every few years or so i rewatch the first and second seasons of the show UnREAL because i love toxic yuri and rachel and quinn have possibly the most toxic yuri dynamics of all time.
however, whenever i watch the show i come to the same basic conclusion about what's wrong with it, which is basically that first season should have been the third season. they jumped the gun way too quickly on rachel and quinn and co. getting one of their contestants killed. at that point they fully cross the moral event horizon. and don't get me wrong, i think that's great, i love evil women. i just think it needed more build up because once they do that the show loses a lot of its tension. there's no longer any real question about how far these characters are willing to go, or whether there's any hope for redemption. their character development is kind of done and there's nowhere for them to really go from there.
also, it's kind of just hard to top mary's death in terms of drama. so in subsequent seasons, the writers have to keep ramping up the stakes to the point where our characters are killing people every season. which is a problem because the bachelor isn't actually the hunger games. like don't me wrong, i think these kinds of reality shows are deeply unethical, and that UnREAL is right to call attention to that. but for a show like this to work it has to be an effective critique of the actual unethical practices in reality tv production, i.e., emotional manipulation, unsafe working environments, pervasive misogyny, even more pervasive racism, exploitation of vulnerable people, etc. etc. but i guess the writers thought that that stuff wasn't dramatic enough to carry at least the first couple of seasons so things go off the rails way too quickly, and i actually think it ends up kind of undermining the show's message.
so my proposition is that the show should have started when rachel first began to work as a producer on everlasting. she starts off naive and hopeful and she genuinely believes that she's going to change things and make everlasting more feminist and diverse or whatever. but not only does she come to realize how impossible it is to change anything, she also discovers, through her toxic yuri mentorship relationship with quinn that she has real skill at manipulating people, and that she sort of enjoys it. so the first season follows rachel as she's slowly corrupted by quinn. in the second season, she has less scruples about what she's doing at first but then she starts recognizing that she's behaving just like quinn which leads to her having a mental breakdown on tv and then quitting at the end of the season.
if the first two seasons consist of all of the backstory that the actual show only alludes to, then season season 3 would essentially be what season 1 ended up being. i.e., rachel has to come back to work because quinn is lowkey blackmailing her which rachel uses as an increasingly unconvincing excuse to justify her terrible actions. and halfway through the season she and quinn end up getting a contestant killed and they spend the rest of the season scrambling to cover it up. then in season 4 (ideally, the final season) they're both in full villain mode and they start plotting against one another. the show ends with them totally destroying each other's lives, but they still kind of end up together because they don't how to be apart. the end.
