Comedian June Diane Raphael on What Makes Netflix So Different From Network TV

Specs Age 36 Claim to fame Co-stars on Netflix's Grace and Frankie (Season 2 now streaming); appears on the upcoming Netflix series Lady Dynamite (May 20) Base Los Angeles Twitter @MsJuneDiane Adweek: What's the first information you consume in the morning? June Diane Raphael: I'll probably look at my phone to see if I have text messages or phone calls, but I'm not necessarily on Twitter or anything like that. Because I have a young child, mornings are madness. What's your go-to social media platform? Even more than Twitter, I follow people on Instagram. I don't know whether I'm getting any information from it, but it's definitely something that I compulsively look through for reasons unknown. I do love Pinterest, I'm not going to lie. It's kind of dangerous. The accounts I follow are all home décor and DIY and beauty, and once you scroll through for a while, you start to feel sick at the distance between your own life and what these other ladies are pinning. Or at least I do. Who do you follow on Instagram? I follow all the Real Housewives. I find them to be so insane and wonderful to watch on television, and they do such a presentation of themselves on Twitter. It's so styled and so thought out. What I appreciate the most are the ads that they're clearly being paid to do that they write the copy for themselves. They try to present it in a casual way—like, "Oh, gosh, my friend was asking me the other day about how my teeth are so white, and here's what I use!" It just makes me laugh. I love all of it. I've drawn the line at following any househusbands, but that's taken a lot of resolve on my part. What's your favorite app? Because I'm pregnant right now, I'm always on the What to Expect app. The message boards on those apps are just so crazy. They can be really wonderful and supportive, but then there's the mommy wars that go on. It gets really heated. The things I've seen, I can barely go into. There was one woman who got in a fight with another woman and started posting as the ghost of her miscarriage. It was one of the most unbelievable things I've ever seen in my life. What podcasts do you listen to? So many. My dear friends Casey Wilson and Danielle Schneider have a podcast called Bitch Sesh, which is all things Real Housewives and Bravo. I love it. I'll also listen to the old standards like This American Life and Radiolab and all that stuff. I'm really into Dear Sugar right now. How about TV shows? I'm on Season 3 of The Americans and I'm loving it. Also, I started watching Shark Tank, which I love, and then I got into Beyond the Tank, which I loved even more, and now I've upgraded to a show that CNBC called The Profit. I'm deep in it. I was out with my girlfriends, and they were talking about celebrity crushes, and they were all, like, "Ryan Gosling!" And I was like, "Marcus Lemonis from The Profit!" [Laughs] And, you know, I'll watch basically anything that Bravo puts out. I do have some limits, though. I won't do Below Deck. For whatever reason, that seemed like a cutoff. There's something about the title that makes me think, "I don't want to go below deck. I want to stay up here." Is working on a Netflix show different from doing a network or cable series? In some ways. I think the main difference for me is that, because Netflix is really the network, you don't feel their presence, and I say that as a huge compliment. They really trust the shows' creators. Even the fact that they don't really do pilots—that alone is a totally different process. Pilots are often pretty terrible at the network level because they're trying to do so much in one episode. But there's just a level of faith that Netflix has in its shows' creators that I don't think network TV has because they're tied to advertisers. It's just a really different model. What's the worst movie you've ever watched for your podcast, How Did This Get Made? It's hard to say because, as I've said on the podcast a million times, I don't remember any movies. I watch it, we do the show, and I completely forget about it. But I remember the experience of watching The Last Airbender was very painful. I had to take it in, like, 15 minute intervals with half-hour breaks. It was the only way I could get through it. That's rare, because usually these movies are wonderfully insane and pretty enjoyable, but that one was just hard. This story first appeared in the May 16, 2016 issue of Adweek magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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Comedian June Diane Raphael on What Makes Netflix So Different From Network TV

And her Bravo-obsessed media diet

Emma Bazilian

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