When I was little, my mum would call me and my sister – planted inches from our TV screen – “TA!” (“telly addict”) to admonish us about our viewing habits. It didn’t deter me, and I’ve clocked too many hours in front of screens since. But when I see something that makes me lean in, I have to say something. So I’m saying something about UnREAL, the most brutal, fantastically machiavellian TV series I’ve seen in years.
UnREAL is a show about a reality show – except its main concern is peeling back the layers of artifice that go into constructing that “reality”. The fictional show is called Everlasting, a riff on those dating programmes in which an eligible young man “finds love” among women living in a mansion. Here’s the deal, the show tells us: everything is manipulated, nothing is real. The genuine drama is behind the scenes: young producers duke it out in increasingly amoral ways to create the most entertaining results from the contestants. Their boss, Quinn (Constance Zimmer of House Of Cards), is a megalomaniac, and ratings are king.
UnREAL is smart, too, ironically grounded in reality; it was no surprise it won a prestigious Peabody award this year. In the first episode, Quinn takes the self-evident truth of black contestants never winning these shows and savagely runs with it (“It’s not my fault that America’s racist, people”). Lies, leading questions and creative editing make villains out of ordinary women. And we lap it up. The show is about TV, yes, but also about audiences – do we care how the sausage is made?
Season two has just started streaming on Amazon. Do yourself a favour and tune in.
