The Female Tony Sopranos We’ve Been Waiting For
Quinn King and Rachel Goldberg of Lifetime’s ‘UnREAL.’
“I mean, it could help [the contestant] get a little bit of closure, I guess,” says Quinn King, showrunner of the Bachelor-like show Everlasting, to her best producer, Rachel Goldberg.
Rachel seems hesitant, but accepts what they’re about to do, and says, “Yeah, because, you know, I read about this, this thing where this therapy… where confronting your abuser actually changes your life.”
Quinn nods, and now both of their eyes light up, as they’ve almost fooled themselves into thinking that they’re not horrible people, before saying, “Right, right. And all we want to do is help.”
It’s this sick nature of being that drives Lifetime’s UnREAL, which is now in its second season. Quinn King, of UnREAL, is Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada on crack, and Rachel Goldberg is her co-conspirator.
The show, while addictive like the Bachelor/Bachelorette franchise, is an informative and at times almost unbelievable look into the industry. Quinn and Rachel are the protagonists, but in no way the heroes (or antiheroes, for that matter), yet viewers still root for them. While this is still new territory for women in film, we’ve come close with the Olivia Popes (Scandal) and Carrie Mathisons (Homeland) of the TV world. Media has been slowly inching towards acceptance of these “good bad guy” roles for women over the past couple of years, but Quinn and Rachel don’t hold anything back (there’s no trying to maintain some false sense of justice for the audience’s sake like previous antiheroines) and have busted right into their rightful titles as the female Tony Sopranos of television.
Quinn King, of ‘UnREAL,’ is Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly from ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ on crack, and Rachel Goldberg is her co-conspirator.
In a 2013 Atlantic article, David Masciotra hailed Tony Soprano’s character for being a TV game changer when he said, “The show’s power rested on the reality that no single adjective could accurately describe him. Not tough, smart, evil, good, soft, hard, selfish, or paternal. He was many things at once: a sentimental bully who genuinely loved his children and used a ‘pay the bills and put food on the table’ philosophy to justify building a criminal empire with murder, theft, and extortion.”
Rachel justifies her return to the show despite committing grand theft auto and being arrested for a DUI during an Everlasting-guilt-induced-mental-breakdown as needing to pay for legal fees/car damages and to keep the network from suing her for stealing a vehicle, but it becomes obvious that she enjoys her work, which she hates herself for (something that one of her bitter ex flames points out).
There are an abundant number of parallels between James Gandolfini’s character and the two UnREAL leads, including an offbeat moral code. One of the Everlasting producers described it best when, in the wake of a recent show scandal, he said, “Quinn’s a surly, old bitch, to be sure, but she protects her own.”
In the penultimate scene of Season 1, Quinn and Rachel briefly duke it out on lawn chairs in England after essentially acknowledging that their lives are mutual train wrecks. It’s after this reluctant but not surprising confession that Rachel gets “that look” in her in eye, familiar to viewers and Quinn, prompting the older woman to demand to know what she’s thinking. Rachel acquiesces and says, “I love you. You know that, right?”
Quinn seems hesitant, as the two women spent the past two episodes shaming themselves for falling in love with men, and believing that it was true, everlasting. She answers Rachel, though, truthful for a rare moment in her line of work and murmurs, “I love you, too… weirdo.”
In an interview with Variety from 2015, one of the creators of UnREAL, Sarah Gertrude Shapiro said, “… Rachel and Quinn are the primary relationship in this show. They’re the love story, they’re everything. That scene of them in bed together is really one of the most important scenes. As Marti and I are talking about our journeys as women in this industry and as creative people in this industry, these relationships, like these creative relationships…”
Marti Noxon, the other show creator, finished Shapiro’s thoughts, “And we sleep together all the time.”
The two women started the show years after Sarah Gertrude Shapiro’s time working on The Bachelor, where she began behaving in a way that inspired the character of Rachel Goldberg—drinking heavily, neglecting relationships, etc.—and finally told her bosses that she needed to quit, stating, “I’ll kill myself if I stay.”
They let her out of her contract and she moved to Portland, Oregon, where she recorded an album of folk music, before soon returning to a high stress environment when she began working for Wieden and Kennedy, an advertising firm that had her working with Nike and Old Spice. “I can’t stop. I get bored,” she said, regarding her career change that eventually wound up bringing her back to the entertainment industry, but from a creator’s perspective, in a profile for The New Yorker. Shapiro took this drive and chose to let it define her profession, but in a different way than her time on The Bachelor.
“My mom thinks I’m seriously ill… mental,” Rachel admits to Quinn, after the young producer orchestrates a strategic and almost beautiful catfight between two contestants, which the pair are now slumped on an outdoor couch and watching as it turns physical. In a faux display of comfort Rachel had provoked a seemingly kind girl into starting the fight in the first place, stoking the flame of her already fragile state with lies and comments pandering to the girl’s body image issues.
“There is nothing wrong with you. You’re a genius,” Quinn replies before passing Rachel her cigarette.
Rachel considers this before taking a drag. “I’m never getting out of here.”
“Why would you want to? You’re home.” Rachel doesn’t respond and they continue to pass the cigarette as the fight gets to a point that clothing is being ripped off and other contestants are trying to intervene. Quinn hands Rachel the cigarette, which she eagerly accepts, before smiling and saying, “That’s good TV.”
