The second season finale of UnREAL, Lifetime’s dubiously capitalized drama about the behind-the-scenes antics of a Bachelor-esque reality show, had a fatal car crash. No, I’m not talking about what happens to protagonist Rachel’s boyfriend and former boss who drove off the road, I’m talking about what happened to the show itself. A surprise hit with critics and viewers last summer, watching the final episode with its sloppy plotting, shoddy writing and dislikeable characters behaving inexplicably was like seeing a Mazda lying in the ditch about to catch fire, except that might have been compelling.
Why does this type of decline always seem happens to good shows? Mr Robot is halfway through its second season and while it should be celebrating a host of Emmy nominations, it’s fending off accusations that it’s on the fritz. Right now, the knottily plotted hacker drama seems to be more interested in the boring battle between Elliot and his inner demons than in showing us what happened after fsociety brought about the end of the world. The show was always darker than a piece of bread left in the toaster for a fortnight, but this time around it’s just wallowing in bleakness – and it’s dreary.
The creators of both UnREAL and Mr Robot – Sarah Gertrude Shapiro and Sam Esmail, respectively – were granted increased control over their high-profile second seasons. To create UnREAL, Shapiro, a former Bachelor producer and first-time TV writer, teamed with Marti Noxon, a veteran of shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mad Men and Grey’s Anatomy. Noxon left the show after the second episode of season two to focus on her other program, Girlfriends Guide to Divorce, leaving Shapiro in charge of the show. Shapiro even appointed herself as director of one episode.
Apparently the first season was not smooth sailing. In a New Yorker profile of Shapiro, Noxon called their relationship a “contentious and fruitful collaboration”. But perhaps having Noxon to balance out and sharpen Shapiro was for the best, since the second season seemed to lack discipline and, like the reality television that it tries to satirize, attempted to lure in viewers with crass stunts (like an ill-advised Black Lives Matter subplot in the episode Shapiro directed).
On Mr Robot, Esmail’s dominance is even more obvious. Not only did he write each episode of the show’s second season, he also directed all of them, shooting scenes out of order the way that a film would be made. Indeed, one of the criticisms leveled against its latest foray is that it seems like a long movie chopped into bits rather than distinct episodes that stand on their own. At least we have a good explanation for why that happened.
Still, UnREAL has already been renewed for a third season, and Mr Robot looks likely to be, since both shows are favourites on their respective networks – unlike HBO’s True Detective, which seems unlikely to survive a second season which was both critically panned and saw a dramatic downturn in viewership. That sophomore season had seen writer Nic Pizzolatto take the reins, working with a rotating series directors after the first season’s director, Cary Fukunaga, moved to an executive producer role and, he suggested to Variety, had his creative input sidelined.
Most terrible second seasons are due to chaos behind the camera. The infamously slow second season of The Walking Dead was filmed after the zombie series’s initial showrunner, Frank Darabont, was fired and the production plunged into turmoil. David Lynch had left Twin Peaks by the time its second meandering season was under way, and Washington’s most famous small town seemed to lack purpose.
While Twin Peaks was axed because it got so bad it bled viewers like Laura Palmer the night of her murder, there are plenty of shows that have course-corrected and pulled themselves out of a death spiral. When Homeland decided not to kill Nicholas Brody at the end of the first season, it made a grave error which led to two seasons of outlandish plots for him and CIA paramour Carrie Mathison. Finally, at the end of season three, they did what should have been done 24 episodes earlier and executed him, resetting the show as a spy drama starring Carrie alone and bringing it back to form.
Desperate Housewives was a megahit after its first season, but adopting a darker tone didn’t work well for the widely panned follow-up. Marc Cherry smartened up and brought the show back with a third season that focused on the frothy plotting that made the show a success in the first place.
Hopefully UnREAL and Mr Robot can steal a page from these shows’ playbooks, focusing on the characters and storytelling that made them popular and trying to find some stability behind the camera. Sadly for these two show’s creators, that stability might come at the cost of some of their autonomy. However, there are worse things to give up: the shows they worked so hard a building. If the quality continues to slacken and viewers are jumping off their sinking ships, they could be the captains that go down with them.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion