Whenever someone mentions that they can’t hang out after work past a certain time on a certain weeknight because they have to go home (or to a friend’s house) to watch The Bachelor or The Bachelorette or Bachelor in Paradise, I get really excited and ask if they’ve also ever watched my own personal favorite dirty pleasure, which is also full of steamy getaways, sparkly skin-tight dresses, elimination ceremonies, high drama and plenty of roses: the four-season shooting star of a series that was and is Lifetime/Hulu’s UnREAL. The answer I consistently get is a flat, disinterested no.

So, this person always goes home to their wine and television set, and I go home to mine—we’re doing the same thing, and yet we’re doing very different things. The reason I find myself an UnREAL fan as opposed to a member of the Bachelor Nation is because this is exactly what UnREAL does, both in the show itself and as a show itself, this same-same-but-different dance. Bachelor fans can’t get enough of the drama, and UnREAL fans can’t get enough of the meta. Beyond this, I can’t compare the two families of show, since I don’t watch one of them.

What I know about Bachelor Nation I know from UnREAL, and what I know about UnREAL is this: it’s difficult to explain. It’s a fictional show about people who are making a show that’s like The Bachelor. It’s about people who work on the set of a reality TV show and are producing the contestants and causing drama on and off camera. It’s about people trying to make something of a certain nature in a certain culture. And, most importantly, it’s accomplished the not-easy task of bringing metafiction to the general public.

An interest in metafiction used to mean I pretended to legitimately like, understand, and enjoy Infinite Jest. Today, it means that not only can I ask (and try to answer) rough, tough questions about whether certain ends justify certain means (i.e. can murder, rape, libel, slander, denial, and good editing create a show with a feminist/human-empowering/true-love message?), whether form equals content (see previous question), and to what degree we can find some level of redemption when we’ve broken through our rock bottom yet again (good God Rachel how twisted can you get!? ← sentence you say every four minutes while watching UnREAL)—but I can also do so in less than an hour on the internet, without sacrificing myself to the psychological perils of the Twittersphere, and while still getting that brain-turnoff relaxation benefit that two (but not five) hours of TV gives you. That alone gives me hope, nevermind UnREAL’s overarching message that what you make matters, and how you make it matters. And, since UnREAL’s entire stakes rely on viewer numbers, which exist because of TV watchers just like you, what you watch matters, too.