Thursday, December 17, 2009

"Buppies" Creator Talks Gay Storyline And Why The Down Low Phenomenon Is So Popular With Urban Audiences

"Primetime television watchers still mourning the back-to-back (to back) deaths of Girlfriends, Everybod Hates Chris and The Game, along with daytime soap opera fans, frustrated whenever they tune in to All My Children or The Young and the Restless to find beloved, black characters like Jesse, Angie or Neil being pushed to the side (or off a cliff in the case of Y&R's Drucilla), take heart. The revolution is truly being webivised, thanks to BET.com's wickedly-soaptastic web dramedy Buppies," reports Daytime Confidential.

Buppies creator, Julian Breece, shares with Daytime Confidential.com how his sharp, hilarious, scripted web vehicle (a first of its kind for BET.com) came to be. Breece, also discusses Buppies gay storyline and why the Down Low phenomenon is so popular with urban audiences.

Below is an interview excerpt:
Daytime Confidential: What made you decide to create a series revolving around black Hollywood socialites? 
Julian Breece: Buppies started out as a film school project. When I came up with the idea I’d just moved to Los Angeles and was really intrigued by the Hollywood scene. Anyone who’s worked out here, particularly on the celebrity side, knows that it's a world built completely upon delusion. Sometimes reckless delusion. Then, down the block, you have "black Hollywood," which is reckless delusion times 10, especially when you consider our racial history in this country. You see it and think to yourself, “Hmm, I’m pretty sure this isn’t what Malcolm and Martin had in mind.” So, initially Buppies was meant to be a pure, Curb Your Enthusiam-style comedy that parodied the black elite. This was about five years pre-Obama, mind you, and it’s an approach that wouldn’t be timely now. So, when I developed the series for the web, I decided to make the show more relationship-driven, and flesh out the universal themes of the show. The backdrop is Hollywood, but at its core, Buppies is a story about young people struggling to figure out who they really are in a world where nothing's how it seems. 
Daytime Confidential: I know I am still going through my quarter life crisis, seven years later! In addition to an "A" storyline revolving around Quinci coming to terms with both the death of her father, a Hollywood mover and shaker, and her ex's betrayal, Buppies features a down low gay thread with sports agent Eliot (Preston Davis) and pro football player Truth (Damian Wigfall) as its "B" storyline. Why do you think the Down Low phenomenon is so popular with urban audiences? 
Julian Breece: Fear and curiosity. It’s funny because the last thing I wanted to do was create a “Down Low” storyline or elaborate on that directly, because I think it’s kind of tired. Quincy Lennear and Deondray Gosset’s D.L. Chronicles was a incredibly thoughtful, well-done series that I think put that whole issue to bed narratively. So with Buppies, I wanted to meet people where they still are with D.L. hysteria, but explore the flipside. Bisexuality is real, and every guy who’s bisexual isn’t cheating. In fact, the ones I know tend to be more monogamous and honest with their parnters than my straight friends. A liar is a liar, a cheater is a cheater. Sexual orientation has no immediate bearing on that, and with the Eliot character I really wanted to explore that notion. 
Read full interview here.
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