News Reporter: Act Four: 'UnREAL' returns just in time for the general election

Friday, 3 June 2016

Act Four: 'UnREAL' returns just in time for the general election

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

As a critic, I’ve spent the past couple of years feeling as though I’m constantly behind. If I covered television alone, I couldn’t get to it all, thanks to the explosion of original programs all across the broadcast dial, not to mention the rise of streaming outlets. And I also cover movies, books and the occasional piece of music and theater. But given how overwhelming the cultural environment is, the things that shine for me, that make me want to tune in every week or desperate to see them on opening day, really stand out.

And oh, how does “UnREAL,” Lifetime’s scabrous, weirdly engaging drama about the behind-the-scenes action at a “Bachelor”-style reality show, which returns this Monday, shine. The dynamic between Rachel (Shiri Appleby), a producer for the show who is marvelous at sowing chaos because of her own damage, and Quinn (the consistently magnificent Constance Zimmer), the show’s co-creator is cracklingly good and compulsively watchable.

This season, “UnREAL” will tackle one of the biggest controversies surrounding the “Bachelor” franchise: the fact that neither “The Bachelor” nor “The Bachelorette” has ever been African American. But it feels slyly relevant for reasons beyond that.

At a moment when Donald Trump has turned the presidential election into a reality show, it’s fascinating to see the mechanics of that sort of drama at work. And given that Hillary Clinton will have to navigate through an election governed by rules of Trump’s own making, the way “UnREAL” examines how women function in the toxic milieu of reality television will be particularly salient. The contestants on the fake reality show in “UnREAL” are pushed, prodded and emotionally tortured by other women; the whole show is about women being made to turn on each other by the men who profit off the harm they do.

Both in “UnREAL” and in “Entourage,” Zimmer has played women who have learned to survive in environments where men want women to conform to certain distorted images of femininity. Clinton recently told New York Magazine’s Rebecca Traister that when it comes to what she’s reading these days, “I like a lot of women authors, novels about women, mysteries where a woman is the protagonist … It's relaxing." “UnREAL” certainly isn’t relaxing. But it might well put some iron in Clinton’s spine — and steel the rest of us for the next five months.