The problem with reality TV is that creative writers are not involved; TV folks are, and some journalists who will only mine the surface of subjects. Hard work necessary for discovering and delineating the intimacies of the subjects they capture is mostly avoided.
The only difference in reality TV and the other TV is that the scriptwriters for reality TV are not union. I have been on reality TV shows. Believe me, my friends: It's not just improv and whatever happens when the cameras are rolling.
I have no control, of course, over how I'm marketed. It's a sad thing, though, that so many people perceive literature to be gendered. The idea that some subjects are male and some are female is just preposterous to me. It's reductive and nonsensical, to separate writers and subjects and plots along gender lines. It's meaningless.
Even though I've mostly done movies, TV has developed in such a wonderful way over the past few years in the sense that film directors are being involved and some fantastic actors are committing to seasons of series. There are some fantastic writers working in that medium right now.
I really wanted to feel strong, I wanted my subjects to feel strong, but I didn't know how to do that. It's really hard for, I guess, every woman to not internalize misogyny. I just learned as I went on how to best capture my subjects without objectifying them.
writers do not find subjects: subjects find them. There is not so much a search as a state of open susceptibility.
I was on the wrong side of colonization. My ancestry is mostly mired in having the colonial experience as colonized subjects, first as slaves and then as independent subjects with a post-colonial experience.
The amount of work that TV writers and executives do is incredibly hard. I'm shocked that these people will hand in three outlines and two scripts, and everybody has to read them and give notes on all of them, even the writers.
I have always chosen subjects which are little different, and not subjects that you see. That challenges me and the actors who work in the project.
For all reality TV, and all the viewers of reality TV, just be entertained. Don't invest your feelings, your heart, your soul into reality TV. It is entertainment. And that's all that it should be.
I don't think writers really choose their subjects. I think the subjects, the topics, the themes, choose us, and then we make the most of what we have. For Trollope, society; for Roth, Jews. For me, apparently, love. Why hide it?
TV and film are very different media with different requirements. In a TV show, you have actors and fellow writers and directors, who are interpreting your work. With a novel, you only have ink, words and your reader.
Without arts programmes there's only reality TV, and reality TV needs the arts to show it what reality is.
For those that have said I seemed dickish to some of the nuttier guests on Joe Rogan Questions Everything - guilty as charged. As the season wore on I lost my patience with some of those folks unfortunately. I think I overdosed on ridiculous/likely fake stories. I certainly learned a lot about the kind of people that invest a large portion of their life on fringe subjects - they're all white. I think there's something interesting about the subjects, (UFOS, etc) but the study of them has often been overrun by silly thinking.
I think something very simple that everybody can do is they can participate in medical research as subjects. Personal genome project, for example, will take on as many subjects as we can find.
If people can't take the heat and can't take the controversy then they shouldn't be involved in advertising of reality TV because there is so much heat and controversy in reality TV.
I'm a musician. I've done TV, but I've never really been a reality TV star, and it's not the route I'm looking to go down, and when I do TV, I want it to be connected to music.