‘UnREAL’ Hits Netflix: Ranking the 10 Most Shocking Moments From ‘The Bachelor’-Inspired Series
[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for UnREAL Seasons 1-4.]
Credit where credit is due: UnREAL spent four seasons living up to its name.
The shameless drama series followed the cast and crew of Everlasting, a send-up of dating shows like The Bachelor, as they schemed, gaslit, and outright killed the competition, all in the name of making good television.
UnREAL focused on troubled talent handler Rachel (Shiri Appleby) and ruthless executive producer Quinn (Emmy nominee Constance Zimmer) as they use everything from mental manipulation to pharmaceutical intervention to stoke drama and maybe something resembling love for the adoring audience watching at home. First on Lifetime and then on Hulu, the series proved time and again that if given the choice between the right choice and the crazy choice, it would always choose the latter—sometimes to its detriment but always for the entertainment of its audiences.
On August 19, all four seasons will make their debut on Netflix, meaning you can relive every backstab and blindside.
To prime you for your rewatch, here are 10 of the craziest moments from UnREAL, ranked.
10. Rachel To The Rescue (Season 3, Episode 5)
While this doesn’t have the same shock value as No. 2 on this list, it is notable that UnREAL not only revealed that Rachel was being drugged by her mother, but her father (Barclay Hope) was too! Olive had been drugging him with lithium to subdue his guilt over never turning in the man who raped his daughter. But in an attempt to break the aforementioned vicious cycle of her mother’s abuse, Rachel decides to take it upon herself to get her father clean. Rachel getting someone else help? Who would have thought we would see the day?
9. No Weddings and a Funeral (Season 1, Episode 2)
Many cruel things will be done to the contestants over the seasons, but one of the most vile is when Quinn and Rachel decide not to tell sweet Anna (Braddy) that her father has had a heart attack back home. She has finalist potential, and they don’t want the news to cause her to quit the show. But when she finds out, she flees the set on foot to find a phone at a local bar, where she learns her dad has died. By the time she gets back to the Everlasting house, where Quinn and Rachel have staged all the cast and crew to film her grief, she calls the diabolical duo every
name that Lifetime would allow without being fined by the FCC.
8. Cutting the Villain (Season 1, Episode 1)
“Starve our villain Britney til she’s mean like a pitbull.” Those are Quinn’s orders as soon as she recognizes the potential villainy of Britney (Arielle Kebbell), the unapologetically forward
contestant who kisses Adam (Stroma) the second she gets out of the limo. The villain is a
signature piece of the dating show puzzle, and Quinn wants to keep hers around to stir up
trouble. But to exert some kind of autonomy over his search for love, Adam (with a little nudge from Rachel) cuts Britney on the first night. Storming off set, she spirals into a heart-wrenching
confession about her insecurities to Rachel, who secretly films it to exploit her one last time.
7. Faith Comes Out (Season 1, Episode 5)
Faith (Breeda Wool) was too kind for the cutthroat world of Everlasting, and we knew it from the second she stepped out of the limo. Originally cast because she is a virgin who could give them
a few good soundbites, Faith’s naivety and charm convinced Adam to keep her around long
enough to visit her hometown. But thanks to meddling from Rachel, she ends up coming out as a lesbian, a reveal that only made us love her more. The only problem: it meant she left the show. But it was perhaps the first (and maybe only) truly joyous moment in UnREAL history.
6. Rachel Hooks Up With Adam (Season 1, Episode 8)
While it will become a foregone conclusion that the Everlasting crew will sleep with a revolving door of contestants over the seasons, the first time it happened was both inevitable and shocking. Pulled in about 12 different directions, Rachel succumbs to their consistent flirtation
and has sex with Adam, muddying the waters of their dubious suitor-producer relationship. They took a shower together in Episode 2, so it was bound to happen! To make it even more complicated, she had just rekindled things with her ex-boyfriend and camera operator Jeremy (Josh Kelly), giving the show its first real love triangle—you know, except for Adam and the 20 women vying to marry him.
