Confessional

Sarah Gertrude Shapiro’s show takes aim at sexism and competition among women.Illustration by Malika Favre

For 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. “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. 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. “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. “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.”

A decade later, “Unreal,” a diabolically entertaining drama based on Shapiro’s experiences in reality TV, became a surprise hit on Lifetime. Shapiro, who is thirty-eight, constructed a scenario that teasingly mirrored “The Bachelor,” which airs on ABC. “Unreal” chronicles the making of a show-within-a-show, “Everlasting,” in which twenty women compete for a handsome man’s hand in marriage. An oleaginous master of ceremonies narrates the process. 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. In the twentieth and most recent season of “The Bachelor,” the contestants included Amber, Becca, and four Laurens. In the second season of “Unreal,” which began airing on June 6th, the “Everlasting” candidates included Brandi, Haley, and Dominique.

“Unreal” focusses on the producers who pull the contestants’ strings, and Shapiro’s pleasure in the abhorrent gives the series its darkly comic tone. The stars of “Unreal” are a caustic “Everlasting” producer named Quinn and her ambivalent deputy, Rachel, whose character clearly owes a lot to Shapiro. The relationship between Quinn, played by Constance Zimmer, and Rachel, played by Shiri Appleby, brings to mind that of Fagin and Oliver Twist. Rachel keeps trying to escape “Everlasting,” and Quinn thwarts her every time. She threatens Rachel with lawsuits, she lavishes her with praise, she threatens to expose a tryst. The first season ends, inevitably, with Quinn and Rachel alone together. “I love you, you know that?” Rachel says to her tormentor and best friend. “I love you, too, weirdo,” Quinn says. 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 “Unreal” offers a singular meditation on stardom, media mendacity, sexism, and competition among women. One of the nicest surprises about “Unreal” is the sneaky way the contestants emerge as sympathetic—behind the scenes of “Everlasting” one sees the humanity that the producers suppress onscreen.

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. 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. Though “Unreal” was subversive, it provided the pleasures of the genre it satirized: the fictional bachelor on “Everlasting” was as chiselled as the real ones on “The Bachelor.” This pleased the executives at Lifetime, which is best known for women-in-peril movies. In 2013, Shapiro, an unknown who lacked an agent, sold “Unreal” to the network after a friend walked her into the office of a studio executive there. Shapiro presented a twenty-minute short that she’d made, “Sequin Raze,” which centered on a reality-show producer. She recalls her pitch for “Unreal” as “A feminist working on ‘The Bachelor’ has a nervous breakdown.” Executives at Lifetime offered to buy the idea immediately. Afterward, Shapiro had second thoughts worthy of a victorious “Bachelor” contestant: “I was calling 411, asking, ‘Do you have the main number for HBO?’ ” She couldn’t reach any executives there—this is her story, anyway—and she proceeded with Lifetime. The first shot of the pilot episode—Rachel seen through the moonroof of a limousine, passed out on the car’s floor, wearing a “This Is What a Feminist Looks Like” T-shirt—caused a conflict with the network. It evoked an art film, not a sudsy entertainment. “I had to fight for it all the way through,” Shapiro remembers. “I told a lot of people to fuck off.” Lifetime wasn’t sure of the match, either: its head of research found the show-within-a-show conceit too dizzying.

Since then, the partners have grown more comfortable with each other. “Unreal” has won a Critics’ Choice Award and a Peabody Award, and Lifetime is thrilled to have an acclaimed show that attracts a hipper audience. Shapiro wants to build on her success by aiming the series more directly at the kind of viewer who admires such challenging shows as “Girls” and “Transparent.” The studio has a more conventional ambition: Season 1 averaged 3.7 million viewers an episode—paltry numbers. Lifetime is determined to transform “Unreal” into a ratings hit. “We’re seeing Season 1 as almost the pilot,” Nancy Dubuc, the C.E.O. of A+E Networks, which owns Lifetime, told me. Shapiro believes that she can accomplish both goals, and has transferred this desire to her alter ego. In the writers’ room, she described Rachel’s motivation in Season 2: “It’s really about ‘I’m savvy enough and smart enough that I know I have to give the network all the frosting and the froufrou and all the titties that they need, and in the process I’m going to slip them this super-important thing.’ ”

On whiteboards, Shapiro and her writers had sketched out a pointedly different trajectory for Season 2. This year’s bachelor was African-American—a dig at the fact that “The Bachelor” has never had one—and one of the contestants is a Black Lives Matter activist. Another is a Southerner who wears a bikini with a Confederate-flag pattern. The story line culminates in a tragic turn. Shapiro was proud to have found a way to insert the national debate about race into her seemingly lightweight show.

