Rebecca Fried had no intention of preserving the record of a persecuted people whose strife was ready to be permanently written off in the eyes of history as exaggerated, imagined, or even invented.

That's because Rebecca was too busy trying to get through the 8th grade.

In 2002, University of Illinois-Chicago history professor Richard J. Jensen printed “No Irish Need Apply: A Myth of Victimization.” His abstract begins:

In short, those famous “No Irish Need Apply” signs—ones that proved Irish Americans faced explicit job discrimination in the 19th and 20th centuries? Professor Jensen came to the blockbuster conclusion that they never existed.

The theory picked up traction over the last decade, but seemed to reach an unexpected fever pitch in the last few months. Explainer websites this year used it to highlight popular myths of persecution complexes that are, as Vox put it, “stand-ins for an entire narrative about how immigrants are treated in America.” That’s from the lede of an article printed in March called “‘No Irish Need Apply’: the fake sign at the heart of a real movement.”

Here, of course, is the problem: After only couple of hours Googling it, Rebecca, a 14-year-old, had found out these signs had, in fact, existed all along. Not only in newspaper listings—in which they appeared in droves—but, after further research, in shop windows, too.

The Irish were persecuted in the American job market—and precisely in the overt, literally written-down way that was always believed.

All of this would have been written off as a myth if it weren’t for Rebecca Fried, a rising high school freshman—who one of the preeminent scholars on the Irish diaspora in the United States now calls a “hero” and “quite extraordinary”—and who simply couldn’t believe it, either.

Rebecca never set out to prove the thesis wrong. She was just interested in an article her dad brought home from work one day.

“Now and then I bring home stuff for the kids to read if I think they will find it interesting or will convey some lesson,” says Michael Fried, Rebecca’s father. “Half the time they don’t read them at all. Sometimes they’ll read something if I suggest it. Nothing has ever come of any of these things other than this one.”

Rebecca wasn’t even trying to disprove her dad—let alone an academic at the University of Illiniois-Chicago. She just figured she’d Google the words and see what came up over 100 years ago.

“Just for the fun of it, I started to run a few quick searches on an online newspaper database that I found on Google,” she says. “I was really surprised when I started finding examples of NINA ads in old 19th-century newspapers pretty quickly.”

So she started collecting a handful of examples, then dozens, then more. She went to as many newspaper databases as she could. Then she thought, somebody had to have done this before, right?

“I didn’t see anything right away. This led me to wonder if it might be worth writing up in some form,” she says. “I showed my dad right away when I started finding these NINA ads. We just didn’t know whether this was already widely known and, if it wasn’t, whether it would be viewed as a topic worth considering for publication.”

Enter Kerby Miller, a newly retired history professor from the University of Missouri. He’s written everything from Guggenheim-funded books about the 18th-century Irish to the PBS documentary Out of Ireland with Paul Wagner. In 1986, he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for history.

“It was out of the blue on May 1st, May Day—which is sort of fortuitous, now that I think about it,” says Miller. May Day is International Workers' Day, which celebrates laborers and worldwide.

They wanted to know if they were missing something. They weren’t.

In fact, for years, Miller wanted to know why everyone else was missing the opposite.

“From the first, my responses to Jensen’s claims had been strongly negative, as were those of a few other scholars, but, for various reasons, most historians, social scientists, journalists, et cetera accepted or even embraced Jensen’s arguments,” says Miller.

Miller says it all makes sense when you consider the parallels between Jensen’s arguments and the tone of anti-Irish propaganda after the Irish Civil War.

“This was a period dominated in Irish writing by those who collectively came to be known as ‘revisionists.’ What they did was, in some cases, take every traditional Irish Catholic belief concerning British Colonialists—some of which were heroic, even—and turn them upside down,” says Miller. “The British and Britain’s supporters were not to be seen as oppressors. They were now to be considered those taking down Irish Catholic oppression.”

Miller says it applies to all of Irish history, but recent history as well—even events and acts of persecution that the Irish lived through themselves.

“A lot of people were getting sick of this, but were afraid to speak out. They wanted to say it’s bullshit, but you would be regarded as an uncouth barbarian or an IRA sympathizer,” says Miller. “The narrative was that, ‘They should stop their whining! They weren’t victims! They weren’t oppressed!’”

