UnReal

Whip-smart and skintight, Season 2 clicks like clockwork. You’re appalled, you’re LOL, you can’t wait to see next week.

Last summer, the show's quality was a surprise because of what it was about and where it aired. Now, UnREAL isn't surprising. It's just thrilling.

Somehow, just like its unfortunately tattooed protagonists, UnREAL just gets smarter the more shameless it gets.

UnREAL remains one of TV’s most sharp-minded and -tongued escapes, a heart-shaped box full of chocolate and razor blades.

Appleby and Zimmer's chemistry isn't just electric, but acidic, burning through the camera lens so fast you almost forget their characters are doing truly terrible things in the name of ratings.

Watching UnReal so ably slice up and serve all this topical relevance can be exhilarating--and also exhausting. Season 2 affirms that the series is not merely a fine and nasty piece of entertainment.

UnREAL is as hard-boiled and adventuresome as any male-dominated, gritty, “dark” premium-cable show you’d care to throw an Emmy at. The performances by Zimmer and Appleby are amazingly nuanced and layered, especially for a show whose gimmick, Everlasting, insists upon the superficiality of women’s images of themselves.

You want to spend time here, to see what the characters do and say, rather than high-tail it at the earliest opportunity alongside the newest crew of rejected contestants. The series can be enjoyed on a higher, premium-cable-quality plane, particularly when it comes the destructive female friendship at its core, but it’s also a whipped-cream blast full of prickly dialogue and verbal take-downs.

The second season of UnREAL continues to work from that same multilayered template [of season one], but with even more confidence and a greater sense of ambition.

UnReal uses its seemingly frivolous setting to stage one of the darkest, most incisive shows on television.

UnREAL’s early episodes leave those questions [Will Ruby and Rachel team up to make Everlasting a show that is about more than performative romance? Or will one betray the other? Will Ruby be ruined by reality TV, as so many before her have ... or will she harness the power of “reality” to improve reality?] tantalizingly open, with characters, and its plots, that are elastic and complicated enough to accommodate many possibilities.

There are times the whole affair feels little to similar to season one, but by the end of the second episode a new character has entered the series, promising to shake things up in a necessary way.

The show is fast, funny, profane, and charming, even with it occasionally gets almost unrelentingly dark as abuse and toxic relationships run up and down the chain.

Appleby and Zimmer continue to deliver strong and funny lead performances playing two of TV's most outspoken and prickly characters. And with a fine new suitor comes a fresh and engaging new group of wifeys, blifeys and villains. Catching up on the first season is recommended, but you could almost just jump in fresh for the summer pleasure, no guilt here, that is UnREAL.

This dishy delight is a guilt-free pleasure. [6-19 Jun 2016, p.19]

What a bracing thrill-ride it is. .... There are so many ideas bouncing off each other and colliding in the new season that viewers may occasionally long for a quiet moment or two, but presumably things will settle down a little once the setup is out of the way.

The level of comedy is again superlative, with Appleby and Zimmer carrying the cynicism and viciousness to new levels.