Augmented Reality: The Television Mind of Mona Scott-Young
Scott-Young’s shows have a paradoxical mission—to dignify her subjects while teasing out the melodrama of their lives.
Scott-Young seems to see herself as a kind of champion for the unrefined underdog; she has argued that it would have been a kind of internal racism to try to exclude certain black people from her series because of their seedier backgrounds or personas. “The stories we are telling are these specific stories of women who navigate the world in this way,” she told me at one point in our conversation. “This is what happens in the hip-hop space, same with things that come with being in rock and roll, in any genre,” she said. “It’s sad for me that we still have yet to embrace the full spectrum of who we are, from the Jocelyn Hernandezes to the Nene Leakeses to the Oprah Winfreys to the Michelle Obamas. Why are we not allowed to celebrate all parts of us? They are a product of their experiences.”
“What we’re doing is stringing it so that the narrative is tightly woven, so it plays out more like a soap opera. And we’re setting it in beautiful backdrops and lighting it beautifully and making sure our cast looks beautiful,” she said. Scott-Young feels that brown skin is often badly lit on television. “We were not going to turn cameras on them and all of a sudden have them looking grainy and ashy and crazy. They needed to look just as beautiful as they did in real life.”
“What’s been most gratifying is to see how completely we’ve permeated the culture,” she went on. “When people are shouting you out in songs, when the President of the United States, Barack Obama, is shouting you out, you’ve made it.” She turned back to the editing screen in the studio. “People were saying, ‘What are you so happy about? He’s dissing you, I think!’ I’m, like, ‘The point is, he’s watching.’
