

The original watch was based on the A-11, a time-only watch with no elapsed time accumulator, that rang in at 32mm. I wonder if it’s because that buyer in the room isn’t Black.The case profile, at 42mm wide and 14mm tall, certainly lends itself to giving the watch a "modern" presence on the wrist. “I have brought those families to buyers, families of A-list Black entertainers, and they haven’t committed.

“I can’t tell you how many times someone has asked me for the next Kardashians,” says Jenkins. Jenkins, a veteran of reality powerhouse Bunim Murray who launched his own production company with 3 Ball Media Group in 2019, bemoans the lack of people of color he sees when he goes into a pitch. A show filming today might not air for a year.”Īs is the case in many corners of the entertainment industry, the ones with greenlight power are also still overwhelmingly white. “I think buyers are embracing change,” says Jeff Jenkins, the producer behind the recent Paris Jackson docuseries Unfiltered, “but change comes slow. And several producers cite multiple networks that have engaged in dialogues about including more people of color in casting submissions.
Star watch case company dead reckoning series#
Bravo, which also parted ways with a castmember of the series Below Deck Mediterranean, is said to have increased the vetting process across the board. These latest firings, and the broader cultural reckoning that inspired them, have left many in the industry scrambling to avoid future missteps. That means getting on the phone and cold-calling a lot of people.” “A large part of the vetting process is finding trust from a community, not just the one person. “The new route of casting is going through social media, but you’re only seeing one side of a person,” says Tanania.

(Scandal, after all, is hardly a new development for the genre.)

They also pointed to one lazy casting approach as a reason why so many reality shows end up with bad apples. The pair, who say they felt they had to stack the deck with queer people and people of color during the aughts, describe the genre’s representation issue as one that’s been improving. Lucente and his business partner Risa Tanania did casting for the Netflix series Dating Around, a show that bucks familiar reality formulas by highlighting a wide range of races, age groups and sexual orientations. “There needs to be a greater emphasis on casting different kinds of people from the beginning,” says casting director Anthony Lucente, “because most of the people who apply for these shows are the ones who already see themselves on TV.” In it, she recalled roadblocks where she was told not to cast applicants who were “too Black.” Multiple casting professionals and unscripted producers who spoke to The Hollywood Reporter shared similar examples on other projects, pointing to a history of tokenism that follows the genre.īlack people tend to be the only or one of very few when cast on shows with predominantly white casts - or part of reality shows crafted for Black audiences like VH1’s Love & Hip-Hop franchise. “Casting should never be about how many BIPOC you can throw into one show.”Ĭollins, who worked on five seasons of The Bachelor franchise, recently posted an open letter to ABC in the wake of Matt James being named the franchise’s first male Black lead. “For years, networks have treated casting diverse groups of people like fulfilling a quota,” says casting producer Jazzy Collins. Reality casting, from representation to vetting, demands more scrutiny from networks. Bravo axed the pair, along with two co-stars with a history of racist tweets, Max Boyens and Brett Caprioni, days after Stowers recounted the event during a June 2 Instagram Live - but the need for such a purge on a nearly exclusively white series highlights a pervasive problem facing TV’s most prolific genre. Stassi Schroeder and Kristen Doute, longtime stars of Real Housewives spinoff Vanderpump Rules, called the police on former castmate Faith Stowers in 2018 in an attempt to implicate her in a crime she did not commit.
