*Looks like the teeny, tiny chink in Tyler Perry‘s armor has been found. He is obviously quite irritated by the fact that some black folks are not feeling his fray into mainstream TV.
If you haven’t heard, the criticism that’s being directed towards is Perry is because of production his TLC series, “Too Close to Home.” He’s characterizing it as “reverse racism.”
“That’s totally reverse racism because it was coming from African-American people,” Perry, who has directed 16 films and created numerous TV shows, told the Associated Press. “I don’t know if it was because they thought I should only be giving jobs to black people. Well, I think that’s ridiculous. If you look at the hundreds of black people I’ve given jobs to and even the ones I’ve made millionaires, people of color, I just think it’s unfair.”
Others would say boo-hoo, Tyler. It’s real simple, actually. You branded yourself with African American audiences who’ve supported you through thick and thin. They expect BLACK oriented productions from you. Period. End of story. With this move, they feel like you’re abandoning them.
So, with that in mind, check out his explanation as to why he decided to break precedent with “Too Close to Home,” which premiered in August and returns to TLC on Wednesday.
“I’m just finding out more as I travel the country and world, the more I meet people, we’re all the same,” he said. “We all got the same dramas. So I’m not seeing color as much as I did anymore in the sense of our stories. Our stories are so similar.”
In any event, he says by the end of the season, a lot of the hate turned into praise for the series.
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When he got a call from Discovery Communications president David Zaslav (Discovery owns the TLC network), he was initially hesitant to take on the project. But once he began creating some of the characters in the writing process, he felt more confident about moving forward with the project.
The AP story shares that in writing the script, Perry offers a glimpse of his own experiences of once living in a trailer park community with other relatives in a small Louisiana town.
“I know that world very well,” said Perry. “The same stories I’m relating to and telling, it could be anyone black or white. I’m not trying to the shine a light on a certain stereotype or certain people in a trailer park. It’s my own experiences from having spent time and sleeping there.”
“Too Close to Home” stars Danielle Savre (“Heroes”) as a young woman who returns to her old life in Alabama, having fled from Washington D.C. after her affair with the president was discovered.
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