‘The Real’: Amanda Seales on Her Infamous Exit – ‘They Had a Really Toxic Work Environment I Wasn’t Willing to Accept’
The Real has been over for some time now, but Amanda Seales won’t be silenced when it comes to discussing her brief stint as a co-host on the now-canceled daytime talk show. Seales was brought in as a replacement for Tamar Braxton, but was gone by the end of her first season. She says she left the show because of censorship issues, and that the show’s culture was toxic behind the scenes.
Amanda Seales says she refused to accept toxicity in the workplace on ‘The Real’
After serving as a guest co-host several times on the show, Seales was announced as a permanent co-host in 2019. Her hiring was met with mixed reactions from fans of the show. She announced her exit via an Instagram interview after just six months on the job.
Seales was not mentioned in the show’s finale, which she took issue with. In an interview with Kandi Burruss on her YouTube show Speak On It, Seales said the executive of the show didn’t like her. She explained:
I think they had a really toxic work environment that I wasn’t willing to accept. At that point, the women of The Real had come to accept it largely because they had been there from the beginning. So it’s a different relationship that they had to that show. I’m coming in fresh off the street like, ‘Y’all doing what? Oh no, I’m not doing that.’ And they would be like, ‘We didn’t even know we could say no.’ One time they were like, ‘We’re going to take your lunch and have you get prepped during lunch,’ and I was like, ‘No ma’am. Can I have my 30 minutes? We’ve been up since 4:30 am. Can I have my 30 minutes to eat my soup without being asked about Justin Beiber’s mustache?’…you start to accept that and you make the adjustments yourself because a lot of times, it’s easier to just make the adjustment yourself than to try and buck the system.
The ‘Insecure’ star says she was hired on the show to be a villain
In retrospect, Seales says her gig on The Real was never going to work out. While chatting with The Breakfast Club, she explained that she was hired under false pretenses. She was under the impression that she was hired to bring more depth to the show, but in reality, it was for her to be combative with her co-hosts. Seales explained:
You start to realize that what you were told is not what it is. And that’s just it. I thought I was being brought in there to elevate conversations, I was told they wanted to have more conversations about stuff going on in the zygotes and social justice, etc. Then I learned that it wasn’t really why I was brought in there, that was a portion. Still, I was really brought in there to kind of be a villain because the women on that show had basically started not having opinions on things because they really didn’t want to deal with the internet response, and they wanted to just keep things chill. And also, they’d been there for so long that they always knew what each other was going to say. So, they brought me in there to shake the table.
She says she was intentionally excluded from the show’s finale
The show played a video montage of its best moments over its eight-season run. Seales was excluded from the montage, though former co-hosts Tamar Braxton and Tamera Mowry were featured. She says she spoke with Jeannie Mai and Adrienne Bailon, and they confirmed her exclusion was on purpose. As for why Braxton was included despite her acrimonious exit after three years on the show, Seales says it was a matter of business politics.
“Tamar had issues, but allegedly she apologized to them, and that’s why she was included, but I have nothing to apologize about,” she explained. “They should be apologizing to me. The leadership of that show should be apologizing to me…Ultimately, they had the decision to do right in this instance, and they chose not to…When you have the opportunity to do right by the people you’ve wronged, take it.”
Seales says she contributed to the success of the show and should have been featured. Moving forward, she doesn’t believe she’ll ever do a daytime roundtable talk show again.
