a belated UnREAL post for Valentine's Day

[pocochina]

UnREAL: quite possibly the best new show of 2015. All of the praise that it's gotten has been well-earned. The one thing sticking point I have is the repeated claim that Rachel Goldberg is “the female Walter White.”

Now, I have nothing against the idea of a female Walter White character. Walt's comedic doppelganger was a woman; some day soon he'll

Comments

[waltzmatildah]

I haven't seen Man Men so I can't comment on the Don Draper comparison, but people have been saying Rachel = Walt??!!!!

Okay then.

[pocochina]

Heh, yeah. In fairness, a lot of it seems to come from the producers. They seem to have thought (if so, quite reasonably) that no matter what the narrative did, people would refuse to see a young woman as an antihero and so the point would be missed. And I think BB was the easiest comparison to access in some ways because it was the most recent of these types of stories and because the basic setup of "person starts doing X under pressure but the viewer is made painfully aware that they want to do X" is more or less the same

[sunclouds33]

I agree that Rachel is far more a Don than a Walt (or IMO, as I argue below, a Peggy). However, IMO, it's Mad Men (the past)- UnREAL (the present) - Dollhouse (future) on a continuum. I agree a big Rachel/Walt comparison is that the basic setup of "person starts doing X under pressure but the viewer is made painfully aware that they want to do X" However even there, the pressure to do a morally objectionable job under financial coercion is actually more universal than Walt or Rachel would like to believe. Walt's impending lung cancer death and Rachel's debt to Everlasting is extreme unusual circumstances

[pocochina]

Walt's choices were absolutely the nerd's revenge on the jocks, the DEA. the strong drug dealers, even Elliot, a scientist who wasn't as smart as Walt but was more socially skilled and thus, got The Money and The Girl. It's a high school story for a guy who didn't make it out of high school......She's the Smart Quirky Girl who is making the Bimbo Cheerleader Sluts look like morons and hoping beat her own Elliots

Oh, that is great, ITA. I've assumed that Rachel probably did pretty well socially throughout her life just because she's so good at working people. But regardless of how she would come across to an observer, Rachel would feel like an unfairly overlooked Smart Quirky Girl.

[sunclouds33]

I see Rachel a little as a sidekick to the most popular girls, instead of THE popular girl. A Cordette instead of Cordela. She'd be a valued part of the gang because she's so good at getting all kinds of status people to trust and like her and maybe she helped with homework or brought over the juiciest secrets for the metaphorical Burn Book. Maybe that's a little too on-the-nose for the role she plays in UnREAL, but its my head canon. And a Rachel who's always felt like a side-kick would have resentment about that