Lifetime executives had not objected to the race theme, but they pressed for more of what had worked last time: romantic complications for Rachel. To supervise the writers, they had brought in a showrunner named Carol Barbee. Shapiro has the reality-TV-show habit of thinking of people in epithets, and to her a showrunner is a Wubby—slang for a child’s security blanket. A Wubby is there, in part, to insure that scripts are written on time and that scenes won’t be too costly to shoot. Shapiro calls herself the Magical Unicorn—“the voice of the show, throwing up rainbows all over the board.”

Like everything to do with “Unreal,” the studio’s notes had a meta component. Citing comments from Lifetime, an executive producer named Stacy Rukeyser told the writers, “I’d caution you against any pitch where Rachel doesn’t give a fuck about ‘Everlasting.’ ” It was essential to preserve the idea that Rachel is “super-invested, would do anything for the show.”

The studio also asked the writers to expand the role of Jeremy. Played by a former Army Ranger named Josh Kelly, Jeremy was a staple of Season 1: a cameraman with handsome-handyman features who was quick to doff his shirt and rescue Rachel from perils. He fit the aesthetic of Lifetime movies but was not Shapiro’s type. She does a good imitation of his irritating growl: “Hey, Rach!” She was proud of the fact that Season 1 had easily passed the Bechdel test. (The cartoonist Alison Bechdel has observed that few Hollywood productions depict women having conversations about anything other than relationships and men.) Jeremy, she told me, was “conceived as a one-season character.” Later, she e-mailed me: “I could not get on board with the idea of Jeremy being Rachel’s ‘Mr. Big’ (which was brought up).” Still, the studio had pushed for Josh Kelly to return. “They can ask you to do it, but they can’t make you,” she told me. Like Rachel, Shapiro frequently has to decide whether she is a bomb-thrower or an inside player with misgivings. In this case, she decided to play nice.

Barbee had joined Shapiro in the writers’ room. She was fresh from a phone call with the network. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s put on our big-boy pants and make a story for Jeremy.”

Shapiro stood up with a black marker. She has a slouch and brown hair pulled back in a mussed bun; she was wearing a woven leather belt with black shorts, black tights, and Acne black boots. “O.K.,” she said. “Let’s make a story for Jeremy.”

Shapiro was born in 1978 in Santa Barbara. She comes from what she calls an “intellectual hippie family.” Her father was an economics professor, her mother teaches special-needs children. “I had an imaginary horse that lived in the forest,” she recalls. “I pretended I was Russian royalty and couldn’t believe I had been sent to live with these peasants.” Her older sister was interested in ethnobotany—she is now an environmental economist at Duke—and Sarah used to eat plants she knew were harmless in front of other kids, to frighten them. “That was my trick,” she said, adding, “I feel like I never understood being a kid.”

Her parents divorced when she was thirteen, and during her first two years in high school her grades plummeted, she says, to “a 1.2 average.” Her boyfriend, a “hot seventeen-year-old” lifeguard who had predicted that they would marry, dumped her. She had relationships with both men and women, some of them “bad experiences.” She gained weight, “not wanting to be looked at by men.” Assuming that she would not be admitted to a four-year college, she enrolled at Santa Barbara City College. Shapiro, who has a stable instability, graduated as the valedictorian. She then enrolled at Sarah Lawrence. Her hope was to study with the poet Mary Oliver, but she was not accepted into Oliver’s seminar. “I don’t think I cried in her office,” Shapiro recalls. “But I definitely cried after.” She never quite fit in at Sarah Lawrence. She took cinema-studies classes and discovered that the focus “was on Stan Brakhage and Maya Deren.” Her senior project was a film about “a gay man and a fag hag” who get kidnapped by a terrorist during a shopping trip. “The professor hated it,” she says. “It was too narrative.”

