It’s the second season premiere of UnREAL, Lifetime’s dark, incisive scripted drama about the machinations and manipulations that go down behind the scenes of a Bachelor-like reality romance show, Everlasting. Rachel (Shiri Appleby), who is brilliant at a job that disgusts her, thinks everything is going to be different this time around: Her frenemy-as-boss, Quinn (Constance Zimmer) appears to be an ally, willing to hand the reins of the show over to her mentee. And Rachel has the ratings gold idea: To give Everlasting its first black suitor. This is a brilliant move she celebrates by having sex with said black suitor’s right-hand man; with her legs around his waist and her fists in the air, she cheers: “I’M GONNA MAKE HISTORY!”
To calm nervous execs about the plan to cast Darius (B.J. Britt), an NFL quarterback with a PR problem that only, as Quinn puts it, a match made on television with “a blonde, beautiful white wifey” can solve, Quinn assures her higher-ups that Darius isn’t, like, black black. “He’s football black.” She promises — and, with Rachel’s hustle, delivers — a white girl who is made Instagram-famous for bouncing around in a Confederate flag bikini, a Black Lives Matter activist who ends up wearing an “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirt on the air, and a Muslim who, though she’s never worn a headscarf before, is urged by the producers to rock what they believe American audiences will interpret as the unofficial uniform of terrorism.
The first season of UnREAL was outstanding, brutal and vicious but dressed up in glitter, a cutting, twisted story about the beasts behind the belles. It won a Peabody Award, was the youngest-skewing show in Lifetime’s history, and was renewed for a third season before season two even premiered.
If the first two episodes of this season made available to critics is any indication, UnREAL wants to dig into everything most people would prefer to gloss over, starting with race and sex. It’s certainly willing to go somewhere that its real-life doppelganger, The Bachelor, has never gone. Now in its 21st season, the series has yet to feature a black leading man; neither has its sister-spinoff, The Bachelorette, had a black woman handing out roses. Black contestants, as a general rule, do not make it past the first few elimination rounds. (A class action lawsuit against the franchise, alleging racial discrimination, was thrown out in 2012.)
Britt has the honor, then, of breaking down a meta-barrier: In the real world, it has taken UnREAL just two seasons to do something The Bachelor has yet to do. But within the show, characters talk about the casting of Darius as a groundbreaking but risky-for-the-ratings move.
“I’d never even heard of this before getting cast,” Britt said to ThinkProgress by phone. He planned to watch the first two episodes but ended up bingeing the entire season. He didn’t realize that he would be in the running to be the first black suitor until he was caught up on the series.
“I think it’s a long time coming for the first black suitor,” he said. “UnREAL breaks down barriers. They’re not afraid to go where other shows don’t.”
Before the season began, Britt said, the writers “sat me down and said, ‘B.J., we understand, this is going to deal a lot with race. But there are going to be other talking points. [And] we’re not black; we don’t have the answers. So if the writers or producers put something in the script that you don’t think is on point or right, let us know, so that way we can both make sure we make it right.”
“It made it so much more comfortable for me,” he said, even though taking on the role is “a lot of pressure, just to make sure you get this right.”
How UnREAL Became The Breakout Hit Of Summer TVUnREAL is the breakout show of the summer. (Not to say we told you so, but, ahem.) The new drama takes us into the…thinkprogress.orgDarius’ mother told him “that the rules would always be different for him coming up,” said Britt. “He’s kept the lid on things. He’s the first black quarterback on his pro football team. So his job is to keep his nose clean, stay above the drama. He’s the face of the team, so he has to have that squeaky clean image.”
Part of the tension in the season is that the people pushing for this history-making move are two white women, Quinn and Rachel; the black cast members are seen by Quinn and Rachel as props to be manipulated. (Then again, they feel that way about the white cast members, too. They feel that way about everyone.)
Whatever control the cast members — even Darius — think they have over their on-camera lives is mostly an illusion. “You don’t have any power,” said Britt. “And everything is stripped away from you. You have no connections with the outside world. No phones, no wallets. They control what happens in those four walls, whether you realize it or not. And in a sense, it’s kind of like hazing. If you… decide you want to do it your way, [the producers] can cut and paste how you look.”
But Rachel has been wrestling with a change-the-world impulse since the series began; the first time we saw her, she was wearing a “This is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt. She wants to be a populist; she tells herself that her work here is meaningful, no matter what depravity is entailed in getting her desired result.
Quinn and Rachel “definitely want their show to pop. They want to be the number one show on that network,” said Britt. “They also want to break down barriers and do what’s never been done before. Rachel is the one who said, ‘Want to do something big? Let’s get the first black suitor. We can spin it and make it appeal to him as well.’”
As for the way UnREAL goes there this season with race, Britt said, “People cringe, I’m sure, when they see that they’re even going that far with it. Just like in last season when they were talking about eating disorders and suicide. UnREAL goes there.”
Season two of UnREAL premieres Monday, June 13 at 10 p.m. on Lifetime.