UnREAL Thoughts
I just finished UnREAL- so I'm a little late to the party (but not as late I often am!). 12_12_12 and pocochina have written beautifully about it, much better than Vulture.com. I had a few thoughts on a discrete areas.
I never really had these strong specific moral objections to reality shows or the people who make them. Maybe I'm just not close enough to a dating-personal reality show like Big Brother or The Bachelor. I've tended to just find them vaguely crass and moved on. Quinn does make a great point- the stuff that happens to these girls happens in real life. The world may regard professional sports as dominant pop culture and welcome water-cooler talk for its fans in any venue from a sports bar to a corporate lunch among business-suited men. Meanwhile, many educated people have contempt for The Bachelor or Big Brother. However, I don't think it's been definitively proven that sleazy reality shows cause more pain to its participants, draw on worse ethics and have sleazier crew members/executives, and do more to enforce harmful health or gender norms in society than the US's football, basketball, pro-wrestling, even baseball.
Actually, I do and have enjoyed business-porn-type reality shows like the early seasons of The Apprentice or Next Food Network Star or Chopped or Shark Tank. And my parents loved the Real Housewives franchise- so I watched some seasons of that and even enjoyed it a little because it was equated with family time and wine.
I'm not sure how to compare Everlasting to The Bachelor to help assess the moral culpability of the Everlasting crew. One of the creator of UnREAL, Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, was a producer on The Bachelor which informed UnREAL. I've read a bunch of her interviews- she describes her experience on The Bachelor as miserable, said they did crappy stuff, cited well-known facts that the cast wasn't allowed phones, computers, and there was more booze than food to exacerbate tempers. However, obviously, she doesn't say whether she swapped out a woman's pills or edited tapes of a perfectly fine woman to make her seem like the villain just because she was understandably distraught over a family death or told a woman who grew up in the system that she wasn't lovable or faked a suicide note or even whether it's standard to withhold news of a family member being hospitalized from a cast member.
I think it's more probable that Ms. Shapiro and the crew of The Bachelor did not step over the line as often as the Everlasting crew did. I'm pretty ignorant about this- but IMO, the extremes of Everlasting is what The Bachelor sort of aspires to but The Bachelor isn't staffed with Quinns and Rachels enough to make these "exciting" events happen on a weekly basis. From my very limited experience, the majority of the eps are the super-boring scenes that drive Quinn to epic temper tantrums in the control room.
It makes me wonder- do we root for Rachel's ugly come-uppance or for her to someday, get to the career point in her life where she writes a great comedy-drama about her experiences working on Everlasting and makes talk show rounds and perhaps even university rounds discussing the women's studies issues that fascinate her from a position of moral, intellectual, and creative authority. "African AIDS babies" as her actual life! Rachel has a long row to hoe- but by the end of S1, I'd be fine with her turning Everlasting into a respectable success that she could actually bring home and throw in her shrink professor mother's face. It's weird- I know (and obviously) dislike Rachels in real life, who even look like Rachel. She feels very real to me. However, I dunno, her brand of terrible actually feels too ubiquitous in my life to condemn her forever. She's not a sociopath. She's annoying and manipulative- but it's actually her sharp intelligence and sympathetic mental problems that allow her to do serious damage. I think I'm sort of rooting for her- with reservations since it's just the end of S1.
I don't even watch Vampire Diaries but I enjoyed 12_12_12 discussion of Rachel and Elana from Vampire Diaries. pocochina had some discussion of how Rachel and Quinn use vogue-feminist buzzwords to actually do misogynistic actions. Rachel can justify her actions and continue to pass in a group of women because she (a) knows the right feminist buzzwords to justify her actions and (b) despite the sloppy clothes and hair, she's actually really performing the role of heroine in her own TV drama that she calls her life. The vocal fry, the youthful flopping about to connote anything from pitiable despair on a chaise lounge to BFF girly confidante on a contestant's bed, the quick switch from cynical to earnest between just a few sentences. This is not for comfort. I don't think Rachel is exactly comfortable flopping on a stranger contestant's bed to girly-confidant convince her to slut-shame the competition or dragging on a hot leather jacket over her sweaty, under-washed body in the California sunshine. Dolly Parton said "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap" to describe her appearance; it takes a lot of effort to look Rachel-careless. However, it's beyond ingrained in Rachel to play this part to the hilt. Someone like Quinn telegraphs and announces her every calculation; Rachel was much more just born with this capacity to closely observe what works for real and especially fictional characters and how to adapt it to her situation to her advantage.