“He’s still quite handsome, despite what happened.”

In 1999, her senior year, she became an intern at Killer Films, a production company that has made many films with gay themes, including “Far from Heaven.” She was asked to stay on, but she couldn’t afford to work there. “It was my introduction to the idea of indie film as trust-fund sport,” she says. It also forced her to confront a conflict: was she an innovator or a conformist? Ava Berkofsky, the cinematographer for “Sequin Raze,” and later Shapiro’s girlfriend, said of her, “She’s a very genuine mystery.” In 2000, Shapiro became an assistant to David LaChapelle, the fashion photographer. LaChapelle was, she says, mean and “hated feminists.” When she shared her thoughts on Julian Schnabel’s “Before Night Falls,” LaChapelle said, “How dare you have an opinion!” (LaChapelle denies this.) He soon fired her. She wrote her own letter of recommendation: “I told him that I wasn’t going to let him fuck up my résumé.”

After 9/11, Shapiro moved to L.A., planning to devote herself to an arty rock band with her college friend Brendan Fowler, a visual artist, but she abandoned the idea. She describes this period in the language of a Hollywood pitch: “Aching loneliness, operatic jubilant mania, and the infinite, grasping need for connection.” In 2002, she got a job on “High School Reunion,” a reality show created by Mike Fleiss. Alumni gather twenty years after graduation and explore how their relationships and power dynamics have changed. Shapiro calls the show “pretty innocuous”: “The people had existing relationships. The Nerd was going to talk to the Prom Queen that he’d always been too afraid to talk to.” Shapiro was a hit on the set, encouraging the shy and seeding the kinds of social realignments the producers wanted. She says, “I’ve always been one of those people who people tell things to, a weird superpower.” Shapiro enjoyed the job—the show was shot in Hawaii, and she had real responsibility while still in her early twenties. In 2003, she was invited to work on another Fleiss creation: “The Bachelor.” It had a larger budget and audience. “It was supposed to be a big promotion,” Shapiro says.

But Shapiro, who had organized a women’s-rights club in high school, felt uncomfortable with the “Bachelor” concept. “I told them I was a dyed-in-the-wool feminist,” she recalls. “They said, ‘Check your contract.’ ” She says that she went to a lawyer, who confirmed that it would be almost impossible to get her out of the contract, which was perpetually renewable. Shapiro, then twenty-three, put on her big-boy pants and reported for work.

“The Bachelor,” which had its première in 2002, perfected a form that had been inchoate. Fleiss had made his mark in 1998, with “Shocking Behavior Caught on Tape”; its most infamous episode had a bartender stirring an unwitting patron’s Martini with his penis. Fleiss had also produced “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?,” which was cancelled after it was revealed that the millionaire had been served with a restraining order by his ex-fiancée. “The Bachelor” combined elements of the game show and the dating show with the humiliations and revelations of reality TV. It capitalized on the loosening of sexual mores and on the increasing anxiety that American women felt about their chances of marrying. Twenty-five women competed for one eligible man, and though the goal was a wedding, the approach was tawdry—an open bar insured that contestants were rarely sober, and the bachelor and his chosen mate spent the night in a suite outfitted with night-vision cameras. Despite such elements, “The Bachelor” trafficked in the iconography of old-fashioned romance: the contest took place in a mansion, and there were roses and evening gowns for the women. Lisa Levenson, the executive producer, who had worked on “General Hospital,” told Vanity Fair that the goal “was to raise the fantasy level.” Her producers recall Levenson’s using a term borrowed from “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”: “zhuzh it up.” Shapiro says that it means “to pretty something up—to fluff someone’s sequin pillows.”

