BingeyKohan

I know this is a Ryan Murphy show so it seems masochistic to even dwell on this, BUT...parts of this seemed very rushed, unlike a first episode of a new season, when you assume that's the one they actually spend time thinking out and plotting. You have one scene where Chanel announces they're going to pull an all nighter and figure out werewoman's problem...then the next scene she's abandoned that out of boredom and figures it out with John Stamos, using only dialogue (no interstitial scene) to show the Chanels even attempted? And the hospital's backstory was too ridiculous to have any creep factor whatsoever. I get they're sort of doing a Halloween 2 thing with the hospital setting (including the woman in the hot medical bath, though Michael Myers boiled his victim)...but it makes zero sense. They have a full staff but have had only one patient? How did she even pay? Dean Munsch did this with her publishing earnings? I don't think books pay THAT much these days... (i know, this is a fool's errand I'm on.)

Loving this show. As much as I enjoy the daily-grind detailing I'm also intrigued by the creep factor they're slowly building, like the guy in the Batman mask knocking on PB's door and in this ep the shadowy dude the bartender mentions also looking for PB. Assume they're connected? also, what did the ep's title mean?

I want to be friends with Sam/Pamela Adlon. The footage of her younger self in the opening credits kills me - I fondly remember her as the kid-sister Pink Lady wannabe in Grease 2 and as Jo's mini-me in one of the Edna's Edibles seasons of The Facts of Life. Is it weird that one of the (many) pleasures of this show for me is that I can pretend it's giving us a view of a grown-up Jo, what her life might be like now? (I mean, especially since Nancy McKeon chose not to do the terrible Facts of Life reunion movie...)

Is Cadillac supposed to be a badass who's stayed slightly too long at the party, or a joke? I can't decide if he's a disco version of McConnaughey from Dazed and Confused or Coming to America Eriq La Salle. This show is infectious even while part of me knows it's a little bad, which I guess is fitting for the last days of disco.

Having recently seen (suffered through, if you like) the current CATS revival on Broadway, I will postulate that my inability to count myself a CATS person tracks with my inability to appreciate even the smallest whiskers of pleasure provided by UnReal S2. Both are centered around an annual spectacle (the jellicle ball, a season of Everlasting) on a gaudy, overdecorated set. Both build to the selection of a lucky, chosen specimen to receive a dubious honor (ascending to the Heaviside layer, having a skeevy bachelor propose marriage). And both forego nuance and character development in favor of vignettes where each cast member merely steps forward, announces their identifying detail, and recedes again to wait out someone else's turn to make their data dump in the litter box: "I'm a naughty cat that breaks all your vases," "I'm a cat that rides a train!" "I'm a combo of 10 mental cases!" "I"m a cop who hasn't a name!" "Me, look me up, I'm a racist of Instagram." "You and your sex slaves are just a big sham!" What can we say? Season 1 turned us into finicky viewers. We won't eat just anything.

Parting thought on a sh*t season: Can you even imagine how the New York Post would headline the cover story of a dating-show contestant who, first, craps herself on national television then, second, has the terrible misfortune to die in a car crash a week later? RUNS OF BAD LUCK SKID MARKS GOING GOING GONE GIRL It's been fun wading through the muck with y'all. And now I fade to black. Or at least brown.

I wonder if Rachel is still invited to Coleman's cousin's wedding. It seemed so important to her! Maybe she could take Jeremy now.

NYMag has a similar one where SGS and SR are just as defensive (the two interviews are basically redundant, since the women repeat themselves, down to the same phrasing). What strikes me is the distances SGS goes to share 'credit' in the writers' room, rejecting the notion that UnReal is an 'auteur' show. I don't actually think she's that modest; I think she just wants to spread the blame. Although in both the NYMag and the Hollywood Reporter interviews I think SR comes off more distastefully - but again SGS could have been hanging back and holding her tongue to offer up another shooting target besides herself. It bothers me that they both imply The New Yorker misreported the Lifetime mandate to make something work with Jeremy. I personally know how New Yorker articles are fact checked, and SGS and the showrunner (Carol B I believe was her name) would have confirmed their quotes when they are clearly resigning themselves to behaving like adult professionals and making a story for Jeremy at Lifetime's insistence when they clearly don't want to. I feel badly for the show's performers - the trainwreck of this season will put them on their back feet at the start of season 3, when they have to do press and all they will get asked is how they feel about the drubbing this season received from critics and fans.