Rachel drags out this performance, even in the most real make-it-or-break-it moments. Rachel plays Buffy Summers confronting Faith in Consequences when Rachel has her voice break with earnest crushing guilt sadness that they have to take responsibility for Mary's death to the police. However if you look at the actual facts of Rachel's situation, right up until Shia confessed that she switched out Mary's pills, the actual responsibility *was* on Rachel. The network and the rest of the country knew damn well that Quinn and Co. brought Mary's abuser on set. The proof is in the tapes. Everlasting was on the chopping block and Rachel lived in fear that Quinn could sell her out as the low-level person to take the fall if things got too hot with legal or at the very least, the show's interruption would just prolong and worsen Rachel's financial problems. So of course, Rachel leaped like a dog at a bone when Shia confessed switching the pills- it was the shining beacon of hope that Rachel saw to *evade* responsibility.
Movies and TV shows glorify in female angst and self-loathing. The most heroic female characters tend to hate themselves, and thus, require comforting from the right man. Rachel literally tries writing that script as she crawls into Adam's bed, declaring herself a monster and waiting for the spooning to come to her. I don't know if it's because it just ended- but I did watch UnREAL thinking of Mad Men. On Mad Men (especially in the early seasons), the characters/actors came across as particularly affected and even odd in how they'd carry on the simplest conversation, mix a drink, hold a cigarette, sit on a home sofa v. office sofa, push a cart. However, these weren't aliens- you could recognize these specific codes of conduct from old movies and imagine that the characters on the show were posuery enough to imitate the movies of their times or the 1950s more than your average guy or gal who doesn't live in that One Percent World.
It's a little harder with UnREAL because Rachel is actually just REALLY doing what's stylish RIGHT NOW. UnREAL isn't a period piece. However, the show particularly attunes us to Rachel's performance because she is the wonderkind producer, the split between the facts of what she's doing and the motivations at stake versus her performance is called out.
In terms of what I've seen, UnREAL does follow in Girls's foot-steps in satirizing the affected way that even unfashionable, nerdy, hipster twenty-something girls present themselves in the 2000s. However even more than Girls, UnREAL drags in how a woman blends hipster chic with corporate requirements with mandated individuality to be of any interest/attraction to either body in an attempt to not just fit in, but direct and produce herself as the Heroine of Her Own Story. There's further irony because Rachel's 2010-2015 performance is juxtaposed against the ultra-retro feminine performances that she elicits from the contestants or Quinn's somewhat 1980s-1990s Professional Grade A Bitch in Sharp Shoulder Pads which have both hung along for far too long as feminine performance, and are now firmly regarded as unfashionable, stupid, and indicators of lurking moral corruption.
And Rachel reminded me a lot of Hannah Horvath.
To further the Mad Men comparisons, Rachel was a living embodiment of one of my favorite Don Draper quotes- "People will tell you who they are. But we ignore it, because we want them to be who we want them to be." Rachel introduces herself as the producer of the show, makes the conditions to create the seamy, ugly drama that have occurred in past Everlasting seasons. However, at the beginning, Rachel has an uncanny way of endearing herself to the cast of the show, both The Rooster and The Hens. Even though the cast knows that Rachel's job is to sow drama and not to help any one contestant land the guy or match-make the guy with his perfect wife, the women want Rachel to be their buddy ally or Adam wants Rachel to be his Manic Pixie Dream Girl. In the cast's (especially the women's) gilded cage, Rachel makes herself out to be the closest thing to a friend.
However, over time, the cast did see more and more through Rachel. Adam abandoned her; women like Grace and Anna and Maya had epiphanies that this whole game was rotten and Rachel was at the center of it all. As a result, Rachel's ploys had to be bigger and more reckless and more personally humiliating to get her chess pieces to listen to her. She spiralled downward from just needing a well-placed "maybe you're unlovable" to having to needily and humiliatingly faux-bawl out intimate details of her relationship with Adam as he rejects her to convince Anna to leave him at the alter because, by that point, Rachel already had a reputation as not just a manipulative bitch, but a pathetic manipulative bitch.