Not only did “The Bachelor” have a brilliant concept; it cost only a quarter of what it typically does to make a scripted show. “Fleiss was a populist idiot savant,” Shapiro says. “He was dumb enough to say the stupidest idea and then smart enough to pull it off.” But she missed her bohemian origins and tried to unify her two worlds. A college friend, Porochista Khakpour, was studying for an M.F.A. when Shapiro called and urged her to become a contestant, saying, “You’ll be the Persian Barbie.” Khakpour, who is now a novelist, recalls, “She was dead serious. According to her, I would make the show cooler.” She declined.

Shapiro could see how shrewd “The Bachelor” was, but she hated that it objectified women and vaunted heterosexual romance. She especially disliked working in an environment that fetishized beauty. To rebel, she wore a “George Bush, Out of My Uterus” T-shirt, and jeans that exposed her butt crack. She says, “Since then, I’ve always been body positive, refusing to talk about myself as a sexual object that way—and am so adamant about it that I just don’t even think I have a body.”

The show lived off the intensity of the contestants’ feelings, and to help the women focus on how much they wanted to be with the Bachelor the producers took away their phones and other links to the outside world. Levenson called it “the ‘Bachelor’ bubble.” Shapiro had to help maintain the bubble. The ambitions and the frustrations of the contestants flowed freely, fuelled by the alcohol, and Shapiro found a dysfunctional home. She was oddly energized by the sordidness of her task. Hayley Goggin Avila, another producer, says, “It became a sport for her. She wanted those merit badges.” Shapiro was a feminist sadist, punishing her unenlightened sisters.

The junior producers were trapped in their own bubble, working non-stop, their private lives erased. Senior staff played favorites; Goggin Avila recalls Levenson’s handing hundred-dollar bills to whichever producer got her girl to cry first. Levenson had a collection of Prada bags and gave them to producers whose work pleased her. “She was better at manipulating us than we were at manipulating the contestants,” Shapiro says. The competition among producers was Hobbesian: “If your girls got cut, you got cut.” (Levenson declined to comment.)

After two years, Shapiro was promoted to field producer. “A friend said, ‘Your parents must be proud of you,’ ” she recalls. “I said, ‘My sister is at Yale and my brother is at Harvard, and my parents think I work in pornography.’ ” This was an exaggeration—her parents mostly worried that the stress was overwhelming her. But even in her family’s educated circles the program was a phenomenon. Shapiro says, “I’d be at these gatherings at my parents’ house, and these intellectuals only wanted to talk to me about ‘The Bachelor.’ Instead of eating plants, I talked about ‘The Bachelor.’ It was my new trick.”

Shapiro was startled to learn who was tuning in to a demeaning caricature of courtship. The show’s viewers are overwhelmingly female, and many have annual incomes exceeding a hundred thousand dollars. Why did so many smart, wealthy women enjoy a show in which, in the words of the media critic Jennifer Pozner, “prospective princesses sit on their aimless, tiny behinds, fend off fellow ladies in waiting, and hope to be whisked off by a network-approved knight in shining Armani”?

There were things Shapiro liked about her job. She could fly anywhere in the world, for scouting purposes. (Contestants sometimes made whirlwind trips to Paris or Miami.) And she loved certain moments that she created onscreen. For a spinoff, “The Bachelorette,” she had a couple riding on white Andalusian stallions arrive, at sunset, at a walk-in sand castle. “I got it built for free,” Shapiro says. “I was famous for that.”

Ultimately, Shapiro concluded that the contestants were not the only ones with Stockholm syndrome. “We were all sort of crumbling from the inside out,” she says. “I was too tired and grossed out and depressed for a relationship.” She drank heavily and behaved erratically. On a road trip with Fowler, her artist friend, she hopped out of the car at Pomona College and kissed a female undergraduate on the lips. The woman ran to a “rape box”—a campus alarm system—and pulled the lever. When a security officer arrived, Shapiro kissed him, too. Shortly afterward, Shapiro told her bosses that she had to quit, adding that she planned to leave California. She recalls, “They said, ‘Who poached you?’ And I said, ‘No one poached me, but I’ll kill myself if I stay.’ ” She was released from her contract and fled to Portland, Oregon, planning to farm kale, sing folk songs, and re-start her life.

