Monique Samuels is making her triumphant return to reality TV with Love & Marriage: DC. To no one’s surprise, she’s trashing The Real Housewives of Potomac while promoting it. Monique’s new reality show on OWN Network premiered last weekend, and she’s opening up about how TV producer Carlos King helped her overcome her “reality TV PTSD” while building this new show.
“My experience with reality TV has been somewhat of a roller coaster to the point where at the end of it all, I had reality TV PTSD,” Monique muses in the intro of Love & Marriage: DC. It’s a sentiment that she’s expressed multiple times after her tumultuous exit from The Real Housewives of Potomac. But, now that she’s back in the spotlight on OWN Network, she is ready to prove that there’s more to her than binders and brawls.
In an interview with Page Six, Monique opened up about how Love & Marriage’s producer Carlos King helped her leap back into reality TV. Although he definitely has a rich history with The Real Housewives franchise, he convinced Monique that the Love & Marriage: DC experience would be different.
“I didn’t want to do it [at first]. I said, ‘Carlos, I do not want to do another ensemble. I really don’t,'” Monique said. “After talking to him some more, he said, ‘Look, this will be different, I guarantee you.'”
According to Monique, she and her husband, Chris Samuels, got to handpick the ensemble cast for the show. That obviously wasn’t the case on The Real Housewives of Potomac, where she came in during the second season and initially struggled to fit in with the group.
“I was interacting with a group of women who were, for the most part, toxic,” Monique recalled.
She then talked about how Love & Marriage: DC, and the castmates she handpicked, created a more comfortable environment than RHOP. She believes that this show highlights her authentic character more than the “angry” woman she feels she was portrayed to be on Bravo.
“When I was on RHOP, it was always, ‘Oh, let’s show her when she’s angry. Let’s show her when she’s zero to 100,'”
Instead, Monique says we can look forward to seeing her and Chris dive into their marriage issues and work with the other couples to grow in their relationships. Whether that’s the type of thing you’re looking for in a reality TV show or not, Monique promises that we’ll get to know her beyond the draggings we saw her deliver on RHOP.
“This time, you get to see me as the full person that I am,” she said. “In this situation, I’m not being put into a box. I’m not being edited to look only one way. It’s showing me as a wife, a mom, a businesswoman, and a friend. I’m very passionate and felt like a lot of times that was cut away when I was on that other show.”
TELL US – ARE YOU TUNING INTO MONIQUE’S NEW SHOW? DO YOU THINK RHOP PORTRAYED HER IN A BAD LIGHT COMPARED TO OTHER HOUSEWIVES?
[Photo Credit: Bravo]
