Secrets and lies bind 'The Americans' and 'Unreal'
As the FX spy drama wraps up its fourth season this week, another great show returns on Lifetime.
Sometimes television surprises us most when it's showing us things we should have known all along.
One of my favorite shows, Lifetime's UnReal, a fictional look at a Bachelor-like series, returns for a second season this week just as another, FX's 1980s-set Russian spy drama The Americans, ends its fourth. One thing these two very different series have in common - beyond audiences smaller than they deserve - is that neither leaves me feeling as though I'd been played.
I have been, of course.
Spies like us
It's been hard to watch The Americans this season without waiting for certain shoes to drop. As some characters flirted with what only seemed like inevitable endings, others had their lives cut short just as I'd almost forgotten to worry about them.
But bracing for the next shock too often means missing the show that's actually there, the one in which spies Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) are part of a vast, largely hidden network that could be seen as including their FBI agent neighbor, Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), as much as it does their Russian compatriots.
For these people, several layers removed from their political bosses, the Cold War is plenty warm. And as we see characters such as Stan and Oleg Burov (Costa Ronin) come together in an attempt to avert a disaster, it's harder to think of them as being entirely on different sides, even when the line between whistleblowing and spying is barely discernible.
Our once-anonymous enemies have faces and personal histories, and though they also have a healthy fear of the country they're spying on, America's gotten under their skin.
If it's sometimes a struggle to remember that The Americans, which was recently renewed for what will be its final two seasons, is - like The Sopranos - not all about the violence, it may be because so much of what we've come to think of as quality television relies on delivering shocking moments at only slightly unpredictable intervals.
'UnReal' time
Yet when I think of UnReal's first season (it's streaming on Hulu for those looking to catch up), it's not the suicide of one of the contestants I remember, but the close and coercive relationship between Quinn (Constance Zimmer), executive producer of the show's meet-a-mate competition, Everlasting, and her talented but unstable protege, Rachel (Shiri Appleby).
Their dynamic doesn't need a Hollywood setting to seem real. Anywhere there's money and power at stake, there are Quinns and Rachels. And there are also people like Quinn's boss (and former lover), Chet (Craig Bierko), who do 1 percent of the work and sop up 99 percent of the credit.
Not that the setting doesn't matter.
Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, who cocreated UnReal with Marti Noxon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce), is a former Bachelor producer - experience that probably helps in establishing Everlasting as a workplace, not just a parody of a popular TV show.
For the millions who still watch ABC's The Bachelor, it shouldn't be news that shows such as these are well-orchestrated exercises in manipulation, cast for conflict and edited to produce storylines that may be in the works long before the first woman steps out of her limo to a thousand mean tweets.
What UnReal, which has already been renewed for a third season, does that The Bachelor will never do is show the strings being pulled - even as it's reminding us the contestants aren't actually puppets.
In Monday's season premiere, Quinn's now officially in charge of Everlasting, and Rachel, despite an epic meltdown at the end of last season, is the new Quinn.
Which isn't necessarily good news, as Rachel realizes when Quinn, selling the network president on her big idea for revitalizing the show - the first black "Suitor" - promises a very specific mix of contestants, including a "hot racist," on a show that, as Rachel points out, has already been cast.
"I'm Chet, you're Quinn. I say crazy [stuff], and you make it happen," replies her boss.
That Rachel is more than up to the task may be the scariest part of UnReal, which shows her to be every bit as seductively deceitful as The Americans' Elizabeth Jennings, but without Elizabeth's conviction that she's doing bad things for a cause that actually matters.
And that's where The Americans and UnReal may hit a little too close to home. Or at least to work.
Because many people's livelihoods at least occasionally depend on following - or getting others to follow - orders they may not believe in, and often without the conviction that it's for any greater good.
If we're watching shows such as this to escape, we've definitely been played.
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