However, I think that the later seasons will be really benefit by comparison to this first season. As the audience, we all watched this debut season as a major event in Rachel's life. Her relationships with many of the major characters on the show from everyone on the cast to Jeremy devolved as everyone turned against her. If this was like any other show, Rachel would have a serious reckoning ahead of her after she alienated so many people, including both of her romantic interests. However, UnREAL isn't like any other show. Ultimately, Adam and all of the ladies on the show were pretty disposable. The season of UnREAL is over. There's going to be a new cast of patsies for Rachel to befriend and betray and even genuinely cozy up to and a new set of relationships to wreck. I wouldn't be surprised if Rachel has ANOTHER big sweeping epic romance with the Rooster of the next henhouse.
However, I'm not just saying this mockingly. This has to take a toll on all of the producers to basically set their calendar to when a new set of "friends" will view them as monsters. I do think that there's something in Rachel, though, that can fool herself to believe that THIS cast really likes or even loves her and they'll always understand her POV as opposed to Shia and Jay who introduce themselves as producers and are constantly in touch with that persona. This imbues Rachel with confidence and righteousness at the start of the series- but also ensure that she falls apart more dramatically at the end of the series when her "friendships" and "romances" collapse like a sandcastle of self-delusion and just plain deception and betrayal. We'll learn more about Rachel's career at UnREAL before this season- but Quinn acted like Rachel's dramatic "May sweeps" arc of romance with The Bachelor and declining a potentially lucrative Quinn-Rachel partnership on a hairbrained quest for her conscience and homebody Best Self was to be expected. It's just the way that Rachel cracks up right before a hiatus- it's cool because Rachel is worth five wrecked Ferraris.
It seems like Rachel's internal bio-rhythms can be set to a network TV calendar for reality TV shows. Fresh and eager to be liked when they start up in the fall, full of mystery on the ongoing plots. Maybe sentimental around Thanksgiving or Christmas, right as Rachel ponders her relationships along with the rest of the cast. And then, amped up continuously in the spring for some unpredictable season finale whether it's drunkenly crashing the Ferrari or creating a runaway bride leaving the cheating, not too bright start. And then, Rachel and the TV show itself makes a little whirring noise and shuts down for the summer hiatus. Not many people have that- but what's the cost of literally living a life like a TV show?
I never really had these strong specific moral objections to reality shows or the people who make them. Maybe I'm just not close enough to a dating-personal reality show like Big Brother or The Bachelor. I've tended to just find them vaguely crass and moved on. Quinn does make a great point- the stuff that happens to these girls happens in real life. The world may regard professional sports as dominant pop culture and welcome water-cooler talk for its fans in any venue from a sports bar to a corporate lunch among business-suited men. Meanwhile, many educated people have contempt for The Bachelor or Big Brother. However, I don't think it's been definitively proven that sleazy reality shows cause more pain to its participants, draw on worse ethics and have sleazier crew members/executives, and do more to enforce harmful health or gender norms in society than the US's football, basketball, pro-wrestling, even baseball.
Actually, I do and have enjoyed business-porn-type reality shows like the early seasons of The Apprentice or Next Food Network Star or Chopped or Shark Tank. And my parents loved the Real Housewives franchise- so I watched some seasons of that and even enjoyed it a little because it was equated with family time and wine.
I'm not sure how to compare Everlasting to The Bachelor to help assess the moral culpability of the Everlasting crew. One of the creator of UnREAL, Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, was a producer on The Bachelor which informed UnREAL. I've read a bunch of her interviews- she describes her experience on The Bachelor as miserable, said they did crappy stuff, cited well-known facts that the cast wasn't allowed phones, computers, and there was more booze than food to exacerbate tempers. However, obviously, she doesn't say whether she swapped out a woman's pills or edited tapes of a perfectly fine woman to make her seem like the villain just because she was understandably distraught over a family death or told a woman who grew up in the system that she wasn't lovable or faked a suicide note or even whether it's standard to withhold news of a family member being hospitalized from a cast member.
I think it's more probable that Ms. Shapiro and the crew of The Bachelor did not step over the line as often as the Everlasting crew did. I'm pretty ignorant about this- but IMO, the extremes of Everlasting is what The Bachelor sort of aspires to but The Bachelor isn't staffed with Quinns and Rachels enough to make these "exciting" events happen on a weekly basis. From my very limited experience, the majority of the eps are the super-boring scenes that drive Quinn to epic temper tantrums in the control room.