Two weeks after arriving in Portland, in March, 2005, Shapiro concluded that she had grotesquely miscast herself. “It was just a fantasy to get me out of L.A.,” she says. “Being a folksinger is like talking to people who already agree with you.” She did, though, record an album of her own songs. (Sample lyric: “Animals don’t think about health insurance and cars / And when animals get lonely they don’t go into bars.”)

She took a job at the advertising firm Wieden+Kennedy and worked for such clients as Nike and Old Spice. It didn’t surprise her to be back in a high-pressure job in the media world. “I’ve had outs at every turn,” she said. “I can’t stop. I get bored.” She did well at the firm and liked Portland—she finally had the money and the leisure time to own a horse—but she found advertising sexist. She kept pitching herself as a director and getting turned down. “It would always be a twenty-four-year-old guy in a graphic T,” she says. “ ‘Jim has ideas.’ Well, I had ideas, and also I’d directed.” She notes, “Ad guys are the douchiest.”

Shapiro worked at the firm for seven years and helped recruit Goggin Avila, her old “Bachelor” colleague. At lunch, they turned over their time on the show, focussing on the tricks they’d devised to get contestants to bare their souls. “It was like she was dealing with P.T.S.D.,” Goggin Avila says. Shapiro realized that she desperately wanted to revisit the experience on film: “I felt that there were stories inside me and I would be killed if they didn’t get out.”

She was especially haunted by the memory of a lawyer who was rejected by Jesse Palmer, the Bachelor of Season 5. Shapiro was told to extract tears in an interview. “She wouldn’t give me anything,” Shapiro remembers. Her bosses were irritated, and the crew was going into overtime, but Shapiro says she “just couldn’t get her to crack.” At 4 a.m., Shapiro got nasty: “I asked her, ‘Do you think he dumped you because you are fat?’ I knew she had food issues.” The woman began crying and hyperventilating. “I made the cameras follow her to a minivan that was waiting to take her to the airport.” The next day, the contestant called Shapiro and accused her of ruining her life. Shapiro says, “I realized what I had just done, and looked at myself—I was wearing stretched-out size-16 Gap jeans, a puffy down jacket with streaks of nacho cheese and marshmallow goo, my hair was greasy, my skin was broken out, my walkie was hanging off my belt—and I just thought, Oh, my God, I’m a monster.”

In 2010, Shapiro, then thirty-one, showed Sally DeSipio, a Wieden+Kennedy executive, a script that she had just written: “Sequin Raze.” DeSipio admired it, and another female colleague got the firm to contribute financing and lend Shapiro its postproduction facilities. The firm also gave her a leave of absence so that she could attend the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshop for Women.

“They’re such a nice couple—we should really see them more often. I don’t mean that literally, of course.”

For “Sequin Raze,” Shapiro resurrected her middle name, putting symbolic distance between herself and the Sarah Shapiro who had worked on “The Bachelor.” The short closely tracks Shapiro’s most upsetting experience: a reality-show producer named Rebecca Goldberg (Ashley Williams) promises her colleagues that she can get an unusually composed contestant to cry, and succeeds by mentioning the contestant’s bulimia. Afterward, the other producers cheer as Goldberg scoops money off the control-room floor. As she walks off after this putative triumph, self-hatred distorts her face.

Within weeks, Shapiro had signed the contract to make “Unreal.” Lifetime executives saw her as a promising talent who had been underrated because she was a woman. And they loved the idea of a story about competition among women in their industry. The network paired Shapiro with the veteran showrunner Marti Noxon, who had worked on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Mad Men.” Noxon helped Shapiro give her short the arc of a television season. “Unreal,” Shapiro realized, had to be “one hundred per cent fiction,” even if “the truth of what it was like on ‘The Bachelor’ is baked in.” Noxon taught her to decode what network executives wanted, even when they couldn’t articulate it. “In the business, they call this ‘the note behind the note,’ ” a writer at “Unreal” told me.