I share the fear they are going to just hand-wave his transgressions to get him back on the team to doublecross Coleman/Yael (Yaelman?) It's like Suicide Squad and Quinn is Amanda Waller!

First of all, he looks terrible. Secondly, he's wearing the same plaid shirt in the outdoor scene and the control room scene so must be part of the same sequence of events. He's possibly eavesdropping on Coleman and Yael? Off topic but they have some new cute guys in the control room too - I guess the staffers we sort of glimpse from time to time. By their applause I guess they are happy with something that happens with the Darius wedding outcome?

This is coming from someone who has not made one correct prediction, but...I'm going to try again. I'm starting to wonder if Rachel decides to produce/'weaponize' Jeremy against Coleman in order to silence him. It's the ultimate manipulation, getting someone to kill for you.

I feel as sick as Yael when I think of all the things we were told would matter this season that came to nothing: Chet having a child at all (nothing) then kidnapping it (nothing); having a Black Lives Matter activist AND a Confederate flag-waver AND an African-American police officer in the cast during such a fraught time (nothing, nothing, nothing), Romeo getting shot by a police officer (nothing), having Quinn sign an over-all development deal with the network, meaning she should be developing several new projects to get off the ground (nothing), then having her date the head of her network, who could provide the fast track for those new shows (less than nothing; rather than finding a way to make the remains of the relationship work for her she tells him to get the hell out of her life). The penultimate episode takes a left turn into Bridesmaids gross-out territory. I'm choosing to interpret Yael's white dress as a metaphor for the narrative clean slate season 2 represented before SGS came and...sashimi'd all over it.

Maybe, just maybe, if the show is capable of paying off one single thing they planted (amid all the dropped plot points and details that seemed important but have proven meaningless) they will actually do something with the concept of Yael as a Rachel look-alike (which I never really saw, but whatever) Maybe Jeremy will threaten real Rachel and Hot Rachel, knowing where his gun is, will come to her aid, or vice versa, a literalization of Rachel "saving herself." But then again I haven't correctly predicted anything yet!

They'll overcomplicate it somehow but the photos (pared-down set of players, Rachel back doing her job, her and Quinn together) make it look like season 1!

Totally! Last season, there were at least two scenes with the contestants reacting to Mary's suicide, one when they were sequestered in the room and they had the unsettling realization cameras weren't filming the aftermath, and again in the counseling session where Faith requested that they pray. This season they could barely manage one coherent scene with the contestants processing their feelings, and ruined it with Jameson's lame reference to police getting a bad rap. They might as well have just had her say, "As you know I'm a cop so I feel a certain way about this," end of scene.

I call major BS on her assertion we meet a 'very different Everlasting' after the 'time jump.' Seemed like the same damn Everlasting to me. It's actually insulting how much BS that is.

Sadly, I agree - the reassurances may be empty, but I think Lifetime will try it, or at the very least that writers from Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, and The Hollywood Reporter are as we speak angling/negotiating for a Lifetime exec to go on record admitting the failure of season 2 and what fix they propose for s3. Part of me agrees with the premise of the Time piece, that the show is no longer good because it's not a premise built for repeated variations - just like The Bachelor itself, a show that finds drama in the making of a show like The Bachelor is doomed to be repetitive and formulaic, or to avoid that will go to the opposite extreme of straying so far from its formula it's not the same show anymore. I can respect SGS for saying, 'ok, lifetime decrees that Rachel never falter in her commitment to Everlasting-what could legitimately keep a woman as smart as Rachel committed to working on such drivel?' Her answer was to have Rachel try and subvert the Everlasting premise as a way to confront race, not a bad workaround idea, but then SGS let that formula-tinkering get sabotaged in the writers' room. The lesson Lifetime will take is that we want original-recipe UnReal, with possibly the only tweak being a female suitor...which will inspire SGS (by then slightly demoted) to force a transgender twist, and we're right back where we are now!