It makes me wonder- do we root for Rachel's ugly come-uppance or for her to someday, get to the career point in her life where she writes a great comedy-drama about her experiences working on Everlasting and makes talk show rounds and perhaps even university rounds discussing the women's studies issues that fascinate her from a position of moral, intellectual, and creative authority. "African AIDS babies" as her actual life! Rachel has a long row to hoe- but by the end of S1, I'd be fine with her turning Everlasting into a respectable success that she could actually bring home and throw in her shrink professor mother's face. It's weird- I know (and obviously) dislike Rachels in real life, who even look like Rachel. She feels very real to me. However, I dunno, her brand of terrible actually feels too ubiquitous in my life to condemn her forever. She's not a sociopath. She's annoying and manipulative- but it's actually her sharp intelligence and sympathetic mental problems that allow her to do serious damage. I think I'm sort of rooting for her- with reservations since it's just the end of S1.
I don't even watch Vampire Diaries but I enjoyed 12_12_12 discussion of Rachel and Elana from Vampire Diaries. pocochina had some discussion of how Rachel and Quinn use vogue-feminist buzzwords to actually do misogynistic actions. Rachel can justify her actions and continue to pass in a group of women because she (a) knows the right feminist buzzwords to justify her actions and (b) despite the sloppy clothes and hair, she's actually really performing the role of heroine in her own TV drama that she calls her life. The vocal fry, the youthful flopping about to connote anything from pitiable despair on a chaise lounge to BFF girly confidante on a contestant's bed, the quick switch from cynical to earnest between just a few sentences. This is not for comfort. I don't think Rachel is exactly comfortable flopping on a stranger contestant's bed to girly-confidant convince her to slut-shame the competition or dragging on a hot leather jacket over her sweaty, under-washed body in the California sunshine. Dolly Parton said "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap" to describe her appearance; it takes a lot of effort to look Rachel-careless. However, it's beyond ingrained in Rachel to play this part to the hilt. Someone like Quinn telegraphs and announces her every calculation; Rachel was much more just born with this capacity to closely observe what works for real and especially fictional characters and how to adapt it to her situation to her advantage.
Rachel drags out this performance, even in the most real make-it-or-break-it moments. Rachel plays Buffy Summers confronting Faith in Consequences when Rachel has her voice break with earnest crushing guilt sadness that they have to take responsibility for Mary's death to the police. However if you look at the actual facts of Rachel's situation, right up until Shia confessed that she switched out Mary's pills, the actual responsibility *was* on Rachel. The network and the rest of the country knew damn well that Quinn and Co. brought Mary's abuser on set. The proof is in the tapes. Everlasting was on the chopping block and Rachel lived in fear that Quinn could sell her out as the low-level person to take the fall if things got too hot with legal or at the very least, the show's interruption would just prolong and worsen Rachel's financial problems. So of course, Rachel leaped like a dog at a bone when Shia confessed switching the pills- it was the shining beacon of hope that Rachel saw to *evade* responsibility.
Movies and TV shows glorify in female angst and self-loathing. The most heroic female characters tend to hate themselves, and thus, require comforting from the right man. Rachel literally tries writing that script as she crawls into Adam's bed, declaring herself a monster and waiting for the spooning to come to her. I don't know if it's because it just ended- but I did watch UnREAL thinking of Mad Men. On Mad Men (especially in the early seasons), the characters/actors came across as particularly affected and even odd in how they'd carry on the simplest conversation, mix a drink, hold a cigarette, sit on a home sofa v. office sofa, push a cart. However, these weren't aliens- you could recognize these specific codes of conduct from old movies and imagine that the characters on the show were posuery enough to imitate the movies of their times or the 1950s more than your average guy or gal who doesn't live in that One Percent World.
It's a little harder with UnREAL because Rachel is actually just REALLY doing what's stylish RIGHT NOW. UnREAL isn't a period piece. However, the show particularly attunes us to Rachel's performance because she is the wonderkind producer, the split between the facts of what she's doing and the motivations at stake versus her performance is called out.
