Critic Reviews

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

Often uncomfortable to watch, sometimes hilarious soap opera, UnREAL is also both intelligent and thought-provoking, one of TV's smartest and most cynical shows.

One of the fascinating tricks that UnReal has managed to pull off is utilizing the tropes of the reality TV format to drag viewers even deeper into their personal investment in these characters.

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

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.

UnREAL is a great many things, including a dark satire of reality TV, a satisfyingly comedic soap opera, and the ultra-rare female antihero drama.

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

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.

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.

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.