Amanda Seales is saying farewell to daytime talk show The Real.
“My contract is up … and I didn’t renew it, because it doesn’t feel good to my soul to be at a place where I cannot speak to my people the way they need to be spoken to,” Seales said during an Instagram Live earlier this week. “And where the people who are speaking to me in disparaging ways, are not being handled,” she added.
Sources tell Deadline she was offered a new deal, but declined to stay.
“I’m not in a space where I can, as a full black woman, have my voice and my co-workers also have their voices and where the people at the top are not respecting the necessity for black voices to be at the top too,” Seales said.
Seales had served as a guest co-host several times in 2019 before becoming a permanent co-host in early January, joining Loni Love, Jeannie Mai, Tamera Mowry-Housley and Adrienne Houghton.
She later posted a follow-up statement that her decision to exit the show had nothing to do with her co-hosts.
“Do not try to create some false dissention between me and the co-hosts of The Real. Y’all so f***ing corny,” she said. “There is a whole pandemic and an uprising going on, and you still can’t find s*** else to do but try and create some kind of conflict that doesn’t exist? … What I gotta do with my business ain’t got nothing to do with them sisters.”
Seales is known for her role as Tiffany DuBois on HBO’s Insecure and her debut stand-up special, I Be Knowin’. She is also the creator/host of the live music + game show, Smart Funny & Black and hosts weekly podcast, Small Doses.
The Real is in its sixth season on Fox Television Stations and in national syndication, with a rebroadcast on cable network Bounce. Produced by Warner Bros. Television Distribution, the show was renewed for its seventh and eighth seasons in November 2019, taking it through the 2021–2022 television season.