Kaitlyn Bristowe's time as "The Bachelorette" may be over, but there's still an incredibly entertaining reality-show treat to sink your teeth into. Lifetime's breakout drama "UnREAL" is not a reality show, but its depiction of the behind-the-scenes chaos and manipulation at a "Bachelor"-like series called "Everlasting" is even more engrossing than the "real" thing.
Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, who co-created "UnREAL" alongside Marti Noxon, joined HuffPost Live's "Spoiler Alert" on Tuesday to dish about the show leading up to its first-season finale, which airs Aug. 3. Having Shaprio at the show's helm is interesting because she spent three years as an associate producer on "The Bachelor," and she told HuffPost Live that "thematically, there's definitely some stuff I was struggling with when I was there" that's made it into "UnREAL."
But the plot of her drama is "100 percent fiction," and it's thrilling. In an age when women are still struggling for equal representation in film and TV, "UnREAL" presents a world of powerful female characters who outnumber the men around them. And those women don't just sit around and look pretty; they explore their sexual identity, they masturbate without shame, they stop at nothing to get what they want. Shapiro said that's exactly what she and her writing team want to portray.
"We talk about 'Breaking Bad' a lot in the writers' room. That's definitely something we aspire to -- that kind of antihero, but for women," she said. "Tonally, we always calibrate back to, these people get to be like Don Draper, they get to be Walter White, they get to be Tony Soprano. And we threw out the word 'likability' really early on. We just don't care."
Watch the full interview with Sarah Gertrude Shapiro in the video above, and click here for the full "Spoiler Alert" conversation, including analysis of "The Bachelorette" finale and Caitlyn Jenner's docuseries "I Am Cait."
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