“You want to live up to what you achieved the first time around”, notes Appleby, who also takes a turn behind the cameras as director of the sixth new “UnREAL” episode. It was one of last year’s smartest, most addicting, and overtly feminist watches. Shiri Appleby has always been able to deliver on Rachel’s ambivalence about her job, but here, we’re seeing that ambivalence being driven out of her as she drifts closer to becoming an nearly pure cynic, the way Quinn is.
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That Rachel is more than up to the task may be the scariest part of UnReal, which shows her to be every bit as seductively deceitful as The Americans’ Elizabeth Jennings, but without Elizabeth’s conviction that she’s doing bad things for a cause that actually matters. Rather, the series is all about Rachel’s conflicting personal goals.
Season two opens with Rachel Goldberg (Shiri Appleby) and Quinn King (Constance Zimmer) getting matching “Money”. She’s Rachel’s mentor, friend, rival, support system, instigator, dream, and nightmare. Quinn will do anything (ANYTHING) to ensure she has a hit show.
However, Zimmer still promises that there will be lots of drama this season and that Quinn and Rachel do “horrible things” to the contestants this season. The show is fast, funny, profane, and charming, even with it occasionally gets nearly unrelentingly dark as abuse and toxic relationships run up and down the chain.
With Jeremy (Josh Kelly), Adam (Freddie Stroma), and Chet (Craig Bierko) out of the picture as love interests, all Quinn and Rachel have at the beginning of Season 2 is each other. “I think this season is really going to surprise people”. And it was about being a woman who’s kind of a workaholic and has spent all of my life on sets – all of my adult life on sets – and that’s where primary relationships happen – work relationships. Part of it might have to do with the overall reach of the channel – it could also be that Match just isn’t as scintillating as UnReal, which is aimed at unearthing the dastardly goings-on behind the scenes of salacious reality TV. Recent shows have also gotten better at portraying professional women. The real treachery many of us bump into, after all, isn’t like Walter White battling superhuman drug dealers.
Having more working women on TV proves that, yes, women absolutely belong in the workplace and deserve to be in positions of power, but more than that, it shows how different working women can be. However, while Rachel may reduce the girls down to “wifeys” and “villains”, UnREAL itself is never that cut and dried. That goes to the two creators of the show.
It’s really the central love story of the show. It’s mainly thrown its lot in on reality shows, and adding to its longtime stable of original movies (some of which are becoming increasingly weird and avant grade), though there have been a few notable pickups – like War & Peace – that show Lifetime stretching its borders. But at another network, we might have been one of 30 things in development; at Lifetime, we were one of three. There’s this co-dependency between them. This season, the outrageous world of unscripted dating continues on Everlasting, as “UnREAL” continues to push the limits of chaos with its highly anticipated Season Two return to Lifetime.
We’ve got all the gritty and steamy BTS details! As some characters flirted with what only seemed like inevitable endings, others had their lives cut short just as I’d nearly forgotten to worry about them. The complicated professional relationship between Quinn and Rachel remains front and center on “UnREAL”, an antihero drama that suggests reality television can be almost as cutthroat as the meth trade or organized crime. Thankfully, UnREAL is here to deliver that relationship, warts, drama, digging quips, manipulation, and all.
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For Lifetime scripted drama “UnREAL”, which revolves around a fictional reality dating show called “Everlasting“, the move to cast a black bachelor – the crushworthy B.J. Britt as National Football League quarterback Darius Beck – took just two seasons.
