UnREAL shows the flip side of reality TV
Lifetime’s new program reveals that the network isn’t afraid of dark subject matter
NEW YORK— After six seasons of working as a producer on The Bachelor, Sarah Gertrude Shapiro was facing a breakdown.
“I wasn’t thinking suicide, but I was close,” she said. “I wanted to burn my whole life down.”
Shapiro, an avowed feminist, had somehow become an expert at manipulating female contestants behind the scenes to get “good television” for the reality dating show.
“I used to think the cost of my soul was $5 million,” she said, curled up on a velvet divan at the Trump SoHo hotel. “Like, what would it cost me to torture another woman? But it turns out it was $1,500 a week without benefits.”
Now Shapiro has her own TV series, UnREAL, a dark new Lifetime drama set behind the scenes of a fictional Bachelor- esque reality show called Everlasting. And the protagonist, a producer named Rachel Goldberg (Shiri Appleby) is afflicted by a similar self-loathing. The first time we see her, she is lying on the floor of a limousine at the feet of a group of women in ball gowns while wearing a fraying T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “This is What a Feminist Looks Like.”
“We wanted Rachel’s conflict to be right on her chest,” said Shapiro, who created the show with Marti Noxon, a veteran television writer and producer.
UnREAL is imbued with conflict not only because of its subject matter but also because it is on Lifetime, a network not typically known for complex or gritty dramas. Although the cable network has dabbled in original scripted series, it has been known recently mostly for unauthorized biopics of pop stars and campy movies about nostalgic TV properties such as Saved by the Bell.
“It definitely feels like a turning point show for us,” said Rob Sharenow, Lifetime’s executive vice president and general manager. “We haven’t really had characters like this on air.”
Two of those characters, Rachel and Quinn (Constance Zimmer), work together to produce Everlasting and are constantly making murky moral choices in the process. Both women seem trapped; they are making a product that they know exploits and demeans women, yet they are exceedingly good at it.
“We genuinely are writing two strange female anti-heroes,” said Noxon, who started out as a writer for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and went on to write and produce shows including Grey’s Anatomy, Mad Men and Glee. “They are both in a mental prison where they think they have no other choice than to do this job.”
The job, as depicted in UnREAL, is a nefarious one, and Shapiro and Noxon said that it does not stray too far from what actually happens on reality dating shows.
(Some viewers might find it entertaining on Monday nights to watch The Bachelorette on ABC and then switch over to Lifetime for UnREAL.)
According to Noxon, who was interviewed with Shapiro, producers routinely “starve out” the contestants, cutting them off from the outside world to create heightened tensions.
“The women are hot-boxed,” she said. “They are put in a house with no media, no music, no books, no magazines, nothing. Just each other and booze. So they literally develop a Stockholm syndrome, where the only way you get out is through the bachelor. By the end a lot of these women think they really are falling in love.
“No matter what their intent was, they come in thinking they are just there to play the game, and then by the end they are out of their minds,” Noxon said.
Ultimately, UnREAL is a morality play about reality television and whether it is helping or hurting the people who are caught up in it as contestants or as behind-the-scenes employees. In dealing with domestic abuse, eating disorders, infidelity and girl-on-girl crime, it might be the closest thing to complexity in “television for women,” to use Lifetime’s own catch phrase, that the network has produced.
The channel did address dark issues in the past, but in the form of heavy-handed made-for-TV movies about kidnapping and teen pregnancy. That’s why Shapiro was doubtful about bringing the show to Lifetime to begin with. “My dream would have been to pitch to HBO or Netflix,” she said. “I spent a lot of time asking other people in the industry if I should take the deal, because Lifetime scared me.”
Television writer and producer John McNamara, a friend, “gave us the best review,” Noxon said. “He said, in the future, when anthropologists are trying to figure out what we were now, they will look at reality shows to see who we thought we were. But they will look at your show and say, that’s who we really were.”