“Money, Dick, Power” – the phrase UnREAL’s protagonists Quinn King (Constance Zimmer) and Rachel Goldberg (Shiri Appleby) get tattooed on their wrists at the beginning of the show’s second season – could also double as its mission statement: women can work, party and fuck just as hard as men. And for a while Quinn, Rachel and the other women of Everlasting, the dating reality show within UnREAL, did just that.
MDP energy.
But given the events of the preceding two seasons of UnREAL, which were met with critical and commercial antipathy and culminated with this week’s drop on Stan, it would seem that that tattoo was missing a few words: (the abuse of) power.
This corruption was evident as early as season one, with Rachel covering up a rape and another producer catalysing the suicide of a contestant on Everlasting. In the ill-received second season, when Rachel called the cops on Everlasting’s first black suitor (their equivalent of the titular Bachelor, the franchise they’re ostensibly spoofing), it resulted in his black friend getting shot, speaking to the larger complicity of white women in powerful positions.
Also in season two, Quinn, Rachel, Jeremy (Josh Kelly) and Chet (Craig Bierko) covered up Jeremy’s murder of two people involved with the show – an undercover journalist posing as a contestant and a producer with whom Rachel had a fling – committed in the belief that he was doing what Rachel wanted.
*slaps VILLAIN sign on entire show*
Since then, a spate of other prestige and prestige-adjacent shows about complicated and compromised (white) women have aired and gone into production, such as Big Little Lies, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Killing Eve and Sharp Objects. (Season three of UnREAL didn’t air until earlier this year, almost two years after season two ended.) Perhaps latching onto a moment, season three reverted somewhat to original-flavour UnREAL, portraying Rachel and Quinn as products of the human condition, not outright evil caricatures.
However, perhaps sensing cancellation was on the cusp (which was confirmed this week), season four went all out in attempting to join the club of conflicted women, but instead it just made them complicit in their own power struggle.
UnREAL has long positioned Rachel’s childhood sexual and emotional abuse as the root of her self-loathing and manipulation. Her encouragement of Maya (Natasha Wilson), who was assaulted on season one of UnREAL by Roger (Tom Brittney), to return to season four’s show Everlasting All-Stars to set up a rape revenge fantasy is, while still a reach, somewhat understandable.
Rachel not telling Maya that Roger would also be returning in the hopes that she would snap and reveal his sexual assault on national television, less so. In a writer’s room full of people whose strong suit is not subtlety, UnREAL again stumbled in trying to address the global conversation around sexual assault, as they attempted with police violence in season two. The disjointed writing that drags this storyline throughout most of the season is a grab bag of irresponsible and retraumatising responses to rape – victim blaming, the silencing and imprisonment of survivors, survivors resorting to violence against their abusers – which perpetuate the notion that #MeToo has gone too far, whether intentional or not.
At the very least, it’s in extremely poor taste to put the words “maybe you wanted it” and “maybe it was your fault” in a rape survivor’s mouth given the current cultural climate.
This is UnREAL’s clearest and grossest abuse of power—“betraying the sisterhood” as Roger would call it, having been painted by Everlasting as a feminist icon that is the rotten cherry on top of an increasingly stale season. To varying degrees, the women surrounding Roger are complicit in his reframing as a good guy who couldn’t read Maya’s—and then Noelle’s—very clear rejection of his advances to save their own asses.
By not outright condemning Roger’s actions and having his co-stars empathise with him, UnREAL gives credence to the notion that survivors coming forward about their experiences is tantamount to a “witch hunt” of “good guys” who might get caught in the crossfire. But hey, Roger got his dick cut off and will never be able to do that to another person again, so what even is justice?
Quinn setting up Rachel’s latest love interest and basically the male version of her, Tommy (François Arnaud), to take the fall for everything Rachel’s done further solidifies that theory. He might have worked in tandem with Rachel, but Tommy’s shock at having been set up doesn’t do enough to separate him from those aforementioned “good guys” who got taken for a ride by a fame-hungry woman.
There’s also empty chatter about “woman on woman crime” and honouring the “sisterhood” in some of the show’s worst writing, which is no mean feat. The introduction of Candy Coco (Natalie Hall), a sex worker planted in the Everlasting All-Stars cast to secure Quinn and Chet a spin-off series, Stripper Queens, is a cynical yet welcome (thanks to Hall’s effervescence) offset to UnREAL’s other feminist blunders. Several times Candy espouses empty screeds about women’s empowerment which is coded as funny because, you know, she’s a stripper. But she’s also the clearest embodiment of the beautiful bachelorettes Everlasting attracts and that Rachel can never be.
That doesn’t stop her trying this season, donning the fake eyelashes and blonde highlights of the women she’s always positioned herself as being better than. (Interestingly, original promotion for the season suggested clumsily that Rachel herself would actually be the Suitress, but she actually just uses the male contestants as her personal sexual smorgasboard.)
Now that she’s not hiding behind “This is what a feminist looks like” and “Still with her” t-shirts (though she is wearing the latter in the final scene) and dirty hair, it’s plain to see how badly both Everlasting and UnREAL have broken Rachel, her descent from conflicted but brilliant into one-dimensional vindictiveness reducing her to the conveniently damaged architect and scapegoat of both shows’ toxic politics.
In an eerily prescient scene (season three of UnREAL was filmed in July last year, prior to #MeToo), desperate production assistant Madison (Genevieve Buechner) “pitches” a TV show to new network head Fiona (Tracie Thoms) in the back of a limo, which Madison believes entails taking off her clothes. When Fiona expresses surprise, Madison asks Fiona if she wants her to stop. “Not yet,” Fiona says. It was the perfect set up for a nuanced exploration of women in positions at the upper echelons of entertainment, and how they might reshape conceptions of power after decades of men wielding it with their dicks in the other hand – however UnREAL’s curtain call consisted of cheap thrills at the expense of women on the other end of of this power dynamic.