Okay omg, LOVE that Shapiro is a lesbian! But that's neither here nor there. Okay, random observations: haha, I love watching Rachel justify her life when she's thinking about 1) "helping" Faith come out, and 2) making the terrible decision about inviting the special guest on the family date episode :(. Man, that shit got so real. Which leads me to my main observation, which is about how this show fits into the broader Lifetime oeuvre. I noticed on the writeups that there was some talk about how this show represents Lifetime's step away from its trashy past and into a new future of premium cable peers. But here is the thing, I am a lifelong Lifetime fan, and I see this as fitting in quite nicely. It is a women-authored, women-centered kind of dark storytelling, which spans horror, comedy, and drama. I love that the show includes jokes about miscarriage, super creepy "I love you"s (you know the one I mean, at the end of ep 10), and oh, the "come with me." Moments like that touch what is, as far as I'm concerned, a feminist fantasy space where we go off script, right? I mean that's the whole space the show sets up a craving for, right? GAH. I love it.
That is a really interesting point about how it fits into the Lifetime brand. I am cynical enough about ~critical taste~ that I found the Totally Non-Lifetime So Awesome consensus to be kind of suspect, but I didn't have enough information to base that on. But I can really buy it, actually. Because there's a tonal difference between UnREAL and most ~quality cable dramas.~ Parts of the narrative are a little tongue-in-cheek, while the politics of the storytelling are entirely overt. Whereas, I feel like the dominant Prestige Drama Way (I feel like I'm getting even more mileage than usual out of sarcastic punctuation, lol) is to meticulously play the story straight and leave the audience wondering ~what it all means.~ I can totally see that coming from Lifetime as you're describing it, and I don't think it's something the network left behind to make UnREAL a great show.
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