Who's the Real Villain of 'UnREAL?'

By Vivian Kane | TV | June 7, 2016 |

By Vivian Kane | TV | June 7, 2016 |

Last season, Kristy examined who the biggest jerk is on Lifetime’s UnREAL. This week’s second season premiere made it clear that they’re upping the stakes from regular jerks to unequivocal villains. Of course, these characters seemed like total villains right around the time they basically barely-indirectly killed someone, but somehow they’re managing to double down on the evil. But, based on this first episode, who is going to out-big-bad the rest?

Chet

Chet would seem to be the obvious choice, since he is a big boy chief now, dead set on reclaiming his kingdom or whatever nonsense he came back spewing.

The choice of the MRA manbaby bad guy is such a delightful foe for the feminist hierarchy of this season. But is Chet bad enough to be a truly worthy opponent? For all his men’s rights ramblings, in the end, all I hear is:

Jeremy

Similar to Chet, Jeremy’s number one goal for this season looks to be taking down the women in charge. Or, rather, one woman. And unlike Chet, who just wants the feminazis to give his toys back, Jeremy has a pretty decent reason for his rage. Rachel broke his heart and he wants revenge. If only his tactics (talking about banging “Hot Rachel” in front of her team, for instance) weren’t so childishly vile.

No, Jeremy’s not a villain. But I could see Chet taking him on as an MRA-in-training pawn.

The Contestants

Hear me out on this one. Yes, the contestants are the sheep being led to the manipulative slaughter. Their hearts are broken and sometimes they even actually die. But they’re all also in this mansion for purely selfish reasons. Either they’re looking to get famous, or they’re too obtuse to realize that they’re not going to find actual love on a television show. And sometimes stupidity is just the other side of the coin as villainy. Plus, some of them are racists.

Again, probably not the big bads of the show, but they’re nowhere close to blameless.

The Suitor

Is Darius “Bitch, Please” Beck going to be Rachel’s biggest opposition? Probably not, but he’s definitely going to make her life and job (which, for her, are one and the same) as difficult as possible.

Quinn

I can’t think of another example of a relationship like Quinn and Rachel’s, other than possibly Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. These two truly love and respect each other, and are also only ever half a breath from total mutual destruction. In the season premiere, we saw Quinn give Rachel expert puppet master lessons, but Quinn is nowhere near done with the puppeteerring herself. It’s all about the money, dick, power, and while she wants to hit that bounty with Rachel at her side, she’d clearly rather ditch her mentee than the goal.

Rachel

Sure, Rachel’s our protagonist, but she may also be the show’s greatest villain. She ruined (at least temporarily) Jeremy’s life, her own life, and manipulated the crap out of every last suitor and contestant, all to suit her own end game. Plus, she made this face happen:

And even if Madison is a whiny Pollyanna, and even if she liked her first taste of producer power, that doesn’t make Rachel any less ruthless. Rachel has been knowingly responsible for more destruction than anyone else on the show. So how is she not the villain?