New show on Lifetime

The drama (premiering June 1) is a fictitious look at the chaos surrounding production of a “Bachelor”-esque dating competition, where an idealistic young producer (Shiri Appleby) struggles with the moral quandaries of manipulating contestants’ relationships to get outrageous footage for her demanding executive producer (Constance Zimmer).

“It’s a fishbowl of people that are all looking for love — contestants and producers behind the scenes, ” co-creator Sarah Gertrude Shapiro tells The Post. “The fact that they’re all trapped and all really desperate and hungry and lonely and tired and striving is a crazy, amazing place to set a show.”

Shapiro once worked in reality TV (though for legal reasons, she can’t say which show) and was inspired to write a (non-autobiographical, she stresses) series about discovering the price of a soul is only a paycheck.

“Emotionally, that moment when you realize how far you’ve gone and you can’t even really look in the mirror … There’s the person you think you are and then there’s the person you are 12 hours a day, seven days a week, ” she says. “Eventually, that becomes who you actually are.”