Queer Eye star Karamo Brown wants to fix America's relationships with new talk show
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When the Queer Eye crowd sees Karamo Brown, the show's culture expert, they expect some kind of catharsis by the end of his therapy sessions with makeover subjects. A happy ending. But not all conflicts have those.
On the first day of filming his self-titled daytime talk show at the Stamford Media Center in Connecticut in late August, Brown, 41, sits down with two guests. The host is sporting a monochromatic look with a charcoal grey tee beneath a light grey suit as he listens to these women explain why they keep pushing their wedding date: Auggie believes her girlfriend, C.B., is cheating on her and stealing her identity.
There's some fairly compelling evidence, but each time Brown asks why they're still together, Auggie can't give a reasonable answer. It soon becomes hard to discern what's happening in the studio space as both guests begin shouting over each other to get their voices heard. The threat of Brown losing control of the dialogue is noticeable, but he firmly cuts through the noice and makes a finite decision, probably not the one they want to hear: They need to break up.
"I've had an ex's name tattooed on me before. It's OK. You can cover it up," he tells Auggie. Was that shade? Perhaps. The audience eats it up.
This isn't the kind of response one might expect from the Queer Eye star, and even Brown admits backstage during the break that particular conversation became a little too heated for his liking. But this isn't Queer Eye. As Brown tells his TV audience who came to fill the seats, "I'm trying to fix America's relationships. I'm over it!" Whatever that takes, he's in.
Heidi Gutman/NBCUniversal 'Queer Eye' star Karamo Brown headlines his own daytime talk show, 'Karamo.'
Speaking over the phone weeks later, en route from the airport in New York in mid-September, Brown says "the kinks" have been mostly smoothed out since that frenzied first day making Karamo. "I had to have a direct conversation with my producers and said that we would never have somebody like that," he recalls of that moment with Auggie and C.B. "Arguing and screaming is not my jam, and that's not healthy communication."
Now, Brown will vet each guest just before they are about to go onstage. If he feels their intentions aren't genuine, he'll cut them from the show then and there. "What I've showed people from Queer Eye is that if you want to communicate, you can talk about your challenges without screaming at somebody. That needs to be learned on TV, so that people in their homes who don't have the tools can see this."
That seems to be Brown's intent with the show. It's not just about helping people, which he says is his essential mission. It's about the way he helps people: giving his guests those tools they need to deal with conflict. "I don't shy away from people in challenges. I think that's where the growth happens for all of us as human beings," he remarks. "What I do believe in is that there has to be resolution. You have to walk away with tools — and I'm trained to get people those tools."
The discussions are going to be messier than what people have seen on Queer Eye. That's because the producers on the Netflix show, Brown says, "edit out the tougher pieces of the conversation" with the makeover subjects so that "it stays one tone." Brown wants to have those tough conversations. The situation with Auggie and C.B. fell apart due to an unwillingness he felt to participate in the process.
"On my show, I have to call a spade a spade, and I have sometimes only 15 minutes to do it," Brown continues. "Queer Eye, I can spend a whole week with someone. I'm able to talk them through and be gentle with it. But I'm in a moment right now where it's like, 'We got to call this BS. This is BS and if you want to accept the BS quickly, we can start to grow.' I think people are not used to that."
Brown doesn't want Karamo to be like other shows in the conflict TV space, either. Though, he credits Maury Povich (Brown once guest-hosted episodes of Maury), Sally Jessy Raphael, and Montel Williams as inspirations. For one, there will be no lie detectors on Karamo. It's not a helpful tool. Brown explains, "The way that our body works with the stress and anxiety, those tests aren't accurate. So if we're going to do something to show someone the proof that they need to grow, then let's be accurate about it."
A segment he does implement is unlocking phones. A willing guest will turn over their smart phones for the producers to search through. "I have a whole team that literally unlocks someone's phone all the way back to 10 years," Brown notes. "Even if you think you deleted something, we find it." The intent is not to be salacious. "I do that because we live in a digital age where people are like, 'I don't know this person,' and our phones do know us because we do everything on it. If you give me permission, I'm going to find the information you need so that you can grow and get to the next place."
As a gay Black man, Brown also wants to approach both of those communities differently. Watching daytime TV obsessively as a kid growing up in Houston, Texas, he remembers Jerry Springer bringing gay men who were married to women on the stage, or trans people with photos of their pre-transitioned bodies projected on screens. "There will be no sensationalism of the gay community," Brown vows of Karamo. "Our stories are real, and they're going to be approached [as] real."
He further points to how "Black people in this country have been through generational trauma," which is something he keeps in mind for his guests. "I acknowledge that trauma because I lived in that trauma, and I'm going to make sure that it is not exploited."
Brown regularly refers to his own story when filming the show. He and his father were estranged for more than 20 years after he came out as gay. "We had no relationship," Brown says. His dad had also been abusive to his mother and fathered a child with another woman they didn't know about until that child was a teen. "I was the one who found out," Brown says. "And it broke up our family in a way that you can't imagine."
Brown's family — including his parents, his brother, one of his sisters, a few cousins, and the mother of his son — were in the audience for Brown's first day shooting Karamo that August day. It was an emotional moment for the newly minted talk-show host. Tears began welling up as he took the stage for a meet-and-greet before cameras officially rolled, while his resident DJ blasted Ye's "Good Life."
The significance of that family presence was not lost on Brown. "To have them there," he says, "was not only a testament to my growth and my family's healing and the work that I've done on my family, but also a reminder for me to look at my guests and say, 'Nope! Whatever you're going through, I know you can get through it because my family is literally sitting here and we have the same issue.'"
Karamo premieres Monday, Sept. 19.
Make sure to check out EW's Fall TV Preview cover story — as well as all of our 2022 Fall TV Preview content, releasing over 22 days through Sept. 29.
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