Buppies gets picked up by BET!

Taken from the Wall Street Journal:

For most people, getting an Ivy League degree provides a career boost. But when actress Tatyana Ali returned to acting after graduating from Harvard in 2002, she found it hard to get work in Hollywood.

“I’d been gone for awhile,” says Ali, 30 years old, who co-starred with Will Smith in the sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” early in her career. “That difficulty is what prompted me to start the production company.”

Ali and her sister and business partner, Anastasia, contacted a friend from school, Julian Breece, who’d approached her years earlier with an idea for a television show. The networks passed on the idea, so Ali and Breece looked to the Web, with Ali producing and Breece writing and directing. Independently financing and producing the show gave them complete creative control, from writing in gay characters to casting mostly black actors.

“Doing a Web series, working in this new medium, you have a little bit more autonomy, an ability to tell the story you want to tell,” Ali says.

With a little help from Will Smith’s Overbrook Entertainment, Breece and Ali brought their show to BET. The result is “Buppies,” premiering Tuesday on BET.com. The show is BET’s first original Web series. It’s not the first Web series to feature a predominately black cast, but with BET’s promotion of the show online and on TV, it is arguably the most high-profile.

“BET was definitely not a part of my plan at all,” says Breece. “But a lot of black people flock to the Web for content. I just feel like it’s the new frontier.”

“Buppies” dramatizes the life of Quinci (played by Ali) a socialite and publicist dealing with the loss of her father and the end of a relationship, all amidst the glamour and gossip of Hollywood.

For Ali, who has been readying a pop/R&B album for a spring release, part of the appeal of doing “Buppies” is to show networks that black content can draw viewers.

In past decades, network television featured such black-themed shows as “The Jeffersons,” “The Cosby Show,” “In Living Color,” and “A Different World,” but there are currently no shows with majority black casts that draw the attention of those past programs.

With Ice Cube, Idris Elba, Don Cheadle and Aaron McGruder all producing new series for broadcast and cable networks, that might change in the next few years.

Ali, along with producers Martin Lawrence, Raphael Saadiq and Bentley Kyle Evans (”Martin,” “The Jamie Foxx Show”) have shot four episodes of series called “Love that Girl” and are shopping it to different networks.

“You can only wait around for auditions for so long, wait around for that perfect role for so long,” Ali says about her producing efforts. “As soon as you set out and say: ‘you know what forget everybody, I’m just going to make my own thing, make my own way.’ That’s when you start getting work!”

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You can see the original post with pics from the making of Buppies here:

http://eggfurious.blogspot.com/2008/11/buppies.html

And the official BUPPIES website is here: http://buppies.bet.com

Yay!!! World domination!!!!