He’d been trying to bat down the conclusions in Jensen’s paper for 13 years. Miller says he knew something was fishy from the outset. First of all, he’d seen the advertisements years ago—well before something like Google Scholar made them easy to search for—as a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the 1970s. But something else tipped him off.

“Even more suspicious is that it seemed to fit into a political or ideological framework, in addition to his own writing, which was obviously polemically bent,” he says.

This is, after all, how the abstract in Jensen’s paper ends:

“Some Americans feared the Irish because of their religion, their use of violence, and their threat to democratic elections. By the Civil War these fears had subsided and there were no efforts to exclude Irish immigrants. The Irish worked in gangs in job sites they could control by force. The NINA slogan told them they had to stick together against the Protestant Enemy, in terms of jobs and politics. The NINA myth justified physical assaults, and persisted because it aided ethnic solidarity. After 1940 the solidarity faded away, yet NINA remained as a powerful memory.”

Miller says he wrote to Jensen at one point to contest it.

“Jensen’s email response to my criticisms was that they were to be expected because I was an Irish-American and a Catholic,” says Miller.

“In fact, as I responded to him, I am neither.”

Miller says he realized this might be an unwinnable fight when he went to New Zealand to present some work and he was bombarded with questions on why he didn’t believe Jensen. One man asked who in his family was Irish Catholic. Miller kindly reminded the questioner that the answer is no one—until he remembered his wife is.

“They said, ‘That’s gotta be it!’ That’s why I’m sympathetic to these Irish rebel terrorist scum!” he says, laughing.

“I hadn’t realized how extraordinarily dominant Jensen’s argument had become. I don’t know if that says something about the hierarchy of power in academia, or the others who accepted it because they bought into this revisionist interpretation.”

He wasn’t alone. Miller could name other scholars who questioned Jensen’s motives. He even tried to talk some of them into writing about it.

“They knew from their own research—or strongly suspected—that Jensen’s arguments were wrong or fallacious,” he says. “They were just too busy [to refute it], or preferred not to.”

Then May Day came.

“We didn’t know who to contact, but we saw that Professor Jensen’s article cited Professor Miller as someone who had erroneously believed in NINA, so we thought he might be a good person to try,” says Rebecca. “And he was obviously an expert in this area.”

Miller opened up Rebecca’s thesis. He quickly realized all of the academics too busy to take on Jensen couldn’t have done it better than a 14-year-old.

“She didn’t need any help from me on what she did,” he says. “I’d be surprised if she changed a single word.”

Rebecca says Miller then helped her and her father walk through what a scholarly article should look like. After all, no one in Rebecca’s family is an academic. Her parents are lawyers, and a scholarly article is not a requirement to get out of the 8th grade.

“I don’t want people to think she did this because she got expert advice,” he says. “[Rebecca and Michael] truly deserve all of the credit.”

Then, on Independence Day—fortuitous again—it became official: Rebecca printed “No Irish Need Deny: Evidence for the Historicity of NINA Restrictions in Advertisements and Signs” in the Oxford Journal of Social History.

“The article concludes that Jensen’s thesis about the highly limited extent of NINA postings requires revision, and that the earlier view of historians generally accepting the widespread reality of the NINA phenomenon is better supported by the currently available evidence,” Rebecca writes in her abstract.

When a story was written about the findings on the Irish website IrishCentral.com, Jensen congratulated Rebecca for her scholarship in the comments section, but took issue with her conclusion.

“I’m the PhD who wrote the original article. I’m delighted a high school student worked so hard and wrote so well,” he writes. “No, she did not claim to find a single window sign anywhere in the USA.”

But Rebecca’s article does include that information. She made it clear in a reply.

“I do have to say that the article does in fact list a number of posted physical NINA signs, not just newspaper ads. Pages 6-7 catalogue a number of the signs,” she wrote.

Jensen retorted with a numerical list of all of the “No Irish Need Apply” signs he encountered in her essay—ending with, “That’s very rare. In Chicago, only 3 ads in over 50 years. How rare can you get?”

Then, ever politely, Fried dropped the hammer.

“Thanks again for the response. This discussion is really fun for me, and I appreciate the opportunity to have it,” she wrote. “Let me make one last point and then I promise I will shut up and give you the last word if you want it. You began this conversation by stating that the article ‘did not claim to find a single window sign anywhere in the USA.’ I think we now agree at least that this is not correct.”

