Is a show built around a successful woman who makes good money and is good at her job a feminist show, even if said job consists of commodifying other women? How much of a feminist can you be if you routinely manipulate women into making fools of themselves for profit, or worse, for the sheer pleasure of being good at it? Is that a sign of illness, or of female empowerment? These are the questions at the heart of Lifetime’s new show, Unreal, which is simultaneously the most and least feminist television show on air.
Unreal, which just wrapped its first season, takes place on the set of a Bachelor-esque reality show called Everlasting, which, like its reality TV source material, pits tens of women in a competition for the love of one man. Unreal centers around the lives of Everlasting’s producers, those elfin presences who encourage and enable the self-destructive behaviors that make for great reality TV by any means necessary.
The show wastes little time with throat clearing, its shots skipping back and forth between the set of Everlasting and the dark control room lair where its producers watch the footage on big screens and shout out orders (“We’re producing true love, people!”), but the third episode is where it reveals the stakes. Cutting between an argument producer Rachel Goldberg is having with her mother and scenes of women driven wild by the producers’ crass exploitation, the show goes after the source of Rachel’s talent. Her mother insists that Rachel has an undefined psychiatric disorder (it’s either ADHD, narcissistic personality disorder, or bipolar, take your pick!). “The reason you’re so good at what you do—the manipulation, the attunement—that is the disease!” Cut to a scene of some women getting into a catfight because Rachel thoroughly manipulated them. “There is nothing wrong with you,” her boss, Quinn, played by a magnificently cast Constance Zimmer, purrs over a shared cigarette as she and Rachel sit back and watch the catfight unfold. “You’re a genius.” The show returns to this question again and again: Is manipulation a talent, or an illness? And by doing so, points at what it thinks keeps viewers coming back to The Bachelor, season after season.
Here’s how The Bachelor works: Twenty-five women are gathered in a secluded mansion. They are there to compete for the love and commitment of one man, the titular bachelor, who winnows down the group through dates—both group dates and one-on-one dates—and the weekly rose ceremony, where he calls their names one by one until there are no roses left; those not awarded one are sent home. Twenty-five women date one man until it’s down to the final ten, the final six, the final two, and then the one.
But the competitive aspect of The Bachelor has, in recent seasons, been radically disavowed. The show is now more often framed as a journey for love, the formerly synonymous goals of pursuing passion and destroying the competition heavily contrasted throughout the season. “Are you here for love or are you just here to win?!” is a question contestants often hurl at each other; being on the show “for the right reasons” is a constant source of drama. What are the right reasons for being on a reality show? It’s a good question, one asked by Rozlyn Papa after she became the first contestant to be booted off The Bachelor for making out with a producer. They can’t be to win, that’s for sure: The contestants are put in the position of maintaining the show’s fiction for an audience who know better by now; they must act like going on a reality TV show is merely an unfortunate byproduct of a completely honorable pursuit, a quest for true love. It’s part of what makes the show work; contestants who seem too canny (like last season’s Kelsey, who bragged that her husband’s death was “such a good story, right?”) are booted off with much fanfare.
Unreal’s gambit is to traffick in the aesthetics of reality shows like The Bachelor—its show-within-a-show, Everlasting, is every bit as misogynist and compelling as The Bachelor—while providing the viewer with a potential alibi: that by making the scaffolding of the industry visible around the margins of the show, it proffers a compelling critique of shows like the The Bachelor.
But the nugget of Unreal’s excellence lies in the complexity of its treatment of women. While it certainly understands and exploits the sumptuousness of cat fights and beautiful women with competing goals, everyone—including the sexy, slutty contestants—is awarded plausible goals, and very few of them include love or romance. One of the contestants is gay and wants the “suitor,” Adam, so she can continue her affair with her secret lesbian lover; another is on the show to get recognition for a hair product line; most just want to be famous; and others just want to win. No one seems to actually want a life with Adam. And while viewers of The Bachelor enjoy consuming the self-destructive behaviors of people with flaws just like their own—the desire to be famous, the hunger to be loved—Rachel and Quinn, Unreal’s anti-hero protagonists, enjoy inducing those behaviors, because they make for good TV. The broader tension in the narrative derives from whether the show can get us to root for women who would manipulate and even destroy other women. In other words, the show fully expects its viewers to see producing the sexist tropes of Everlasting as on par with other forms of bad behavior that we forgive in compelling and charismatic male protagonists. It works: In the first shot of Rachel, she’s lying on her back in a limo conveying six women to meet their Bachelor, when the process of commodifying their desperate loneliness will commence. They are dressed in ball gowns; she is dressed in a T-shirt that reads, “This is What a Feminist Looks Like.”
Why do we love The Bachelor? Unreal suggests that more than the delusion of the contestants or the competition for love, what we love about it is the invisible hand that coerces to people degrade themselves on national television. What Unreal suggests is that watching a group of otherwise normal women fight over a man because someone made them do it is a pastime we won’t easily give up, and that like all power, Rachel’s is morally neutral. But it’s awfully nice to see a woman wielding it.