Interesting. The chatter has definitely reached critical mass. Will be interesting to see how Lifetime publicly addresses it after the season has finished airing; I'm sure they will. They'll want to reassure fans (and the show's on-screen talent) they won't be put through this again for season 3.

The Vulture podcast takes on TV sophomore slumps, using Mr Robot and UnReal as object lessons. (There's 3-5 min of preamble and blather before the UnReal focus.) No new ground plowed we haven't already plowed ourselves but always nice to hear validation. http://www.vulture.com/2016/07/season-two-slump-when-tv-shows-become-movies.html

Totally agree. This is the kind of third-act revelation you see in a stage play, like they think they're making August Osage County or something.

It usually means a military killing (accidental) where the strike comes from within your own squadron, which is why we'd speculate a strike comes from within the 'everlasting' family, whether literal (Jeremy coming back and shooting, though I agree I don't think we'll see another gun at this point) or figurative, like Rachel and Coleman's plan to 'burn it to the ground.' I guess this week the 'fugitives' were Rachel and Darius? The episode titles are not terribly imaginative.

We really need to develop a drinking game around all the times a character delivers a line downloading us on an important event that happened off-screen. Call it getting UnSober. I've been looking for an excuse to invest in some barware like Quinn's.

But that's the problem, all this show does is "explain." Characters trade information to nudge the plot along, then Quinn makes a quip. "UnReal" (as a title) wants to be a clever synonym for "really most sincerely real," and the writers, I think, do just as messy a job presenting text that they think is subtext.

I can't really think of anything at this point the finale could do to make us care much going into S3. Jeremy comes back and shoots the place up? So? They won't kill anyone we care about; people get shot on this show and we're left to assume they're ok, like Romeo. Yael's expose is out and they come and arrest Quinn and Rachel for negligent homicide? So? They'll just do a time jump before next season and explain how the network lawyered up and bought their way out of it; maybe we'd get a quick montage of scenes of Quinn in a minimum security prison, played for comedy, ordering around prisoners who've become her minions like inmate versions of Madison. The network swoops in and installs new management? Already been done. Any theories that aren't a version of one of the above?

(heavy sigh). There was maybe 20 minutes of good episode in there. There's just way too much expositional dialogue this season, which unfortunately is doing Constance Zimmer no favors. (I love her but I don't think she'll repeat as an Emmy nominee.) She seems to have lost a little bit of her hold on Quinn, which shows how badly the material is failing her. Rachel had a lot of expositional dialogue this episode, too, but hers at least pushes some emotional buttons so Shiri Appleby had something to access. I also think flat, affectless delivery might be a specialty of Appleby's and they're playing to it. I think they're exploring the idea that Coleman and Rachel are two sides of the same coin (hence the shot of them back to back on the floor at the end). Like Rachel did with featuring the first black suitor, he has convinced himself that the greater good of exposing Everlasting is worth whatever treacheries he has to commit to tell the story; he has probably convinced himself that in her right mind Rachel would agree with his tactics. Again, it's partly weak line-by-line material, but I don't think Michael Rady is a very strong actor. But even Craig Bierko seems to be struggling with connecting to the material so these are just inherently bad scripts, I think. Stray thoughts: I sort of liked Jay this episode. It's beyond ridiculous we haven't seen Romeo again since his eyes went glassy last episode. I don't buy the John Booth character as resembling a real human even a little bit. Do we ever need to see Rachel's mother again now that we know the family secret? It seems like the only plot use for that info now is Coleman using it as context for the expose, damage begetting damage. Another thing I'm tired of is the faux early-morning sunlight streaming into all the show's interior spaces-it gives the show a vaguely sci-fi feel. It makes me think of Orphan Black for some reason - maybe it's a Canadian production thing.