If you haven't seen UnREAL, Lifetime's scripted series about life behind the scenes at Everlasting, a Bachelor-like reality show, you're missing out on the whip-smart, feminist, and darkly funny series of the summer. UnREAL is helmed by first-time showrunner Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, who comes by her subject matter naturally — she spent three years as an associate producer of The Bachelor. Cosmopolitan.com caught up with Sarah to talk about her show, what it was like to work in reality TV, and why we find the genre so compelling.

I'm interested in this idea of what's unreal versus what's real versus what's scripted in reality TV. In your experience working on The Bachelor, what kind of breakdown did you see between actual reality, exaggeration and editing, and staging?

One thing that I should say as a caveat upfront is that I haven't worked in that industry for, like, 10 years, and I think it's changed a ton. I'm really out of it. [But] something we explore on UnREAL is the skill set of getting people who are not actors to perform without giving them scripts. It's sort of like being a CIA interrogator. It's this really weird skill set that's not only manipulating people into performing how you need them to, it's even just having an ear for syntax as people describe their experiences and editing in your head so you can build a first-person narration from people who aren't narrators.

There are a ton of women who are super smart and really ambitious who love these shows.

When I was in it, that was more the case, because it was still pretty new and raw. We had a lot of standards and practices as to how to handle certain situations, and I truthfully don't actually know how that's changed or evolved. But I think [producers] still don't hand people scripts. The other thing that's really changed is participants are more willing and kind of hell-bent on casting and directing themselves. But that's pretty problematic in this medium because audiences have such a strong B.S. meter at this point — they can smell phoniness. So either [viewers] have to be willing to go along for the ride and enjoy the phoniness, or there's going to be a problem.

Being able to sniff out that phoniness is why a lot of people who do watch reality TV say things like, "Well, I know a lot of reality TV is fake, but…" What's the answer to that "but"?

That it's fun. Or that it feels good. You just buy in. It's so subterranean in [UnREAL], but we have a lot of compassion for and understanding of people [who] like these shows. The princess fantasy is so potent. We drill it in starting with little girls, this idea that if you're pretty enough and skinny enough, that everything will be OK and somebody will save us and all our problems will be over. That feels really human. It makes sense. One of the interesting things we discovered when we were doing research for the show was the median income and education for viewers [of these dating shows] is over $150K a year and a lot of them have master's degrees and above. That was my experience anecdotally too. There are a ton of women who are super smart and really ambitious and totally have their lives together who love those shows. I kind of think it's a fantasy or a relief from being a career woman. For people that are working 80 hours a week and busting their balls out in the world, to have an escape where they just think about ponies and hot air balloons and pretty, pretty dresses is really fun.

UnREAL co-creator Sarah Gertrude Shapiro (center) with stars Shiri Appleby (left) and Constance Zimmer (right). Getty

What exactly about the experience of working on The Bachelor was the hardest for you?

It was destroying other women. It was almost like a cartoon, how black-and-white and diametrically opposed the show was to who I was. It was like a Faustian tale. Maybe "destroying" is a strong word. But just the idea that I had spent my whole life advocating for other women, protecting other kids at school from getting bullied, talking about body image. I founded a high-school feminist club. I went to Sarah Lawrence. I had spent my entire life battling the beauty industry. I was really clear about who I was. I was day-to-day doing stuff that in my gut felt wrong for me.

And the other hard part was that I kind of liked it. And that made me feel like I didn't understand myself. And it was hard that I was good at it. It was just a bizarre situation — like sending a vegan to a slaughterhouse and telling them they have to be really good at killing cows.

When you say you kind of liked it, what did you like about it?

I liked having a place to be, and I liked being good at something. Even though I come from an academic family — my dad's a professor and both my siblings are academics — even in that circle, when I'd come home to BBQs or parties or bar mitzvahs or whatever, everyone wanted to talk to me about my job. My sister was in the Peace Corps at the time, organizing coffee farmers in Central America, but everyone wanted to talk to me. The attention and praise and the security of being handed a call sheet every single morning that tells you where you're going to be and when seven days a week, you don't have to decide anything. It made me really scared to make a change. And the thing I really like about reality TV crews is they tend to be the kids who couldn't afford film school but really loved film. They tend to be pretty blue collar and very loyal to each other. I was so miserable, I didn't have fun. But some of those kids had grown up in Bakersville or worked their way up through community college — they never thought they'd get to shoot on top of the Matterhorn. Some of them had never left the country.

I was day-to-day doing stuff that in my gut felt wrong for me.

Did the contestants just want to be famous?

No. For some of these people, it's the biggest thing that's ever going to happen to them in their lives. There are all of these bright, ambitious, gorgeous women from super-small towns who have a tiny, tiny dating pool. Even if they don't end up with the guy on the show, they've had a personal ad that 15 million people have seen and their dating pool has exponentially exploded. Some of them really are just looking for love. Or just to see the world. And there's nothing wrong with that.

But then they wind up playing this chess game they can't beat. I think as audiences and now even as producers, we want to look at the girls on these shows and say, "Well, they know what they signed on for." I think what UnREAL explores is there's just no way they could know, unless they work in the industry. You can't really fathom the power of editing, or of isolation, or of being cut off from phone and Internet and all your friends and family. You're not really eating or sleeping — you're drinking all day, you don't have your regular food. You're being interviewed three times a day. For a layperson to understand what that's going to be like is really impossible. And you have very, very smart people making these shows.

You've said that UnREAL is this hardcore bit of feminism wrapped in a candy coating. What makes UnREAL a feminist show?

To start with, the two main characters are women who are dealing with issues that are [about] not men. They're dealing with career, life, morality, humanity. They're three-dimensional human beings, and they're not reacting to men. That's the first or most profound aspect.

And then the contestants, our aim is to take them out of these paper dolls and make them into three-dimensional women, not stereotypes and headshots. People with parents, children, wins and losses, morals, ideas, feelings, brains. They're actually people. I think those things alone are really feminist. And then it's also really cynical and walks this razor's edge.

I think often when we think about "feminist television" we convince ourselves that it has to be about strong women doing good things or something. Rachel [one of the manipulative producers played by Shiri Appleby] almost strikes me as a Tony Soprano, where she has this moral compass but she doesn't always get to use it. She has to use this brutal skillset instead.

She can be more morally adrift than Quinn [the head producer, played by Constance Zimmer], honestly. Quinn at least knows who she is, but for Rachel, the path to hell is paved with great intentions. Every time she sets out to do something good, she ends up doing something horrible. Quinn, at least, is clear about what's going on. Allowing both these characters to be flawed and loving them anyway is pretty huge. We've given men that for quite awhile — Tony Soprano, Don Draper, Walter White. The fact that women are in there now, that you can allow them to be really screwed up but root for them, I think that's really profound. Both in terms of gender equality and storytelling.

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Lauren Hoffman Lauren Hoffman writes about television, women in pop culture, and her feelings.

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