“It’s Incumbent Upon All of Us to Have These Conversations”
Not long after Bravo canceled Queer Eye for the Straight Guy in 2007, the show’s creators thought their showbiz careers were over. Despite masterminding one of the 21st century’s seminal reality TV hits, David Collins, Rob Eric and Michael Williams — the team behind Scout Productions, founded in 1994 as a scrappy indie film outfit based out of Boston — were struggling to find another hit now that they’d been rebranded as unscripted lifestyle guys. “In 2004, we won an Oscar for The Fog of War and an Emmy for Queer Eye,” Collins says. “Two years after that, we could not get arrested. There was a moment where I was like, ‘All right, am I going to become a barista?’ ”