She then makes a salient point: Even if it were 15 recorded instances per year or 1,500—the signs existed, the persecution was real, and discrimination of the Irish was not an imagined feeling, but a reality difficult to both express and quantify.

“NINA sign would be just as offensive and memorable to Irish-American and other viewers whether it was for a job, an apartment, a social club, a ‘freedom pole,’ or anything else,” she wrote.

Of course, then she ended with this:

“I’ll conclude by sincerely thanking you again for interacting with me on this. It is a real honor and I appreciate it.”

Later, Rebecca says she regretted how her comments came out, saying she "may have come off as insufficiently respectful."

“He has been doing scholarly work for decades before I was born, and the last thing I want to do was show disrespect for him and his work,” she says.

But Professor Miller says he could not possibly be more impressed.

“I have the utmost admiration and respect for her. I really just want to be in the background of this,” he says.

“Rebecca is the hero.”

Now, Rebecca says she might continue along this same path, “exploring other areas where digitized newspaper evidence might supply new historical insights.” She thinks there “might still be some low-hanging fruit for researchers.”

But maybe not. Maybe she’ll be something completely different. She’s 14 years old. She has to start high school in a month.

“For the longer term, it’s too early to tell,” she says. “But I’ve become really interested in history through this process, and I think that would be an incredibly fascinating career path.”

If she does want to be an historian, when she goes to college about a half-decade from now, it’ll be time for her to tell a story no one will believe, once again.

And, for a second time, Professor Miller will be happy to help her prove it.

“It is, indeed,” he says, “quite extraordinary.”

The war against ISIS isn’t going so great, with the self-appointed terror group standing up to a year of U.S. airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.

But that hasn’t kept defense contractors from doing rather well amidst the fighting. Lockheed Martin has received orders for thousands of more Hellfire missiles. AM General is busy supplying Iraq with 160 American-built Humvee vehicles, while General Dynamics is selling the country millions of dollars worth of tank ammunition.

SOS International, a family-owned business whose corporate headquarters are located in New York City, is one of the biggest players on the ground in Iraq, employing the most Americans in the country after the U.S. Embassy. On the company’s board of advisors: former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz—considered to be one of the architects of the invasion of Iraq—and Paul Butler, a former special assistant to Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld.

The company, which goes by “SOSi,” says on its website that the contracts it’s been awarded for work in Iraq in 2015 have a total value of more than $400 million. They include a $40 million contract to provide everything from meals to perimeter security to emergency fire and medical services at Iraq’s Besmaya Compound, one of the sites where U.S. troops are training Iraqi soldiers. The Army awarded SOSi a separate $100 million contract in late June for similar services at Camp Taji. The Pentagon expects that contract to last through June 2018.

A year after U.S. airstrikes began targeting the so-called Islamic State in Iraq, there are 3,500 U.S. troops deployed there, training and advising Iraqi troops. But a number that is not discussed is the growing number of contractors required to support these operations. According to the U.S. military, there are 6,300 contractors working in Iraq today, supporting U.S. operations. Separately, the State Department is seeking janitorial services, drivers, linguists, and security contractors to work at its Iraqi facilities.

While these numbers pale in comparison to the more than 163,000 working in Iraq at the peak of the Iraq War, they are steadily growing. And with the fight against ISIS expected to take several years, it also represents a growing opportunity for defense, security, and logistics contractors, especially as work in Afghanistan begins to dry up.

“It allows us to maintain the facade of no boots on the ground while at the same time growing our footprint,” said Laura Dickinson, a law professor at George Washington University whose recent work has focused on regulating private military contractors.

Today, Afghanistan still represents a booming business for civilian contractors. In the latest quarterly report from U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, there were 30,000 civilian contractors working in Afghanistan in April. But those numbers are steadily falling. For example, in April 2014, there were more than 60,000 contractors working there.

Meanwhile, from supporting weapons sales to the Iraqi government to providing base security, contractor work in Iraq is on the rise.

SOSi is also providing a handful of high-level advisors to work with the Iraqi Ministry of Defense and the Iraqi Kurdish regional government. In late June, the company won a $700,000 contract to provide a small group of security assistance mentors and advisors for one year. The contract could be extended for an additional four years for a total of $3.7 million.

