'The Real' celebrates diversity on daytime TV

theGRIO REPORT - While historically, talk shows have centered around white women, the latest in daytime programming, 'The Real,' demonstrates women of color are boldly and enthusiastically taking over the scene...

Courtney Garcia

Jul 15, 2013

The times, they are a changin’ shades.

While historically, talk shows have centered around white women, the latest in daytime programming demonstrates women of color are boldly and enthusiastically taking over the scene.

Along with CBS’s upcoming The Queen Latifah Show and Aspire’s Exhale, this week Fox premieres The Real, a daily talk show featuring Tamera Mowry-Housley, Tamar Braxton, Loni Love, Jeannie Mai, and Adrienne Bailon.

That’s five women of diverse backgrounds, and no white folks.

“The girls joke and say I’m the white one just because I’m half-white,” Mowry-Housley tells theGrio.

“We speak freely,” Bailon points out. “No one holds back or is worried about offending anyone…The five of us just had the best chemistry. And it goes against the stereotype that in order for a show to work there has to be a white girl.”

A show reflecting America

From home-concocted remedies for beautifying your “vajayjay” to scheduling in time for sex, The Real keeps it sensational, yet honest without restriction.

Black, Latina, Asian and interracial, the show serves as a mirror of American society, and a voice echoing the crowds on its streets.

It arrives on the heels of programs like The View and The Talk, after Oprah Winfrey built a monarch and Wendy Williams further proved women of color mattered on daytime.

Additionally, the influence of the HBO series Sex and the City, which opened the door for provocative commentary on sex and relationships, seems inherent.

“They’ve never had anything like this on TV,” says Bailon, former star of Disney’s The Cheetah Girls. “A cast that reflects what America really looks like: multicultural. And for the first time, there will be a Latina representing on daytime television.”

However race doesn’t necessarily drive conversations on the show.

Every host expresses a vantage not simply related to the color of her skin, but the story of her journey.

Mai, who most know as the star of Style Network’s How Do I Look, brings to the roundtable her Bay Area panache, and stilettos as bold as her trademark blue highlights.

“It’s not so much my ethnicity that plays a big role in everything I do, it’s my culture,” she explains. “Being raised first generation Vietnamese Chinese American, growing up in the Bay Area where I was influenced by so much creativity and self expression, all of these attributes formed the way I think and behave today. I think it’s important to be known for your identity and represent the parts that influenced you, and not just be characterized as a color.”

Testing the limits of pop culture

On the series premiere, The Real women settle into a set flanked by hues of purple, gold and silver to hash out their thoughts on celebrity baby names, ‘twerking,’ and shoe preference. Rapper The Game later arrives as the show’s first guest.

Future visitors include actress Lauren London (BET’s The Game), Kody Brown (TLC’s Sister Wives), Daymond John (ABC’s Shark Tank) and Patti Stanger (Bravo’s The Millionaire Matchmaker).

Younger, energized and ready to get to the bottom of every sex toy on the market, the women of The Real admit they haven’t got their lives completely together yet, and that’s part of the deal.

Braxton, a singer and reality star, contributes her spunky comebacks to the show.

“We want to hear from a girlfriend, from a sister, so this is what you get,” she says. “It’s a really unfiltered perspective.”

Love, a well-known stand-up comedian, adds, “Folks will get to see other layers of me that is just not the funny side. I am single, a former engineer, and a working woman.”