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It’s safe to say that Victoria Rowell is the franchise player for UMC, the streaming platform featuring urban-themed TV series and movies. Rowell, 61, has a handful of projects on UMC, the network formed in 2015 by BET founder Robert Johnson and owned by AMC. Her do-it-yourself series, “Trash vs. Treasure,” is going strong while …
It’s safe to say that Victoria Rowell is the franchise player for UMC, the streaming platform featuring urban-themed TV series and movies.
Rowell, 61, has a handful of projects on UMC, the network formed in 2015 by BET founder Robert Johnson and owned by AMC.
Her do-it-yourself series, “Trash vs. Treasure,” is going strong while the former “Young and the Restless” star, who played Drucilla Winters on the CBS soap, also created and stars in UMC’s award-winning soap “The Rich and the Ruthless” opposite Richard Brooks. It’s loosely based on Rowell’s novels “Secrets of a Soap Opera Diva” and “The Young and the Ruthless.”
Both shows, along with other UMC programming, is also available on Amazon Prime and Roku.
“Robert Johnson always saw the void in black content in movies and TV and gave me the opportunity to have a platform with ‘The Rich and the Ruthless,’ ” says Rowell, who expects the series — she calls it a “dramcom” — to return for a fourth season. “It’s a hybrid between ‘Soap Dish’ and ’30 Rock’ and … we’ve proven it’s possible to have a black-led soap opera in comedy or drama.
“It’s a fun and zany show and goes behind-the-scenes into the machinations of a family with two backstabbing adult kids,” she says. “It amplifies my love of soaps.”
Rowell’s film, “Everything is Fine,” will stream on BET HER as part of the network’s mental health initiative, and she plays a doctor in the BET movies “A Long Look in the Mirror” and “Like, Comment, Subscribe,” directed, respectively, by Vanessa Bell Calloway and Sheryl Lee Ralph. Those will air in October for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
In “Trash vs. Treasure,” Rowell helps families living on the poverty line spruce up their homes with useful everyday items. She says the series grew out of the 18 years she spent in foster care.
“One of my foster mothers collected antiques and I would get excited when we went to Goodwill — it was a treasure hunt for me,” she says. “I’m still a big customer of Goodwill and Habitat for Humanity and various vintage shops and garage sales.”
In Thursday’s episode, Rowell helps Angel, a recovering addict living with five kids in one room. “What I do is assess their space and then make a budget and make space out of that space,” she says. “My goal is to make this show a teachable moment … to look at [items] in plain sight for people with no discretionary income. There are so many resources within their grasp. In this episode, an ironing board becomes a dining room table that will seat four people, or a desk. You can stack milk crates that serve as barstools or chairs.
“What I try to do is pass along knowledge … and practical thinking,” she says. “You don’t need a lot of money to live in beauty.”
In next week’s “Trash vs. Treasure” episode, Rowell travels to Kingston, Jamaica, where she helps a mother of two who works as a street sweeper and earns around $50 a week. “I’ve been going to Jamaica since the ’70s and I’ve developed a good relationship with the country,” she says. “I’ve worked with orphanages in Kingston and I screen a movie there every Christmas for different group homes.”
Rowell, who’s been outspoken about the lack of diversity in the world of daytime network soaps, says there’s still a lot of work to be done in that area.
“I’ve done a metric analysis of all the soaps going back to the days of radio,” she says. “There’s been over 600 years of aggregate soap airtime and no black executive producers or head writers. I love daytime and I loved working on ‘The Young and the Restless’ but … I do hope we can catch up because we’re way behind.”