The requirements for the job are posted on SOSi’s career site, and include “one year or more of experience working with Iraqi [Ministry of Defense] officials.”

One of the job’s duties is to “prepare and deliver briefings to senior military officials on the status of the Iraqi staff, systems, programs and transition progress.”

The company will provide one advisor to the Iraqi Kurdish regional government, and five to the Iraqi government in Baghdad, according to Frank Helmick, a retired lieutenant general who served three tours of duty in Iraq between 2003 and 2011 and is now vice president for Mission Solutions at SOSi.

“These positions are very important. They are not just translators,” Helmick said. “They are advising at the levels where decisions are made.”

For the most part, they are Iraqi-Americans with security clearances, he said.

During his second tour in Iraq between 2008 and 2009, Helmick was in charge of all the manning, training, and equipping of the Iraqi security forces, so today’s mission is a familiar one.

“I’ve been going back and forth to Iraq for the last two-plus years as a businessman, which is very, very different than going as a military guy, but a lot of the same people I worked with in uniform are still there today,” he said in an interview with The Daily Beast.

He acknowledged that contractors are playing a key supportive role in Iraq.

“Contractors thicken the U.S. presence,” Helmick said. “If soldiers are sent there to advise and train, they don’t have to send people to cook their food, wash their clothes or secure themselves. Contractors can do that. We allow the U.S. or coalition military to focus on their core competency.”

SOSi is not the only company that has been on contract to provide high-level advisors to the government in Iraq. ABM, also headquartered in New York, posted a job listing for a “Security Assistance Mentor and Advisor,” who would work directly with senior Iraqi counterterrorism officials.

The position entailed providing “direct assistance to the Prime Minister’s Counter Terrorism Advisor to lead and guide the development of institutional capabilities for the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service in order to provide security and facilitate good governance,” according to the company’s job description, which has recently been taken down. A company spokesman said ABM is no longer on the contract.

But some other company will invariably fill the breach. From providing meals to strategic advice, contractors are built into today’s military operations to help defeat the Islamic State. The fact is, the U.S. can no longer go to war—or even on an advise and assist mission—without them.

“We’re resting a large part of the success of this mission on contractors,” said Sean McFate, a professor at the National Defense University and the author of The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order.

But the role of civilian contractors on the battlefield remains controversial, partly because waste, fraud, and abuse became rampant in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade. The Commission on Wartime Contracting, a bipartisan review board created by Congress in 2008, estimated that between $31 billion and $60 billion was lost to contract waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And security contractors continue to face particular scrutiny after a series of abuses over the last several years. Particularly damaging to the industry’s reputation was the 2007 Nisour Square shooting when guards working for Blackwater fatally shot 17 civilians.

Because of these scandals, there is now increased oversight of civilian contractors at the national and international level, said Dickinson. For example, the Pentagon has made numerous internal changes to improve the way contractors are vetted and used.

Helmick said he’s watched the contractor scene in Iraq change from when he first visited in 2003 to today. For example, he says, the ratio of contractors to U.S. servicemembers is down to less than one to one, at least for SOSi. At the peak of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, contractors outnumbered U.S. troops. While SOSi may have lowered their ratio to remain competitive, based on the Pentagon’s own statistics, it appears contractors outnumber U.S. troops in Iraq today.

Today’s business environment is more competitive, Helmick said. “There are a lot of companies vying for this work.”

William Beaver, the editor-in-chief of DangerZoneJobs.com, said the market’s grown more competitive because there is a large pool of experienced contractors thanks to the last 14 years of war. There is also a large number of combat veterans who have left the military, but are looking for ways to work overseas again, he said.

This has led to a considerable drop in salaries, according to Beaver.

But one thing that hasn’t changed is the lack of transparency around these contracts. There is no central public database for finding out who’s doing this work, so it’s only possible to get a scattershot view, without much context, from searches on FedBizOps.com, the Pentagon’s daily contract announcements and various job boards.

For example, it is unclear whether any contractors are supporting the 935 U.S. and coalition military personnel as they vet and train moderate Syrian rebels.

