Is Lifetime's UnREAL Really a Tell-All From a Former Bachelor Employee?!

Lifetime series' creator Sarah Gertrude Shapiro worked on The Bachelor at the beginning of her career

By Tierney Bricker Jan 09, 2015 6:03 PMTags
Un-Real, Shiri ApplebyLifetime

Whoa, is Lifetime spoofing The Bachelor?!

The network's new scripted series stars Shiri Appleby as a morally-conflicted producer on a reality dating series, which finds a whole bunch of women, some crazy, competing for one hot suitor (played by Freddie Stroma). B--ch fights, sex and mayhem ensue. Sound familiar? It definitely does for the show's co-creator.

UnREAL comes from Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, who just so happened to work on The Bachelor in the beginning of her career. Curious, no? But at the 2015 Winter TCA Press Tour on Friday, Shapiro denied that her time working on the ABC hit series was the main inspiration for UnREAL.

"The funny thing is for me is that I'm a writer first and foremost and I've actually been writing much longer than I ever worked in reality," she said. "It was a day job that I had at 23 and when Marti [Noxon] and I sat down to really come up with the show, it was a great world to set it in. I knew how to put up the wallpaper, but it's totally fictional."

Shapiro's co-creator Marti Noxon, she of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame, added, "We took the world and stuff that anecdotally we heard from all kinds of sources and we made stuff up. I think Sarah's intrigue with it of course started because she was exposed to it, but this is completely not related to those things." 

ABC/Rick Rowell

And while UnREAL definitely features many of the reality dating competition series stereotypes (there's the contestant everyone hates, candles everywhere, etc.), Noxon and Shapiro said they weren't interested in creating a Bachelor "satire." 

"We were hyper-aware of the fact that spoofs have already been done. We put a fatwa on spoofing," Shapiro said. "The genre's already so meta at this point that it's self-referential on its own. That really wasn't our interest or aim."

As for how much the show within a show's set looks like The Bachelor's signature look, Noxon said the ABC hit wasn't the only influence, citing shows like Beauty and the Geek, Joe Millionaire and The Swan. "It's just the sort of generic, over-the-top roses and candles."

UnREAL will premiere on Lifetime in 2015.