

- BACHELOR CONTESTANT WHO SLEPT WITH CAMERAMAN DRIVER
- BACHELOR CONTESTANT WHO SLEPT WITH CAMERAMAN SERIES
Alex Metcalf, a supervising producer, explained to me that in a show’s second season “you have to raise the stakes.” The first season had wrapped its provocations around love triangles and other familiar soapy elements. One day in February, Shapiro sat with the show’s writers in an office on the Sunset Gower lot, in Hollywood, and began imagining the futures of Quinn and Rachel. One of the nicest surprises about “Un real” is the sneaky way the contestants emerge as sympathetic-behind the scenes of “Everlasting” one sees the humanity that the producers suppress onscreen. In Shapiro’s hands, Quinn-who has been denied her fair share of the show’s profits by venal male colleagues-and her protégée emerge as antiheroes, and beneath the giddy parody “Un real” offers a singular meditation on stardom, media mendacity, sexism, and competition among women. “I love you, you know that?” Rachel says to her tormentor and best friend. The first season ends, inevitably, with Quinn and Rachel alone together. She threatens Rachel with lawsuits, she lavishes her with praise, she threatens to expose a tryst. Rachel keeps trying to escape “Everlasting,” and Quinn thwarts her every time.

The relationship between Quinn, played by Constance Zimmer, and Rachel, played by Shiri Appleby, brings to mind that of Fagin and Oliver Twist. The stars of “Un real” are a caustic “Everlasting” producer named Quinn and her ambivalent deputy, Rachel, whose character clearly owes a lot to Shapiro.
BACHELOR CONTESTANT WHO SLEPT WITH CAMERAMAN SERIES
“Un real” focusses on the producers who pull the contestants’ strings, and Shapiro’s pleasure in the abhorrent gives the series its darkly comic tone. In the second season of “Un real,” which began airing on June 6th, the “Everlasting” candidates included Brandi, Haley, and Dominique. In the twentieth and most recent season of “The Bachelor,” the contestants included Amber, Becca, and four Laurens. In both “Everlasting” and “The Bachelor,” the hopefuls gather at a mansion whose brittle elegance feels claustrophobic in each show, unrealistically fit women offer “confessions” in one-on-one interviews that feel staged. An oleaginous master of ceremonies narrates the process. “Un real” chronicles the making of a show-within-a-show, “Everlasting,” in which twenty women compete for a handsome man’s hand in marriage. Shapiro, who is thirty-eight, constructed a scenario that teasingly mirrored “The Bachelor,” which airs on ABC. “They’d often tell us to drive up and down the 405 until the girls cried-and not to come home if we didn’t get tears, because we’d be fired.” In hindsight, Shapiro said, being fired “would have been a great solution to my problems.”Ī decade later, “Un real,” a diabolically entertaining drama based on Shapiro’s experiences in reality TV, became a surprise hit on Lifetime.
BACHELOR CONTESTANT WHO SLEPT WITH CAMERAMAN DRIVER
“I’d have arranged with the driver to have the song play just until I got a shot of her crying-then cut the music so I could start the interview,” Shapiro explained. After the contestant left the set, disconsolate, Shapiro joined her in a limousine while the stereo played a song that the contestant had been primed to see as “ ‘their song’ for their love story with the Bachelor.” Shapiro kept jalapeños or lemons hidden in her jacket pocket-dabbing something acidic in her eye allowed her to cry on cue, which helped elicit tears from the contestant. “The night they were going to get dumped, I would go to the hotel room where they were staying and say, ‘I’m going to lose my job for telling you this, but he’s going to pick you-he’s going to propose,’ ” Shapiro said. Illustration by Malika Favreįor three years, Sarah Gertrude Shapiro worked as a producer on the reality show “The Bachelor.” Her task, as she recalls it, was to get the contestants to “open up, and to give them terrible advice, and to deprive them of sleep.” She sees it now as “complicated manipulation through friendship.” To insure that intense emotions were captured on camera, she sometimes misled contestants who were about to be rejected. Sarah Gertrude Shapiro’s show takes aim at sexism and competition among women.