What is known is that contractors are integral to the teams that operate surveillance drones and analyze the hours of video footage collected, providing the military with the information it needs to target Islamic State fighters on the battlefield in Syria and Iraq. While these contractors are not based overseas—and therefore not included in any official tallies—they are directly supporting the mission to defeat the Islamic State.

From the very beginning, U.S. military commanders have warned that the war against the Islamic State will be a long one. SOSi’s contract for services at Camp Taji may be due to expire in 2018, but it seems certain that it and companies like it will continue to find business as this fight rages on.

Within your own backyard lies adventure that will transport you to a place that feels miles from home. So leave your passport behind and start exploring The Nearest Faraway Place.

It can be hard for a lot of NYC residents to deal with the hustle and bustle of city life. The Cloisters is a serene escape right in Northern Manhattan.

“A cloistered garden is a covered garden that’s surrounded by covered archways,” says The Cloisters Managing Horticulturalist Caleb Leech. “It does give you this sense of escape.”

In this installment of The Nearest Faraway Place, presented by Land Rover Discovery, we took the train uptown to Northern Manhattan to transport ourselves to a place of serenity and back in time to The Cloisters museum.

LONDON — It’s what one might call a discovery.

Edward Bodenham, the ninth-generation scion of Floris, Britain’s oldest perfume-maker which sits in the heart of Mayfair, usually spends his days introducing clients to famous scents, including one custom-made for Winston Churchill, and another for Marilyn Monroe.

But following a recent inspection by this reporter of some of the secret archives in a back room—think ledger books with orders and re-orders from various Royals, going back to when the family-run business opened here in 1730—he had something more to show.

Bodenham descended the stairs, leading into a cold basement, a cavernous area that served as his grandfather’s former workshop, from which fragrances once wafted up to the street.

He then hesitated and turned the corner into an alcove hidden from sight, and pointed at a boarded-up archway descending into a tunnel of darkness in the corner.

It is one of several secret tunnels that the family rediscovered here when they renovated this part of the building not too long ago.

His theory, based on family folklore and other research, is that the gentlemen of London used these tunnels to stay out of sight and get into mischief.

Bodenham believes that the tunnels went under Mayfair to some of London’s secret corridors of power, or the so-called gentlemen’s clubs where women are still mostly banned today, with rare exceptions like the Queen, who is allowed into White’s, the poshest of them all.

“It is rumored that there were many tunnels running underneath St. James’s connecting to the gentlemen’s clubs, Berry Bros. & Rudd the winemakers, and apparently to the Royal Palaces in the earliest days,” Bodenham told The Daily Beast, mentioning one of the other neighbors on the street here in St. James.

In fact, as legend has it, Charles II, the so-called ‘Merry Monarch,’ asked for this upscale retail area to be built close to St. James Palace, where he lived. He is supposed to have had one of these tunnels built from his palace to Berry Bros, his favorite liqueur store, and would apparently then pop across to the local brothel from there.

Other tales of what happened inside these secretive dungeons seem to have been buried for now in the rubble that fills most of these passageways.

But Bodenham is hoping to find out more.

“I’m really just going by family folklore that has been passed down over the years and also what I’ve heard from some of our local neighbors and people that have been in touch to research more about the St James’s area,” he says.

Back in the day, his grandfather used to refer to this area down here as the mine.

“Apparently the tunnels were used so that gentlemen of the time could discreetly visit the clubs in the area and meet up to discuss business, topics of the day and to have a few drinks and play cards,” Bodenham says.

“I cannot be certain, but I presume that at one time some of the family members would have done the same. Joseph Floris was apparently a keen high roller and would often play cards and discuss local current affairs with the local icon and arbiter of men’s fashion, Beau Brummell, in our showroom through the back of the Floris Shop here in Jermyn Street.”

Lots has been written on the web about London’s underground rivers, government tunnels and Tube network, but tunnels used by monarchs and the elite to go out on the town are less well-known about.

One man to have sunk into more than most of London’s subterranean world of tunnels, metro stations, bunkers and even rivers, is Dr. Bradley L. Garrett, a Cultural Geographer at the University of Southampton and Visiting Research Associate at the University of Oxford.

His books (Subterranean London: Cracking the Capital, Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City) include stories of dodging guards and red lights to see first-hand underground oddities like an intact office designed for Churchill and secret train stations. Garrett likes slipping into manholes unseen.

