Even if they don’t seem real, participants in reality TV are most definitely harmed in the production

We've gorged on 15 years of reality television now (if we controversially date it from the first series of Big Brother) and we're all feeling a little sick.

Up to 75 per cent of programmes these days seem to be exploitative reality shows with titles like Toddler Thunderdome: Babies with Buzzsaws, The Poor: Look at the Cut of Them and Sociopath Zoo: Which one do YOU hate? (I've copyrighted all these titles, btw.)

Many shows on air now are “scripted reality” series in which the techniques of fiction are imposed on messy reality so that harmless naifs can be mocked and demonised by a self-hating audience (“Ugh, we really are the worst,” I now think before settling into a night of hate-watching).

Increasingly, viewers are becoming aware that while reality TV participants do not appear to be real people, they do, in fact, have real people as a key ingredient, and that these are most definitely harmed in the production.

Television producers are aware of our growing self-loathing, and have, for some time, been producing satire on the subject from light-hearted mockumentaries (from The Office to Modern Family) to blackhearted dystopias (Black Mirror).

UnREAL (Lifetime, Tuesday) is a new drama set behind the scenes of a show-within-a-show called Everlasting, a detailed recreation of the Bachelor, a programme in which a slew of young women compete for the affections of a rich playboy – in this instance the toothy, cheese-headed, ball of smug, Adam Cromwell (Freddie Stroma).

He is British, so likes tea and caddish behaviour. Anti-heroine producer The anti-heroine is Rachel (Shiri Appleby), a young producer who has returned to work after an on-set breakdown and who will betray any and all her principles in the interests of creating compellingly terrible television.

She is a plain woman, or so we're told. "You're not hot enough to be crazy," says Everlasting's coke-addled creator. Of course, she is only television plain (flat hair, scruffy clothes and a permanent scowl) and using the sexist metric already evoked, she is, at the very least, hot enough to be crazy off television.

She is no ingenue. Writers Marti Noxon and Sarah Gertrude Shapiro aren’t going for the whole corrupted innocence narrative.

Rachel’s soul has already been worn as thin as her “this is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt by the show’s brand of manipulative cynicism.

Her boss Quinn (the excellent Constance Zimmer) says things like: “Ponies, princesses, romance, love, I don’t know, it’s all a bunch of crap anyway” and “Be a good meat puppet and do what I say!” and, after dismissing black contestants: “It’s not my fault that America is racist.”

Quinn is just an aviator hat and pigeon-obsession away from being Dick Dastardly (although with both an aviator hat and a pigeon-obsession she would arguably have two whole extra dimensions to work with).

Rachel is Muttley to her Dastardly, and, like Muttley, she is a more nuanced character in touch with the yin and yang of things.

Manic pixies

Like Zoe on

House of Cards

and Piper on

Orange is the New Black

, Rachel embodies television’s new, more self-actualised version of the manic pixie dream girl – the sociopathically-selfish nightmare troll.

The producers of Everlasting compete for bonuses if their favoured contestants are granted unofficial production titles like "bitch" or "milf" or "virgin" and they endeavour to manipulate, cajole and, when all fails, edit them into acting accordingly. Despite ineffectual attacks of conscience (she stops filming one hysterical, fleeing woman but makes sure to get footage of her bloody footprints), Rachel is the best at manoeuvring the poor contestants (generally depicted as naive but complex characters) pretending to be their friends while using details gleaned from the in-house psychologist to manipulate them.

This week she (implausibly) edits emotional footage of a recently bereaved contestant to make it look like she's an angry villain. UnREAL is, thus far, darkly entertaining with the dramatic momentum derived from guessing how low Rachel is willing to go in the quest for ratings. In their own quest for ratings, I'm guessing it's pretty low.

Get some monkeys

Later in the week while watching award-winning cameraman Colin Stafford Johnson’s nature documentary

Ireland’s Wild River: The Mighty Shannon

(BBC2, Thursday) I imagine what its behind-the-scenes production notes look like based on what I learned from

UnREAL

:

Tell the bat that the heron was talking smack about it.

Cut the fox from the edit. It’s too “urban”.

Make the monkeys air kiss insincerely. Well, get some monkeys then.

Fine. We’ll call the squirrels “monkeys”.

Would a duck ride a deer? Is that “unrealistic”? I don’t think so. I think it’s okay.

I’m insufficiently attracted to the egret. Get the egret a stylist.

Get the swan to wear sunglasses. We’re losing the 15 to 35 demographic.

Could the call of the corncrake be different? For example: “Stop disrespecting me you b-word!” Maybe if the corncrake said that it wouldn’t be in decline (Hashtag: Just sayin’).

I’m now far too attracted to the egret. Cut the egret.

Could the deer accuse the duck of being racist? It’s just something to think about.

Perhaps the swan could have a sassy sidekick? Possibly a human toddler called Alan (note to self: call Alan from Toddler Thunderdome).

Of course, as experts will know, this is not how Wild River: The Mighty Shannon was made. Instead, Stafford Johnson canoed the length of the Shannon painstakingly collecting and wistfully narrating spectacular footage of the river's birds, insects, fish and animals through a haze of interesting weather and dramatic light.

The end result is soul-stirring, heart-lifting and, in its sad contemplation of environmental damage, troublingly beautiful.

Yeah, I know. It all sounds difficult and expensive. Let’s just chuck Joey Essex in a pond.