Lifetime's new series UnREAL, airing Monday nights at 10 p.m., may center on the production of a fictional reality dating show, but it's likely made some fans wonder about what goes on behind the scenes of their favorite real-life reality series. Breeda Wool, who plays Faith on UnREAL, reveals that, though the fictional show-within-a-show Everlasting seems most similar to The Bachelor, the ABC series isn't her favorite reality show. In fact, she has a TV obsession that you'd never be able to guess without some help, so here's a clue. "I was on a dance tour...and I almost missed my performance because I was watching Flavor Flav," Wool says of her favorite series.
That's right, Wool tells me that while traveling for a tour, she became "hooked" on Flavor of Love and Rock of Love with Bret Michaels. "It's so satisfying when [the shows] are self-conscious," Wool says. "They went straight into it with the full knowledge that there was nothing real about it. It gave them the liberty to be as absurd as they wanted to be."
But UnREAL doesn't suggest that Everlasting, on which Wool's character is a contestant, is as absurd as Rock of Love or Flavor of Love. Instead, it's much more calculated by producers Quinn and Rachel, who strive to create and capture the most dramatic moments possible. "What I think these reality TV shows do is they remove people from their regular lives, they take away their communications, and they put them in extreme circumstances and you end up finding out who people really are as a result," Wool says.
When I ask Wool if she'd ever be able to watch a reality show the same way after portraying a contestant on UnREAL, she says that she was already working with a running knowledge of the amount of editing that goes on with reality shows. "Because I'm an actor, I see editing, I see sound, sometimes I see color correction," she says. "You can see the man behind the curtain."
Images: James Dittiger/Lifetime (2)