One of his discoveries was a disused underground Mail train line.

“The Mail Rail we rediscovered under London in 2011 is a 6.5-mile system of subterranean railway built in 1926 to move post from across the city,” Garrett wrote in an email to The Daily Beast. “Inside, there were tiny trains called ‘mini yorks,’ now all of course immobile.

The tunnels of the Mail Rail were already calcifying, said Garrett, “filling with stalactites and stalagmites. You could easily imagine it in another 100 years beginning to look like a natural cave, with old postal bags and trains being sucked into the tunnel walls.”

The London Underground also has lots of secret underground tunnels and disused underground stations which he has used for research.

“That network is so immense and there are so many in-between spots you can slip into,” Garrett says. “Hiding in tunnels watching the trains fly by, full of commuters that don’t know you’re in there, is an awesome feeling.”

These tunnels are part of a whole subterranean universe found underground, he said.

“The train tunnels are threaded through and around bunkers, sewers and drains, the Mail Rail, cable runs and secret government tunnels,” Garrett says. “The government wouldn’t tell engineers where the ‘secret’ tunnels were underground. Most of the tourists walking at street level, photographing Parliament, haven’t got a clue [about] all that is tangled up under their feet.”

Used for somewhat other purposes, another of these alleged tunnels apparently went from the criminal court The Old Bailey to the nearby church, St Sepulchre so that priests could reach those condemned for an execution.

It has also been posited that there are secret tunnels leading from Buckingham Palace to the Tube and Whitehall.

As for what these gentlemen did underground, or even what they do today within the walls of their clubs, remains something of a mystery.

Graham Snell, the club secretary at Brook’s on St. James Street, wasn’t giving anything away, and says that he has seen no evidence of these tunnels at his club that dates back to 1762.

He did, however, share stories on other tunnels running underneath the City, used for safer transportation of money, including one that, he says, his father saw running through someone’s living room.

Bodenham believes that unfortunately many of the tunnels have been filled in with rubble over the years, as it was an easy way of avoiding having to remove rubble when carrying out building work. So, London’s tunnels aren’t about to give up their many and varied secrets anytime soon.

After watching the first season of Lifetime’s freshman drama series UnREAL, you may feel at once gratified and disturbed, aroused and disgusted, excited and depressed. And while navigating the tension between all of these opposing forces, you’ll arrive at the conclusion that you just discovered what has become the most unlikely—but unequivocally—best show on TV this summer.

We’re as surprised as you are.

This is a TV series that is about the creation of a fictional Bachelor-like reality TV show. Its title is infuriatingly capitalized. It airs on Lifetime, for God’s sake—a fact that you tend to forget as you become enrapt in the psychological warfare taking place between these characters, but then are brutally reminded of during commercial breaks when ads play for some seventh-circle-of-hell series called Little Women: LA.

Oh right, you remember in those moments. This series really is on Lifetime. On paper, nothing about this show indicates how good it is.

But no show this summer has been as addicting, as complex, or as juicy as UnREAL. No show is as dark and bleakly honest about the worst parts of human nature, but still as permissive of our embracing of those very things. It’s a highbrow take on a lowbrow form of entertainment, but that leans in to the sordidness of reality TV with such enlightened and straightforward care that the pleasure of it comes guilt-free.

The season finale airs Monday night. For the love of Chris Harrison—or, hell, to spite Chris Harrison—you need to watch.

“Give them what they want,” shouts Constance Zimmer, the actress who plays Quinn King, the executive producer of Everlasting, a dating reality show modeled after The Bachelor, in the premiere. “Ponies. Princesses. Love. I don’t know—it’s a bunch of crap anyways.”

From the first seconds of UnREAL the curtain is pulled back on what goes into making a reality TV show: how the drama is conjured, how the contestants are manipulated, how ignorant and also how complicit contestants are about the whole thing.

It’s a brilliant conceit, too. Reality TV was supposed to be the curtain-less medium, a voyeur’s look into the lives of other people, unfiltered. Dating series like The Bachelor, or Everlasting in this case, were supposed to reassure us that fairy tales are real—because happily ever after was happening before our eyes, on reality TV with real people.