The characters of Rachel and Quinn emerged from “Sequin Raze.” New plotlines accentuated grim humor: Chet, the oafish franchise owner, turns out to have stolen the idea of the show from Quinn; a tabloid scandal engulfs the Suitor, as the bachelor of “Everlasting” is called; a field producer switches out a contestant’s antidepressants. Shapiro was eager to learn from Noxon. She says, “The biggest surprise to me was the amount of story you have to come up with, and how quickly the monster eats it—A story, B story, C story.” Shapiro tended to write subtext; Noxon knew that TV had to be explicit. In the pilot, Rachel is returning to “Everlasting” after a breakdown. Shapiro wrote the scene with sideways glances, skulking, and muttered chatter. Noxon instantly gave Rachel a memorable barb: “Be afraid, O.K.? Crazy’s back!” Shapiro says of Noxon, “She knows how to focus a scene.”

But their relationship grew difficult. Noxon, who was preparing another new show, “Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce,” was often absent, and Shapiro felt that her supposed mentor favored the other project. “There were a couple of times that actors came up for ‘Unreal’ and then were suddenly auditioning for ‘Girlfriends,’ ” Shapiro says. Lifetime gave final call on scripts to Noxon, which frustrated Shapiro.

Noxon says, “There was about as much drama behind the scenes as ended up on the screen.” She says of her dynamic with Shapiro, “It really came down to voice—ways in which I edited and rewrote things that she would have left untouched.” Later, when the show was being promoted, Shapiro was surprised to see Noxon, who shares a co-creator credit with her, reappear for the press tour. Noxon says, “I don’t think I’ve had as contentious and fruitful a collaboration since I worked with Matt Weiner on ‘Mad Men.’ ”

By most accounts, the pilot turned out poorly. Conventional and overlit, it lacked the intensity of Shapiro’s short. Shapiro felt that the director hadn’t trusted her vision. “He was trying to do me a favor,” she remembers. “He didn’t believe the studio wanted it made my way.” The studio could have backed out, but Nancy Dubuc, A+E’s C.E.O., agreed to a reshoot with a new director. The tone Shapiro wanted would slyly force women to confront their worst tendencies. One of her original pitch notes read, “When women set out to hurt each other, they usually wind up hurting themselves.” Liz Gateley, the executive now in charge of “Unreal,” says that she’s read too many scripts with “overly perfect female characters,” adding, “You know, women are complicated. We’re emotional. We’re flawed. We’re ambitious.” The show fit the delicate needs of a network that both pandered to female viewers and took them seriously. You can watch “Unreal” for the same destructive women-on-women behavior you see on “The Bachelor” or as a witty commentary on it. “Unreal” is a favorite of reality-show producers. Michael Carroll, a onetime “Bachelor” producer, remembers discussing it with former colleagues and seeing “elements of ourselves in the characters.” (Chris Harrison, the host of “The Bachelor,” whose “Everlasting” avatar is preeningly vapid, didn’t like what he saw. He told Variety, “Nobody is watching that show. Why? It is terrible.”)

“Unreal” may be most unsparing in its depiction of the unstable modern workplace. The employees at “Everlasting” fantasize about quitting their awful jobs, but can’t let go of the money and the power. In Season 1, the pressures on the producers lead to a contestant’s suicide; in Season 2, even worse will occur. All alliances are provisional; the more talk there is of work as a family, the more the characters have to watch their backs. Gateley notes, “The set of a reality show is clearly relatable to what everyone else deals with in corporate America. The person who’s your friend today is willing to jump over you to get a promotion the next.” Working on “Everlasting” is the only life most of the characters have; it is where they form the tight bonds that, in earlier times, they would have formed in their personal lives. Whenever Rachel threatens to quit, Quinn asks the same question as the viewer: “Where to?”

Like her characters, Shapiro does not excel at domestic relations. “I’m a runner,” she says. Lately, she has been seeing a man—a musician. She says that she prefers the “lack of drama” that comes with dating men. She and her boyfriend live near each other in L.A., and he rarely sleeps over. “He knows I have to write in the morning,” she says.

Marti Noxon returned for the beginning of Season 2, but soon left to focus on “Girlfriends’ Guide.” She recalls “Unreal” as a “hard environment to work in.” Shapiro, reluctant to revisit the conflict, told me, “As a woman, being labelled difficult can end your career.” One of Noxon’s Season 2 pitches did get in: Rachel will go behind Quinn’s back to the network and try to take over “Everlasting.”

