A series to put in question the world of reality TV shows: "UnREAL"

Hello guys!

Today I just want to talk to you about a great show that I watch for few years, "Unreal". The third season is just releasing now, so I cannot have chosen my time better!

This show was created and produced by Marti Noxon and Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, and was inspired by a short film, "Sequin Raze". It is diffused since 2015, and it is not available on Netflix, but you can find it on the own Youtube channel of the show. It is quite a drama and satirical series. For the moment, there are three seasons and 30 episodes, each of a duration of 40 minutes.

If you are interested in the way that reality-TV shows are made or just an addict of these shows, this article is for you!

The plot

This show follows the paths of the producers of "Everlasting", a reality-TV show, a show in the same kind of "The Bachelor" (so a "dating" reality-TV show), and this series is more precisely focused on the life of Rachel Goldberg (played by Shiri Appleby), a young woman of whom the mission is to manipulate the candidates of Everlasting to create always more and more drama in her show. She has to make choices sometimes beside her sense of morality, to please her main producer Quinn King (interpreted by Constance Zimmer, the journalist in House of Cards, a heartless woman.

The fact that Sarah Gertrude Shapiro produced "UnREAL" is not innocent: she works herself on the production of the reality-TV show The Bachelor, during 9 seasons! You can find the fact that by working there for like 30 episodes and in this very particular atmosphere, she was stretched to breaking point. After that, she worked in a farm for 6 months to recover a certain mental health. This makes this show even more interesting to watch, and I can imagine that by creating the character of Rachel, the co-producer of the show, she has put a lot of herself!

The sentence "We're gonna make some good TV" comes a few times in this show, and since the beginning you can understand that in this show, everything is allowed. And Rachel totally understood this message by making what is asking to her to make the more drama possible and by persuading herself that she is just a good person, who does good for the people around her. But when the cameras are off, she asks herself about what she is doing, but she is not alone, because clearly in this show everyone manipulates everyone.

My opinion

I find it quite interesting to have the interest of this show puts on the producers of reality-TV shows and not on the candidates this time. You can also imagine that with the catching sentence "Everyone will be exposed" of this show, maybe Shapiro was just making her own revenge on her past co-workers... You never know!

The suspense is present during all the episodes and it can truly make you watch this show in a few days (#guilty). There are a lot of unexpected twists and turns that will make you say "Whaaaat" in front of your television/computer. I truly liked the progress through the different episodes of this show.

Personally, I have always thought that the people on the stage of reality-TV shows were quite innocent by arriving on these emissions, but when you see Unreal, you are no longer sure about it. The different candidates arrive all with a lot of intentions, some more honorable than the others: make some advertising for their family, make a "Black girl" win for the first this kind of show,... Unreal allows you to see behind the curtains of this particular world.

And this is what I truly liked about this show: it can really make you question all the reality-TV shows that you have already watch or that you have heard of. Unreal will make you realize all the bad stuff people can do to each other in this kind of emissions. Honestly, I don't know if I can believe all the strategies used by Rachel and Quinn to convince everyone around hers to get what they want, and if these strategies are really used in the reality-TV shows we find on our televisions, it would be so frightening... But who knows!

I hope this article makes you want to watch this show. I let you there, I have to watch the third season!