‘UnREAL’ Co-Creator Sarah Gertrude Shapiro Breaks Down the Emmy-Nominated Pilot

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Last summer, UnREAL seemingly came out of nowhere to become one of television’s most acclaimed and buzzed-about darlings.

But the drama, which pulls back the curtain on reality dating shows like The Bachelor, didn’t come from nowhere. It was adapted from Sarah Gertrude Shapiro’s award-winning independent short film Sequin Raze.

Still, that a first-time television creator — partnered with veteran executive producer Marti Noxon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mad Men, Girlfriends Guide to Divorce) — teamed up with the often-dismissed Lifetime network to deliver a sizzling pilot and standout first season… well, it was the kind of twist that the producers of show-within-a-show Everlasting would relish.

It wasn’t an easy process. The first pilot was dumped and re-shot with a new director. Eventually, Noxon would depart from the series with rumors of a rift between the two co-creators.

Still, whatever blood, sweat, and tears went into the making of UnREAL turned out to be worth it, when the show garnered three Emmy nominations: Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for Shapiro and Noxon’s pilot, “Return,” Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for Constance Zimmer (Quinn), and Outstanding Short Form Comedy or Drama Series for UnREAL The Auditions.

Yahoo TV talked to Shapiro about the process of adapting her short film into a pilot, what she fought to retain, and the once-in-a-lifetime (pun intended) kismet that brought her together with her co-creator and network:

Did you watch the nominations?
I didn’t, because we got a tough love talk from one of our non-writing producers earlier in the week. He was saying, “Oh, I don’t think it’s going to happen at all. So, just brace yourselves for that.” I felt so amazed by what had already happened with the show, so I wasn’t expecting it at all. I was consciously staying off the internet and blasting Beyoncé’s “Lemonade.” I’d just gotten out of the shower and just totally had it out of my mind and my phone started ringing, and I thought something was wrong. I got the call and I really didn’t understand for a minute. I think we held out hope maybe for Constance, but I really, really didn’t expect the writing nomination.

The show is adapted from your short film Sequin Raze. Once you got the pilot order, what was the process like to write the script for that?
Well, it’s so interesting, because when I had made the short film, I knew that I wanted to turn it into a series. So, I had thought a lot about what the series would be and who the characters would be. But I think when it came to actually making an hour-long pilot that had enough story for 5-10 seasons, it was a much taller order and it was a pretty heavy development process. Marti was super helpful in that process, because she’d been through a lot of development before, obviously. She helped me take all of the ideas I had and form them into something that made sense for the network, which was really a life-saver.

What aspects from the short film were must-haves to keep in the pilot?
The thing that was important to me was keeping it really dark and making sure Rachel [played by Shiri Appleby] was the main character, because I felt like a hallmark of premium cable was a strong subjective point of view. Every great premium cable show that I love, like Mad Men or Breaking Bad, you always sort of start inside one character’s head and know who you’re following through the world. The really easy temptation with this show was to turn it into an ensemble, because there are so many characters. And so, I just fought really hard to stay inside Rachel’s head, because that was what the short was really about — this girl traveling through this world and having become a monster. It’s about what you do when you lose your soul. And it was so important to keep that the central question of the show.

So, I fought really hard for stuff like the shot of Rachel lying on the floor of the limo wearing this “This is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt. That was actually the opening shot of the pilot for a long, long time, but the network felt like we had to open in the reality show so that the people got what the concept of the show was. That was another of those moments where Marti was so instrumental, in helping me find a way to do that, where we still got to Rachel quickly enough that you got who the character was.

I read somewhere that Lifetime actually gave you a note wanting the show to be darker.
I think the contestant stuff can get really silly, really fast, so there was definitely a calibration process in terms of where the show was going to live tonally between the Rachel and Quinn stuff and the contestant stuff, and the cohesion of that tone. I felt like maybe we were trying too hard to address a note or sort of guessing what Lifetime would want, and we would deliver poppier or sillier than they actually wanted. We were sort of second-guessing them, and they were encouraging us to keep going darker.

The relationship between Rachel and Quinn has become the central relationship in the show. Was that intended, or did you adjust because of Constance’s performance?
I think we always knew that was a central relationship, so that wasn’t a surprise to us. But definitely casting Constance changed that a little bit, because she’s so incredibly strong. We didn’t rewrite for her, because we shot a pilot that we threw out. And then we re-shot it, and that chemistry gelled so hard and was so important that moving forward from that point it became more clear to us that it was the central relationship. We definitely knew that going in — even in the short film there actually was a Quinn character that got cut down, the idea that she was the devil that was pulling Rachel into the world. Constance just lit up the screen the minute we cast her. We knew that it was going to evolve into a really important part of the show.

Aside from that shot of Rachel lying on the limo floor, what other moments did you fight for?
I feel like the scene where she manipulates and breaks down the villain after she gets kicked off, and the sun comes up and they’re out on the pool chairs — that, for all intents and purposes, is almost a facsimile of the short film, just inserted into the pilot with an adjustment for who the character is. I don’t know if I had to really fight for that, but it was just so important to get right. It was kind of the heart of the conflict. We worked and worked and worked to get the number of emotional turns that I had in 20 minutes in the short film into a minute and a half in the show. That was something that we put in a lot of elbow grease, so that it worked on all the levels that it needed to.

The end shot of the pilot was a big discussion. In the first pilot, I’d always seen her looking into camera or having some sort of look where she was just overwhelmed by the world and sucked back in and going down the dark path again. In the first pilot, she looked down the barrel of the lens and a tear came down her cheek. And then in the pilot we actually used, that Peter O’Fallon shot, she looks right at the camera above her, and she’s slightly off center. I think that’s something we felt really strongly about — that we needed to end on her and end inside her head and end on her alone. I wouldn’t categorize that as something we had to fight for, but just something we felt very strongly about.

UnREAL can be very funny. There’s a lot of humor in the show, in addition to the darkness and satire. Was it tricky to meld all those different beats ?
It gels pretty easily in the script stage with Marti and myself. It was in the execution where we really had to work at it. It was important for us to define for our directors and our actors that these jokes aren’t jokes and they aren’t meant to land. There’s no landing strip and there’s no laugh track and no bada-boom hahaha. That’s something Constance got right away — she just threw everything away, like she was reading a grocery list, which is exactly the delivery we wanted for that character. Everything had to be matter of fact, and everybody was just going about their business and doing their jobs.

Quinn is just living to crack herself up; she’s not performing for other people. Again, that’s something Constance just got without us talking about it. It took a minute for everyone to assimilate what the jokes were and that it was more important to throw them away than actually land them.

Back to the nominations, the show has gotten such acclaim [UnREAL received a Peabody award]. Still, you’re a first-time TV writer and someone told you not to expect anything. Were you shocked?
First of all, I’m so incredibly happy for [Constance]. For the writing thing, it’s my first teleplay, so it’s pretty crazy! It’s pretty hard to understand. I think we’re shocked — totally, totally shocked — but also really proud of the work we’ve done and really proud of the team.

I also feel like in partnering with Lifetime on this, there was a real leap of faith in both directions. They took a huge leap of faith on me. Marti took a huge leap of faith on me. I took a little bit of a leap of faith on them. I was just coming off South by Southwest and it wasn’t in my mind that that was where I’d sell the show. Lifetime really wanted to do something that would really break through, and they were super supportive of us doing that. And the satisfaction of all holding hands and taking a leap of faith and have it pay off is really amazing for the whole team.