‘UnREAL’: Why Lifetime series has hope entering episode 6

We have been proponents for a long time of Lifetime’s “UnREAL.” It’s a wonderful yet biting take on reality TV production, and as someone who has seem them from the inside, there are definitely parts of it that feel familiar.

However, we admit in the early going that we were worried somewhat about the commercial success of the show, given that the ratings were not that strong and we wondered who, outside of former reality show contestants and intelligent “Bachelor” cynics, would want to watch the show upon first glance. We feel like there are plenty of people out there who would want to watch the show, but sometimes it takes a minute or two explaining to them what it really is.

Luckily, it seems as though some of these people seem to be starting to figure this out going into the sixth episode of the series airing on Monday night. This past episode, a sensational hour revolving around Faith (read our review here), drew the show’s biggest figure to date in the 18-49 demographic, and with 810,000 viewers, it was the second-most-watched telecast of the entire series so far. Granted, this was the first episode that was not available online beforehand, but this shows that you actually can convert internet viewers into live viewers. That’s not something that many networks genuinely can pull off.

While these are still smaller ratings for Lifetime, an upward trajectory towards the end of season 1 would certainly improve the show’s season 2 chances. We do feel like there are reasons to bring the show back on the air, with one of the biggest ones being simply that this may be one of the most critically-acclaimed shows in the network’s history. With many months off the air plus a streaming deal somewhere, maybe you can convince some more people to check this out.

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