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blue squares posted:This show is very good, but calling it the Mad Men of Reality TV is an insult to Mad Men. Just because a show is about a workplace doesn't make it Mad Men. And this show jumped the shark a bit in episode 6, though it managed to mostly recover. I don't think it's just that they're workplace shows, but that they're both selling lies. UnREAL is a lot more cynical about both the characters involved and the product they're selling though, which says something given that they advertised for cigarettes on Mad Men. While that cynicism obviously makes for an interesting show, I think the lack of any real human warmth is probably a limiting factor on how great it can be--it's pretty one note. So yeah, Mad Men is definitely better for that and a number of other reasons, but there is at least a bit of similarity. April posted:I'm so loving addicted to this show. But I just keep coming back to: Is Rachel really bipolar or whatever her mother diagnosed her as? Or is the problem that every person around her is a really terrible manipulative sociopath with their own agenda? Rachel's mental illness is probably to be as crazy as the plot needs her to be more than it is any specific thing, even if they have a guideline they're working with in the writing room, but I do think we're unquestionably supposed to view her as being legitimately unwell and unstable on some level. The job obviously makes it worse, because it's unbelievably stressful and pushes her beyond her limits, but her refusal to leave that life that she knows for a fact is personally destructive for her is part of her dysfunction.
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Jun 17, 2016 01:05
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CeeJee posted:I hope Darius sues the network for 50 million and Rachel, Quinn, Chet and everyone down to the assistant changing the batteries in the walkie talkies end up ruined. That poo poo they pulled with the fake mother crossed some sort of line for me and I just want to see them all fall. I was surprised that their psychologist went along with that. Confining someone who might actually have a breakdown as a result was pretty extreme too. There was a surprising lack of hand-wringing at basically everything Quinn was up to this episode by anyone.
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Jun 21, 2016 15:49
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I'm really glad I stopped watching after the first two or three episodes this season. The first season was good, but it was already striking a precarious balance as it dealt with issues like suicide and outing someone in front of her family, so Chet showing up as a Lifetime caricature MRA villain was a pretty good clue that it wasn't going to hold together this time as they stumbled their way through dealing with race relations.
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Aug 9, 2016 14:36
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The most damning thing to me was reading an interview with the showrunner where she doesn't seem to realize her protagonists are villains. There have been a lot of anti-hero dramas about white male protagonists doing evil poo poo, but I think the good ones were mostly made with a pretty solid awareness that they're not about good people. "It was not necessarily our intention to make them “unlikeable.” We feel that Quinn and Rachel both have giant hearts, and they are in this business producing this show, which makes them frequently do terrible things. And Rachel in particular, that is her essential inner conflict, which has fascinated me since I first read Marti [Noxon]’s and Sarah’s pilot script. Certainly, we saw that there are moments that are pushing that further, but our intention was never, oh, now they’re really being unlikeable or something." This is a pretty brutal tweet by the interviewer in response: https://twitter.com/soniasaraiya/status/762892531952562176
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Aug 10, 2016 01:14
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Yannick_B posted:Every single move Coleman pulled near the end was really bad--hacking a phone...okay but then kissing Yael, it was like they slammed their fist on the bad guy button. It's funny because a lot of people said the first season was so good you wouldn't believe it aired on Lifetime, but some of the issues with the second season feel very much like a reminder that it's a Lifetime Original.
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Aug 12, 2016 04:59
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