One week in April, Shapiro was in Vancouver, where “Unreal” is filmed, to do prep work for the seventh episode, which she was directing. She hadn’t directed on a large scale since “Sequin Raze,” and she was very excited. The intricate logistics of the shoot didn’t faze her: she’d learned to get things done in advertising and on “The Bachelor.” Levenson was on her mind, she said: “I found myself saying, ‘Stop talking! Just figure it out!’ to someone, and that’s straight from her.”

When the episode was finished, she told me that she had engaged in a subtle act of gender revenge: she’d filmed the male actors in their underwear so insistently that they’d begun to ask her if they looked fat. “Quinn and Rachel just keep their clothes on,” she added. “I’m loving it!”

On the set of “Unreal,” the line between genuine and fake is blurred. It’s never clear if you’re walking past a production assistant or an actor playing a production assistant, and the mansion’s décor—sheepskin rugs, French hood chairs—must give Shapiro flashbacks. I entered a control room with a wall of monitors and desks covered with baubles and Post-its. “I told them to make it messy and to show people eating,” Shapiro said. An “Everlasting” whiteboard looked like the one in the writers’ room in Hollywood: “More tits n ass”; “Tender moment before the kill”; “Encourage slut shaming.”

Shiri Appleby, the accomplished actor who plays Rachel, was on the set that day, directing Episode 6. (With Lifetime’s support, Shapiro has used more female directors in Season 2. Nearly half the episodes were directed by women, and three students from the Directing Workshop for Women received training.) Appleby—who looks like a shorter, smaller Shapiro—told me that she had watched Shapiro issuing commands in order to capture that in her own performance. She showed me a tattoo on her wrist: “Money. Dick. Power.” This was another of Shapiro’s themes of the season—women acting like men. At a party, Rachel, newly in charge and high on cocaine and champagne, caps the evening with rough sex. “It’s like a guy celebrating a kill,” Shapiro says.

While Shapiro was in Vancouver, scripts were being revised. Shapiro had preserved the feminist emphasis and the racial conflicts. “It just felt like the most worthwhile thing to do with the platform I have,” she told me. The Wubbies, meanwhile, had insured that she and her writers would keep chronicling love and deceit on “Everlasting.” Rachel had a new lover, Coleman, who was more Shapiro’s type: a Brown graduate and a serious documentarian, an outlet for Rachel’s ambition to be taken seriously. “From the moment she kisses Coleman, she’s working on her clip reel,” Shapiro said. Quinn, of course, will stop at nothing to prevent Rachel’s departure. So there was the super-important thing and there was the froufrou.

Jeremy, the cameraman played by Josh Kelly, had not been forgotten. Originally, Shapiro had dispensed with him by Episode 5, but his story line was extended. Rachel, having had enough of what Quinn calls her “coupon-cutting boyfriend,” casts Jeremy off, and he becomes dangerously angry. To everyone’s surprise, Kelly had helped his own cause by coming back from the winter hiatus forty pounds heavier and with facial hair. “We let him stay chubby, with his beard all fucked up,” Shapiro said. “He looked gnarly—less like a soap-opera actor.” The writers had written a scene for him in which he physically attacks Rachel, accusing her of trying to get him fired. According to Shapiro, Kelly had vigorously objected, feeling that the show was casting him off. “I just wanted to make sure that the writers were writing truthfully,” he says. Shapiro convinced him that the signature of “Unreal” was complexity and that Jeremy was joining the ranks of the show’s antiheroes.

We watched dailies of the moment on Shapiro’s computer—some takes showed promise, some less. Shapiro said of Kelly, “All I can say is we employ a veteran, and he’s a good person.” Over all, she was pleased with how Season 2 had come together. “Integrating Jeremy was a small price to pay for having a black bachelor and letting Quinn and Rachel go all the way to darkness,” she said. Lifetime had turned out to be a suitable companion after all. “I have friends who sold their projects to HBO,” Shapiro said. “And those projects are still in development.” ♦