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Answers by Eva Longoria, Producer, Director, Activist and star of NBC's 'Telenovela', on Quora.
A: Nothing is new, we have all been talking about this for years. I believe that "you can't be what you can't see," and I think this especially rings true here. But a bigger question is how are we to expect to be cast for roles when we don't even have a seat at the table in the boardroom, in the casting chair, in the writer's room? What I can say, and what has changed over the years is social media. These discussions are more public and change is imminent.
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A: We were five female leads on a primetime television show in a landscape that proved that women could be funny, complex, vulnerable, while maintaining a little bit of edge. We premiered to 21.3 million viewers - unheard of this day in age - and overnight connected to a large audience. I feel like I won the lottery with Desperate Housewives, which is also the reason why I made a conscious decision not to jump right back into television afterwards. I really wanted my return to TV to be something I loved because Desperate Housewives had been so amazing.
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A: I had the idea for a while in my head, and we had a couple of writers take a stab at it to try to create this world. Cable has really influenced the way broadcast television does one-hour dramas. Everybody wants Game of Thrones. Everybody wants Homeland, but that didn't happen in comedy. There's no evolution in comedy happening at the moment, so I wanted to really move comedy forward. What's a new world that we haven't seen? What's some new characters that we haven't seen? When I saw the first script our writers wrote, I fell in love. I knew this was it. Originally the role of Ana Sophia wasn't meant for me, but I loved it so much I knew I had to play her.
- Directing: What is it like to direct a TV episode that you also star in? Are there difficulties in doing this?
- Latino Ethnicity and People: How should Hollywood fix the problem of underrepresentation of African-American & Latino writers and actors?
- Telenovelas: Why are telenovelas so popular in Latin America?