In terms of what I've seen, UnREAL does follow in Girls's foot-steps in satirizing the affected way that even unfashionable, nerdy, hipster twenty-something girls present themselves in the 2000s. However even more than Girls, UnREAL drags in how a woman blends hipster chic with corporate requirements with mandated individuality to be of any interest/attraction to either body in an attempt to not just fit in, but direct and produce herself as the Heroine of Her Own Story. There's further irony because Rachel's 2010-2015 performance is juxtaposed against the ultra-retro feminine performances that she elicits from the contestants or Quinn's somewhat 1980s-1990s Professional Grade A Bitch in Sharp Shoulder Pads which have both hung along for far too long as feminine performance, and are now firmly regarded as unfashionable, stupid, and indicators of lurking moral corruption.
And Rachel reminded me a lot of Hannah Horvath.
To further the Mad Men comparisons, Rachel was a living embodiment of one of my favorite Don Draper quotes- "People will tell you who they are. But we ignore it, because we want them to be who we want them to be." Rachel introduces herself as the producer of the show, makes the conditions to create the seamy, ugly drama that have occurred in past Everlasting seasons. However, at the beginning, Rachel has an uncanny way of endearing herself to the cast of the show, both The Rooster and The Hens. Even though the cast knows that Rachel's job is to sow drama and not to help any one contestant land the guy or match-make the guy with his perfect wife, the women want Rachel to be their buddy ally or Adam wants Rachel to be his Manic Pixie Dream Girl. In the cast's (especially the women's) gilded cage, Rachel makes herself out to be the closest thing to a friend.
However, over time, the cast did see more and more through Rachel. Adam abandoned her; women like Grace and Anna and Maya had epiphanies that this whole game was rotten and Rachel was at the center of it all. As a result, Rachel's ploys had to be bigger and more reckless and more personally humiliating to get her chess pieces to listen to her. She spiralled downward from just needing a well-placed "maybe you're unlovable" to having to needily and humiliatingly faux-bawl out intimate details of her relationship with Adam as he rejects her to convince Anna to leave him at the alter because, by that point, Rachel already had a reputation as not just a manipulative bitch, but a pathetic manipulative bitch.
However, I think that the later seasons will be really benefit by comparison to this first season. As the audience, we all watched this debut season as a major event in Rachel's life. Her relationships with many of the major characters on the show from everyone on the cast to Jeremy devolved as everyone turned against her. If this was like any other show, Rachel would have a serious reckoning ahead of her after she alienated so many people, including both of her romantic interests. However, UnREAL isn't like any other show. Ultimately, Adam and all of the ladies on the show were pretty disposable. The season of UnREAL is over. There's going to be a new cast of patsies for Rachel to befriend and betray and even genuinely cozy up to and a new set of relationships to wreck. I wouldn't be surprised if Rachel has ANOTHER big sweeping epic romance with the Rooster of the next henhouse.
However, I'm not just saying this mockingly. This has to take a toll on all of the producers to basically set their calendar to when a new set of "friends" will view them as monsters. I do think that there's something in Rachel, though, that can fool herself to believe that THIS cast really likes or even loves her and they'll always understand her POV as opposed to Shia and Jay who introduce themselves as producers and are constantly in touch with that persona. This imbues Rachel with confidence and righteousness at the start of the series- but also ensure that she falls apart more dramatically at the end of the series when her "friendships" and "romances" collapse like a sandcastle of self-delusion and just plain deception and betrayal. We'll learn more about Rachel's career at UnREAL before this season- but Quinn acted like Rachel's dramatic "May sweeps" arc of romance with The Bachelor and declining a potentially lucrative Quinn-Rachel partnership on a hairbrained quest for her conscience and homebody Best Self was to be expected. It's just the way that Rachel cracks up right before a hiatus- it's cool because Rachel is worth five wrecked Ferraris.
It seems like Rachel's internal bio-rhythms can be set to a network TV calendar for reality TV shows. Fresh and eager to be liked when they start up in the fall, full of mystery on the ongoing plots. Maybe sentimental around Thanksgiving or Christmas, right as Rachel ponders her relationships along with the rest of the cast. And then, amped up continuously in the spring for some unpredictable season finale whether it's drunkenly crashing the Ferrari or creating a runaway bride leaving the cheating, not too bright start. And then, Rachel and the TV show itself makes a little whirring noise and shuts down for the summer hiatus. Not many people have that- but what's the cost of literally living a life like a TV show?