UnREAL Teaches Chet A Tough Lesson About Peddling Toxic Masculinity

UnREAL fans who read The New Yorker (lots of crossover in that Venn diagram, I bet) were struck last month, when the magazine profiled UnREAL creator Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, by one telling mini-anecdote -- an anecdette, if you will. "The studio also asked the writers to expand the role of Jeremy. Played by a former Army Ranger named Josh Kelly, Jeremy was a staple of Season 1: a cameraman with handsome-handyman features who was quick to doff his shirt and rescue Rachel from perils. He fit the aesthetic of Lifetime movies but was not Shapiro's type....Jeremy, she told me, was 'conceived as a one-season character.' Later, she e-mailed me: 'I could not get on board with the idea of Jeremy being Rachel's "Mr. Big" (which was brought up).' Still, the studio had pushed for Josh Kelly to return. 'They can ask you to do it, but they can’t make you,' she told me. Like Rachel, Shapiro frequently has to decide whether she is a bomb-thrower or an inside player with misgivings. In this case, she decided to play nice.' When Kelly got his script for this week's episode, he might have disputed how "nice" Shapiro was to his character, but I was impressed to see that Shapiro at least decided to turn Jeremy -- generally a waste of space and airtime -- into a delivery system for an unambiguously anti-MRA storyline.

For most of the rest of the episode, Jeremy is his usual: a story speed bump. Rachel happens to be walking past the camera truck just as Yael comes out giggling at a picture of Rachel Jeremy has punctured with a shitload of holes, which is how she learns that Jeremy and Yael have been hooking up. The picture is just more proof of what she already knew -- that Jeremy is a bitter bitch -- but when she takes it with her to her office/crash pad and Coleman sees it, he's horrified, calling it "a fireable offense." We should probably be alert to what will happen later when Rachel's response here is, wearily, to defend him: "You can't fire him, because he's good, and he's very fast." But Coleman countermands her, telling Jeremy he's bringing in a consultant -- something that sounds, to Jeremy, a lot like he's getting nudged out as DP; it sounds even more like that when Coleman says Jeremy's being moved back to inserts. When an affronted Jeremy asks if this demotion means he should quit, Coleman evenly replies, "You always have that option, don't you." "YOU DO HAVE THAT OPTION, JEREMY, PLEASE EXERCISE IT IMMEDIATELY," I yelled to my empty living room. I realize Coleman is a weasel -- when Quinn warns Rachel later that he is Rachel's Chet, who will steal all her ideas and leave her with nothing, she's almost certainly right -- but someone has to start pointing Jeremy toward the exits, and if SARAH GERTRUDE SHAPIRO isn't going to do it, I'm glad Coleman is prepared to (even if this method is more than a little passive-aggressive).

Jeremy's immediate reaction is to get day-drunk on canned beer and piss all over Coleman's dumb car, which is how Chet finds him. Chet -- who's only hours out of jail after his arrest for kidnapping his son in last week's episode, and who's just been rejected by Quinn again -- thinks he knows exactly what both he and Jeremy need right now.

A men's retreat for two! (You can tell how serious Chet is about this from the fact that he's sitting in the woods in his blazer.) Chet starts by taking responsibility for his literal crime against his ex-wife and his many professional crimes against Quinn. When it's Jeremy's turn, though, Jeremy -- still drunk enough to be slurring his words -- turns it into a whiny bitch sesh about Coleman's failure to recognize his talent. Chet has to stop him...

...and remind him that this encounter isn't about blame; it's about the truth. As they go on, Chet gets Jeremy to declare that his "damage" is Rachel -- "She's a black hole! She's a cancer!!!" -- because he loved her, and in fact still does love her. Chet seems proud of getting Jeremy to this breakthrough, probably because he doesn't understand that (a) Chet's attendance at a "paleolithic lifestyle retreat" does not qualify Chet to lead one, and (b) the one Chet went on might not have actually done him a world of good given that one of the first things he did upon his return was KIDNAP A CHILD.

