True to life? Behind the scenes of 'UnReal', a show about a reality dating show

Jennifer Platt visited the set of ‘UnReal’, the dark comedy series that rips the face off reality TV

My Friday nights were never the same once I got hooked. I stayed in. On the couch, secretly watching The Bachelor or The Bachelorette. I was transfixed by this concept of a dating show. It was my TV shame.

A bachelor - white, square-jawed, broad-shouldered, and apparently not too badly off - gets to pick his could-be-wife from a houseful of bikini-clad women who pretend they are interested in him and not only in their 15 minutes of fame.

Vice versa for The Bachelorette (although she was not as square-jawed).

Then last year came the first season of UnReal - a breakout hit for the Lifetime channel. Ten episodes of pure heightened draaama on what happens behind the scenes of a dating show called Everlasting. It's fiction. A scripted TV show about just how far the producers would go to manufacture the storylines of the dating show. It's so meta, it's good.

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It becomes even more meta for me. I get the opportunity of visiting the set of a show (UnReal) that I have been talking about since the first episode that's about a show (Everlasting) that's based on another show (The Bachelor) that I've never admitted to anyone that I watched.

The showrunner of UnReal, Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, meets us on the set, which is in a warehouse in a fairly industrial part of Vancouver, Canada.

They're not shooting there that day (they are filming an episode on a farm just outside the city) but they have lit the set up for us to experience the night-time version of it.

This means there are fairy lights everywhere. In the fake trees and vines, on the balustrade of the Everlasting house, surrounding the Jacuzzi. We plonk ourselves in a gazebo that feels like it has been spat out of a Bollywood film - all purple and orange satin cushions and curtains, pink ottomans and gilded poles. We get comfy and start chatting.

Shapiro was a producer on The Bachelor. So she knows things. Bad things. She has done them. "I had to find a way to talk about the tone of UnReal so I decided to call it a drama/comedy: a dramady - a female Breaking Bad. The character of Rachel is very much informed by that time in my life. But the plot is totally fictional.

I'm a writer, trying to tell a story of how when women destroy other women they destroy themselves essentially. When I worked on The Bachelor, I realised we internalised misogyny. We would start to talk about the women as if they were cattle - 'Oh she's crazy, she's a nine, et cetera.'

"As a producer of a show like that you internalise the male gaze because you get used to looking at people that way. Then when you go home and look in the mirror, you think of yourself as a four - a troll. That's what I wanted to write. Just tell a story in the best possible way."

block_quotes_start The first black suitor to be on Everlasting - a dig at the fact that 'The Bachelor' has never had an African-American bachelor block_quotes_end

Now the second season is to begin. If you haven't watched the first, do yourself a favour and get it now. Season two promises to be even better because now they promise to go "a lot further than we have before", says Shapiro. They enter the race debate.

They feature the first black suitor to be on Everlasting - a dig at the fact that The Bachelor has never had an African-American bachelor. The new suitor is an American football player by the name of Darius Beck (played by BJ Britt).

"When my team came to me with the project, I watched all the episodes of season one back-to-back in about 48 hours. And when I found out I could be the suitor I was 'yes, please'. This show rips the covers off reality TV. It allows people to talk about issues in a different way," says Britt.

A few contestants are brought in specifically to create the friction and tension. There's a Southerner, Beth Ann, who wears a Confederate-flag bikini. Says Lindsay Musil, who plays Beth Ann: "I'm here to basically stir up a lot of controversy.

I'm from Alabama and I come from a very conservative family with very interesting beliefs and so it's very challenging for Beth Ann to come in and find that the suitor is black."

She clashes with another contestant, Ruby (Denée Benton) who is an activist for the BlackLivesMatter campaign. The producers of Everlasting manipulate this into happening.

They want a huge audience - 20million viewers. They want people to gasp when "he lays his black hands on a white ass. Twitter will melt down," says the producer Quinn King in the first episode of season two.

It's jarringly truthful. "We are excited that we are in territory that other shows don't find themselves in. We hope that we explore this debate in an honest way," says Shapiro.

Essentially the show is a love story but about a mentor and her student. Its focus is the relationship between the maleficent Quinn and her sidekick Rachel Goldberg (played respectively by Constance Zimmer and Shiri Appleby). They are the centre of the storm that they create. Quinn is now the executive producer of Everlasting and Rachel is the showrunner.

Zimmer says, "This season we are ready to go to the darkest places of them all. Which is fun and dangerous. Quinn uses everything she can to manipulate any situation. There's the power struggle of Rachel and Quinn. They are fighting a lot and it's hard because they are both right and both so wrong and it's all about how they can coalesce together."

• The second season starts at 8pm on Thursday on the Lifetime channel, DStv channel 131.