lunks vie for one Kaitlyn—for me to begin living my worst life. I give the characters cruel nicknames; I compose wisecracks for Twitter. It doesn’t help that I know, as we all do, that some proportion of the show is scripted—that simply helps us enjoy the humiliation without guilt. If “UnREAL,” in the tradition of the show that it mimics, is explicitly exaggerated, blown up like a David LaChapelle photo illustration, that’s part of its power. The distortions suggest how much of femininity is theatre, even in the real world. ♦