5. Add Murderer To Your Resume (Season 2, Episode 10)
By the end of Season 2, many fans believed the series had lost control of its own narrative, and the finale did nothing to ease those concerns. Rachel is in a full-blown relationship with
Everlasting’s new showrunner, Coleman Wasserman (Michael Rady), who makes it clear that
he is working with one of the contestants, an undercover journalist named Yael (Monica
Barbaro), to expose the show’s cruel practices and Romeo’s shooting. But in order to save the show, and especially Rachel, Jeremy causes Coleman and Yael’s car to crash, killing them and their exposé.
4. Romeo Gets Shot (Season 2, Episode 7)
UnREAL wasn’t the best series to chime in on the Black Lives Matter movement, but that didn’t stop it from bringing police brutality into Season 2, which sees Everlasting welcome its first Black suitor (notable that it happened here before The Bachelor did it in real life). In a wildly misguided attempt to stir up racial-charged drama (which Quinn wanted all season), the season’s suitor Darius (B.J. Britt), his friend Romeo (Gentry White), and two contestants take a
Bentley for a joyride, and Rachel calls the police to pull them over in order to film their encounter.
But the inexperienced officer isn’t charmed by Darius and when Rachel bursts out of the bushes with a camera to reveal they are filming a TV show, he gets spooked and shoots Romeo.
3. Rachel's Full Villain Era (Season 4, Episode 5)
In an episode appropriately titled “No Limit,” the full extent of the monster Quinn has created in Rachel is on full display. All bets are off in the Everlasting All Stars season, and Rachel left shame at the door. When Roger (Tom Brittney) nearly rapes a female contestant, Rachel holds
off on helping so Maya (Natasha Wilson), the person he already assaulted in Season 1, can intervene and they can get footage. What she doesn’t expect is that Maya will castrate Roger on camera. It is a chaotic scene, even by UnREAL’s standards, but the biggest shock is in Quinn’s
eyes as she watches Rachel fake a frantic 911 call and then smile, showing no remorse for the everlasting depravity of her actions. See what we did there?
2. Rachel’s Mommie Dearest (Season 2, Episode 8)
From Season 1, so much of Rachel’s willingness to plumb new depths of self-destruction at every turn was ascribed to her toxic relationship with her psychiatrist mother, Olive (Mimi Kuzyk). But in Season 2, the series finally revealed where it all went wrong. When she was 12, Rachel was raped by one of her mom’s patients, which her own mother covered up by drugging and shaming Rachel for years to keep it quiet. The show’s handling of this particular reveal isn’t
one of its strongest moments, but it does inform the vicious cycle that its protagonist constantly finds herself trapped in because the sabotage was coming from inside her own family.
1. Mary's Death (Season 1, Episode 6)
Perhaps the worst thing the show ever did—and that’s saying something—is orchestrate, even accidentally, the death by suicide of single mother, Mary (Ashley Scott). Brought on the show as
punchline to be the “older MILF” that Adam would likely oust early on, the two managed to make a genuine connection. But when it seems that Mary’s storyline has run dry, two unfortunate things happen. First, Quinn invites her abusive ex-husband to set to cause a scene for the cameras, which triggers Mary’s PTSD. Her handler Shia (Aline Elasmar) also called her a “dull, dead-eyed loser” to Mary’s face, causing her to retreat to her bipolar medication, which Shia has
tampered with. Destabilized by everything, Mary leaps from the roof of the Everlasting home and dies, creating a point of no return for the morality of the already deficient show.
Shiri Appleby
Constance Zimmer
Craig Bierko
Josh Kelly
Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman
Caitlin FitzGerald
Kassandra Clementi
Jaime M. Callica
Bart Edwards
Alex Hernandez
Adam Demos
Alex Sparrow
Joe Abraham
Tyler Hynes
Marcus Rosner
Cameron Bancroft
Terry Chen
Melvin Gregg
François Arnaud
Genevieve Buechner
Brennan Elliott
Natalie Hall
Meagan Holder
Alejandro Muñoz
B.J. Britt
Freddie Stroma
Siobhan Williams
Nathalie Kelley
Johanna Braddy
Breeda Wool
Ashley Scott
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