Sure, Lifetime’s upcoming scripted offering “Un-Real” involves a very “Bachelor”-like reality dating competition. And its co-creator, Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, once worked for “The Bachelor.”
But the the fictional series on which “Un-Real” centers is not a spoof of “The Bachelor.” At least, that was the line from Shapiro and fellow co-creator Marti Noxon during the Television Critics Association press tour in Pasadena on Friday.
“I think the show is as dramatic and dark as it is satirical,” Shapiro said of the upcoming series. “We put a fatwa on spoofing.”
Instead, Noxon suggested, the series, with its behind-the-scenes peek into media, owes more in spirit to the 1987 film “Broadcast News.”
The series stars Shiri Appleby as Rachel Goldberg, a still somewhat idealistic reality TV producer working on a show on which the contestants are constantly manipulated. The cast and creators stressed during the panel that the heart of the show will reside in the characters’ attempts to deal with their struggles in their own way and in their own spaces. That would include Goldberg, who grapples with career-driven self-loathing.
“I was really attracted to the character because she’s really good at what she does, which is producing reality television, and that thing is actually what she hates about herself,” Appleby told reporters at the panel.
“It feels like almost every character is an antihero,” Noxon noted.
“You want to see them all succeed, yet they’re all so dark and so demented that you don’t know if that’s a good thing,” added Constance Zimmer, who plays the dating competition’s executive producer on “Un-Real.”
As for Goldberg’s stint at “The Bachelor,” the co-creator brushed off suggestions that her previous gig did much to inform her current one.
“It was a day job that I had at 23,” Shapiro said. When it came to setting the scene for “Un-Real,” she said, “I knew how to put up the wallpaper, but it’s totally fictional.”