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The surprise launch of the final season of the reality TV satire brings the end to an award-winning water cooler hit that ultimately fizzled out

Spoilers ahead

When UnREAL, a scathing satire of the behind the scenes world of dating reality TV, first came out, it was heralded as a darkly comic masterpiece. The show’s first season won a Peabody, an AFI award and received two Emmy nominations, and was celebrated for its presentation of the enduring frenemyship of two very different, difficult women, each of whom is well aware that the show they are producing is deeply misogynistic. The following two seasons continued to probe into this same world, but received a more lukewarm response from critics, many of whom claimed that despite tackling topical issues, the show never quite recaptured what made the first season so novel, fun and smart.

With the surprise release of the fourth season this week, as well as news that this is the show’s swan song, UnREAL now enters a TV landscape where female darkness is no longer a rarity. Instead, there is an increased expectation that female characters should be nuanced and complicated. Against this backdrop, UnREAL’s final season seems strikingly tame in terms of its politics, despite tackling the #MeToo movement even more directly, as Rachel abandons her feminist guilt completely in the service of generating good ratings. The final season, like those that came before it, not only insists that Rachel (Shiri Appleby) and Quinn (Constance Zimmer) should be allowed to be complex antiheroines, but also insist on implicating the show’s audience as the worst kind of enablers.

In one scene from this season, for example, Rachel cheerfully arrives at an Everlasting themed party at a local bar with one of her co-workers. Fans gather dressed up as their favorite contestants from the reality TV show and laugh and make jokes, as they wait for the latest episode to air. When it does and a shocking scene of violence emerges onscreen, the crowd reacts with horror, as well as impish glee. “Lock her up!” they chant in unison, as the screen shows images of a contestant who is portrayed as though she is a deranged ex-girlfriend driven to violence out of jealousy. In reality, the crowd is seeing footage that Rachel purposefully altered in order to hide the truth: that the woman the crowd is rallying against is a victim of a rape that Everlasting did its best to both cover up as well as eventually exploit. Though Rachel ends up vomiting in the bathroom after seeing the crowd go wild, it’s hard to have sympathy for her. After all, one of Rachel’s main goals this season was to force a confrontation between that victim and her rapist, both for personal psychological reasons (Rachel thinks a confrontation might give her the closure that she needs regarding her own sexual assault) as well as in the interest of generating shock.

The fact that these ratings plots work is probably the most depressing aspect of UnREAL. In the world of the series, people don’t want a smart show (Quinn expresses dismay when the host quotes Camus), or even a particularly interesting one. What they want is something scandalous, filled with dramatic twists and ludicrous games that make a spectacular mockery of the things people do for love and money. If Rachel has come to accept her role as ultimate antiheroine this season, exploding onset with long wavy blonde hair and false eyelashes that she cheerfully bats at everyone she is manipulating and exploiting, Quinn has become reluctant. She may not be entirely contrite about what she has put contestants (and Rachel) through over the past few seasons, but she is, at least, restless and bored by the world of Everlasting that she helped to create.

Despite being a surprise release, this final season of UnREAL still seems to be a slow petering out, rather than a triumphant and timely exploration of our fascination with scandal and our collective willingness to drag women through the mud. At a certain point, bingeing on episode after episode where contestants are plunged into pools, assaulted with raw eggs and cajoled into slut-shaming one another, you start to wonder if watching UnREAL is really a protest against a misogynistic world, or just a reiteration of everything that is wrong with it. By that, I don’t mean to say that there aren’t aspects of the show that are clever or fun, but that its place in our current cultural zeitgeist seems a little off.

In particular, the major plot point where Rachel tries to get a raped contestant to confront her abuser in all sorts of unethical ways seems to miss the mark about what viewers today are actually looking for in stories that consider the pervasiveness of sexual assault in American culture. Take two of the most talked about and important comedy specials that have come out over the last few months: Cameron Esposito’s Rape Jokes and Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, both of which defiantly push against audience expectations about how comedy should contend with sexual violence. Both specials embrace candor and vulnerability, in addition to celebrating the humanity of survivors and insisting that the culture can in fact change, all the while still being incredibly funny.

The triumph of Esposito and Gadsby’s work isn’t simply in their commitment to social justice, but also the excitement at presenting a feminist work that is really, genuinely new. In contrast, the fourth season of UnREAL continues to present feminist concerns as a befuddling puzzle that will never truly be solved. The inclusion of new suitress Candy, a sex-positive single mom stripper, who Quinn is eager to include in Everlasting in order to more effectively pitch a forthcoming reality TV show with her as the main star, seems to be intended to be edgy and boundary-pushing, when the sort of feminist epiphanies she spouts are pretty old hat at this point. For example, during a particularly cruel egg tossing game, Candy fights back by throwing eggs at the male suitors, and refuses to slut-shame her fellow contestants. In an interview with Variety, showrunner Sarah Gertrude Shapiro describes Candy as representative of a more complex third- or fourth-wave feminism, but her brand of blonde, sexy pole dancing empowerment comes across as bland, rather than brave, a throwback to what Ariel Levy called “female chauvinist pigs” way back in 2005.

Likewise, Rachel’s casual and consistent cruelty doesn’t end up making her into a more interesting character. Instead, her character becomes repetitive, as every increasingly horrible action seems to actually make her character flatter, rather than more nuanced. In the end, it’s Quinn’s character, played expertly by Constance Zimmer, that ends up being the more complicated portrait of a woman with various motivations, especially as she considers motherhood and leaving the world of Everlasting behind. While the relationship between Rachel and Quinn that has been the backbone of the series remains strong, there is also a sad kind of resignation that permeates their interactions, especially as we gear up to the final episode.

Perhaps this is the main reason that UnREAL seems to be moving so much against today’s zeitgeist – at a time when so many series are focusing on women who are actively working to dismantle a patriarchal system, both Rachel and Quinn’s insistence on staying safe in each other’s arms, promising that they will do better, after burning down the world around them, actually feels kind of infuriating. Maybe there is something hopeful about this: that at a time when the internet exploded with talk about who has “big dick energy”, it’s not the cruel “lady bosses” who are being upheld as exciting heroines but the women like Esposito and Gadsby, who are willing to push past the performance of power for something far more revolutionary: authenticity.

• The final season of UnREAL is now available in the US on Hulu and in the UK on Amazon Prime

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