UnREAL, then, is as cruel as it is cathartic. It confirms what we’ve long suspected but didn’t really want to acknowledge: there is a curtain. And the people behind it are writing these fairy tales as they go along. Then, it tears down that curtain, revealing that these reality TV puppet masters might actually be the delusional, borderline psychotic, at once relatable and unfathomably dramatic “characters” we’re tuning into these TV shows to see. No manipulation required.

There’s Zimmer’s Quinn, whose jadedness when it comes to the deceitful nature of her job—fooling a nation into thinking that Everlasting is real, and ruining the lives of the contestants along the way—is actually portrayed in a way that’s empowering and almost heroic.

Her battle cries to her team of producers—“Cash bonuses for nudity, 911 calls, and cat fights.” “I need a sound bite before she goes.”—quickly have you cheering along, too, and then reevaluating whether you’ve gone insane for rooting for such behavior.

But moral ambiguity and deals with the devil are marching orders in the business of reality TV, and as audience members we’re also reporting for duty.

How quickly we learn that everyone has an agenda.

The contestants want fame, and are willing to sacrifice dignity for it and even their own common sense; even the smartest ones begin to believe this is true love. The suitor himself has an endgame, and romance is the least of it. And we, the audience, simply want to be entertained, so much so that we’re willing to ignore our own conscience telling us that this isn’t real, or, worse, that people’s lives are being compromised at the expense of our own enjoyment.

And there are the show’s producers, including UnREAL’s multilayered protagonist Rachel Goldberg, played by the superb Shiri Appleby. Like Quinn, Rachel messes with your mind. You can’t shake your instinct that Rachel is a good person, even as she double-crosses, lies to, and manipulates the Everlasting contestants into betraying their feelings in order to do what the show needs in order to be good TV.

She is such a complicated character study, a person who feels abundant guilt over what she’s doing, but also a person who is excellent at her job and takes pride in how good she is at it. It just so happens that when she is firing on all cylinders at her place of work, she is also manipulating people, compromising her morals, and possibly destroying lives.

The sliding scale between her guilt over it all and her resignation to it drives the season’s emotional arc, and the constant vacillation between the two is what keeps the show from becoming too preachy—or, on the other hand, too deranged to enjoy.

“Maybe I’m sick of being a manipulative bitch,” Rachel tells Quinn at one defeated moment. “That’s who we are,” Quinn says back, and no moment this summer TV season is as validating. 

These are characters that annoy you, disgust you, and who you might not be able to stomach spending three minutes with in your life, but who you can’t resist adoring as you watch them on TV. All the while, you’re forced to come to terms with the realization that you share much more in common with them than you might like to admit, and, at the very least, understand far more about where they’re coming from than you should.

When was the last time there was this much complexity, this much realness, in a summer TV soap opera?

UnREAL’s greatest asset is an unabashed embrace of the veritable manifesto that drives the reality TV genre it depicts: a lack of pretention. There’s a preciousness and a creative arrogance that’s plaguing what was supposed to be this summer’s best series—Season 2 of True Detective. UnREAL doesn’t come close to falling into that trap. 

It’s as juicy as a reality show, as ridiculous as a soap opera, but still as engaging and mature as a prestige cable drama.

More, it holds a mirror up to our own relationship with the reality TV craze that threatens to herald the nadir of culture while exploring its roots as a noble enterprise. We scoff at the drunken debauchery of the Real Housewives and the mindless vapidness of the Kardashians, yet desperately try to convince ourselves that reality TV has value.

Headlines celebrate the most recent season of The Bachelorette as TV’s most feminist show (seriously), while Caitlyn Jenner’s reality show on E! proves there is power in the medium for confronting culture’s prejudices, educating audiences on our differences, and perhaps inspiring tolerance and social progression.

But UnREAL isn’t reality TV. It’s about reality TV. At its heart, the show is a soap opera filled with cheating spouses and love triangles and suicide, with eating disorders, closeted lesbians, drug binges, mental illness, and all the glorious human issues that the genre loves to exploit as catastrophes.

As audiences and cultural critics, we’re not supposed to like or respect a TV series this soapy, or that legitimizes the worst aspects of reality TV—a genre we’re already trained not to respect. But with a countdown clock that cannot tick quickly enough until Monday night’s season finale, it’s time to admit that this is the cleverest summer TV series we’ve been given in years.

Finally, scripted programming stopped being polite and started getting (un)real.