Around the set, the usual drama swirls: Rachel gets Dominique to undermine Yael by feeding her the fact of Yael's dalliance with Jeremy, which Dominique tells Darius, on camera; when Coleman snakes an award show invitation from Quinn and brings Rachel as his date so that the two of them can schmooze billionaire media mogul John Booth (Forever's Ioan Gruffudd, definitely moving up in the world), Quinn inserts herself in the conversation and wins Booth -- a devoted Everlasting fan -- for herself; when Rachel maneuvers Darius and Ruby into a Dream Suite date, we learn Quinn's rigged the whole room with hidden cameras and has zero qualms about filming them during sex...because it's all a setup for an ambush from Ruby's activist father (Carl Lumbly!!!), whom Ruby didn't even tell she was coming on the show; when Coleman tries to pull away the camera operators and give Ruby and her father some privacy, Quinn goads Rachel by telling her she knows it'll be good TV, and Rachel can't disagree. Quinn then orders a late-night elimination ceremony, where Darius bounces Dominique for being a snitch, and Ruby for having ambitions to remake Darius as a worthy representative of his community and someone Ruby's father could respect -- a pressure Darius knows he can't live up to. All in all, it's a perfect night for Quinn to have invited Booth for a set visit, and he's as impressed by her heartless machinations as Coleman and Jay are grossed out by them, and as Chet lurks and eavesdrops, he hears Quinn and Booth making plans to hit up a Costco to buy her father a casket. This is Romance, Billionaire Style, I guess.

But as the chaos is winding down, Rachel prepares to end her day by taking off the gown she borrowed from Wardrobe, which is when a STILL-drunk Jeremy lurches in. Given that she's not interested in chatting with Jeremy at the best of times, never mind at the end of a crappy day that began with an image of her that he violently defaced, she tries to get rid of him as civilly as she can manage. When he comes back with "Why'd you send your douchebag little lackey to demote me?," she can tell she's not going to get out of this, even if she doesn't know what he's even talking about. But when she tries to leave the conversation, he physically prevents her from leaving.

Rachel carefully backs away from Jeremy, but when he goes on to tell her she's a "selfish, manipulative little bitch," her good instincts kick in and she tries to dart past him. But he overpowers her and gets even further into her face.

Jeremy's ostensible point here is that if Rachel wants to fire him, she should do it to his face, as though his manner at the moment suggests that he's going to react well to a professional setback. Rachel lifts her hand to strike him, but he grabs her wrist (mocking her tattoo while he does so, which: not cool, dude) and tells her she doesn't need a boyfriend: "You need a zookeeper, 'cause you're a wild animal."

And then, things really get bad.

Jeremy does the fake "good guy" thing where he smacks a woman around and then immediately regrets it and is horrified by himself, but he doesn't have a chance to try to work any kind of damage control on Rachel...

...because that's when Chet storms in and pulls his protégé off Rachel, growling, "That's not what a man does," and then throws him out of the truck.

Violence is abhorrent, but this instance is extremely satisfying because Jeremy is fine, just humiliated -- even more so after Chet barks, "I tried to help you. You're fired." (It's at that point that I screamed "YEEEEEEEEEES" loud enough for my neighbours to have definitely heard me, even over their backyard fireworks.) As Jeremy shambles off to, one assumes, get even drunker, Chet turns back to his ex-employee's victim.

Hey, Chet? Maybe you could have waited to ply your MRA baloney on Jeremy until he wasn't drunk, bitter, and scared? Maybe you should have suggested that he work on his violent rage toward Rachel with the help of a qualified therapist in an office setting rather than with you, beside a campfire, between slaps? Maybe the best way to "help" a guy whose first response to adversity is to whip his dick out at work isn't to lean all the way in on his toxic masculinity, because when that anger comes out, it's not going to be visited upon you?