The Root: Why I Decided to Do A Reality Show

Monday morning, entertainment trade magazine the Hollywood Reporter broke the news of an upcoming reality show, Blood, Sweat & Heels, which will debut on Bravo on Jan. 5. Since taping began in the spring, I’d been biting my tongue for months, alternately excited to reveal the news to my readers and, to be honest, afraid of what the reaction would be.

There’s no sense in beating around the clichéd bush: There are a lot of people who don’t think highly of reality TV or reality-TV stars, especially when there are black women involved. The women are all thought to be exploited or selling their souls, either searching for a quick come-up or in a desperate hunt for what Andy Warhol called “15 minutes of fame.”

I’ve been highly critical in my writing of the fighting, the bottle throwing and, in general, the bad behavior by women and men who have been depicted under the guise of entertainment. And yet I signed on to participate in a reality show anyway.

It’s not for the money. The salary for a starting season isn’t a number most would find impressive. And while there’s an opportunity to make some coin, most people don’t, and an uncommon number even lose all that they gain. Earlier this year the Huffington Post looked at the number of women with money problems among the 67 in Bravo’sReal Housewives franchise, and found that a startling 12 had filed for bankruptcy. My lawyer conveniently sent me a link to that story just before I signed my contract for the show. I still signed the contract.

I began blogging in 2006 because I couldn’t find a “character” like me on TV or in media, period. It had been years since Living Single went off the air, and as much as I loved Tracee Ellis Ross in Girlfriends, I needed an East Coast girl to relate to. I was a huge fan of Sex and the City and wondered how, in all of New York City, where people of color outnumber white folks, there wasn’t a black woman or any woman of color on the show. Black shows always got a token white person; why didn’t this white show?

I wanted to see a black woman who treated her city like a social playground, who thrived in her profession or was at least climbing the ladder, who had her relationship ups and downs as I did (and do) but still managed to have fun and remain optimistic. Black women were too often portrayed as tragic, excessively struggling, loving the wrong men hard and getting bitter as a result. That’s a story of black women, but it isn’t the only story, and it wasn’t my story or the story of the women I surrounded myself with. I was complaining that there were no women like me in media, until I stopped whining and started typing.

My blog was published on HoneyMag.com in 2007 and was immediately successful. Apparently, there were a lot of women like me, looking for someone like them. Who knew? The popularity of that blog led me to a position as the relationships editor at Essence magazine in 2007, where I eventually landed my own column about dating and relationships, which earned an award for Best Personal Blog in 2010. Then I earned a book deal based on my blog in 2011.

I’m told that a casting director of Blood, Sweat & Heels found me when she Googled “the Black Carrie Bradshaw,” a phrase that was used to describe me when the Washington Post did a profile about my blog and dating adventures in 2010. The producers originally conceived the show as a black Sex and the City, and I was a fit. When my manager told me about the show, the first thing I said was something like, “I’m not the black version of a white fictional TV character. I’m me. They have to want that.”

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