Reality Bites: How ‘UnREAL’ Became a Runaway Hit for Lifetime
It looks like a conventional reality dating show: A gaggle of beautiful girls in ball gowns pull up in limousines — or, if they’re very lucky, a horse-drawn carriage straight outta Cinderella — to a decked-out mansion, ready to meet their “suitor,” a dashing British hotel heir who resembles an IRL Prince Charming. (Imagine The Bachelor filtered through a Disney-on-Ice princess extravaganza.) The usual suspects are all there: the pretty one, the funny one, the bitchy one, the cheerleader. You can practically smell the champagne and Shalimar wafting off the screen.
And then the cameras pull back, and a woman in a control room is hollering into a headset: “The first girl out of the carriage is always a ‘wifey,’ and that is not a wifey!” The whiteboard behind her already maps out who’ll be this season’s heroines and villains before a single rose has been given out; on set, a producer in a “This is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt preps contestants and later milks a would-be winner’s abusive childhood for onscreen tears.
Welcome to the world of UnREAL, a funny, caustic take on romance shows that’s hooked folks who’d never be caught dead watching them. Part pull-back-the-curtain deconstruction and part character-based workplace drama centered on a tough-talking alpha female showrunner Quinn (Constance Zimmer) and her conflicted second-in-command Rachel (Shiri Appleby), UnREAL was one of last year’s bona fide breakout hits — the only new series who managed to win over viewers, critics and the Peabody Awards committee in one fell swoop. By making the people who turn out such slick, micro-managed shows the stars, folks got an inside look at how the reality-TV sausage was made that also explored the moral toll of making this kind of entertainment. “We don’t solve problems,” Rachel says. “We create them, and then point cameras at them.” And should you think that success has mellowed the show as it goes into its second season, which kicks off tonight on Lifetime, its first post-accolades episode begins with a shot of the two antiheroines getting matching wrist tattoos reading “Money. Dick. Power.”