In the three months since Veronica Newsome took over as Executive Vice-President for Content at the fluffy-specific TV channel FluffTV, she’s received a lot of positive and negative coverage. We sat down with the former PBS children’s TV producer to discuss her approach and get her answers to some of the criticism.
- So, Veronica, FluffTV has seen a real metamorphosis since you took over.
- Yes, I think that the previous executives at the channel were possibly a little too commercially-focused, and maybe didn’t have a lot of experience in the basics of making television programs. And my first few days were about solving some of the worst problems that the channel had.
- You’re talking about cancelling “Dancy Babies”.
- Yes, and that wasn’t just my idea, it was made clear to me right from the start that “Dancy Babies” had to go a.s.a.p. We had hundreds of subscribers who had cancelled our channel telling us specifically, and very angrily, that “Dancy Babies” had given their mares and fillies “babbie fever” and cost them lots of money and, in some cases, their entire relationships with their fluffies. And the replacement show, “Fluffobics”, has been getting a lot of enthusiasm from subscribers whose fluffies were getting a bit too sedentary. But that was just the highest profile example, there was a lot of discomfort among our own creatives about product placement, about shows that seemed designed only to sell new toys, and that a lot of our output simply wasn’t high-quality and wasn’t encouraging our audience to be better fluffies.
- Well about that, not everyone thinks that your new shows are making the audience better fluffies. Conservative media in particular…
- Look, let me jump in right here, because I can tell that you want to talk about “Special Huggies Should Be Special”.
- The New York Post has described it as “hard-core pornography for pets”.
- I certainly wouldn’t describe it as “hard-core pornography” in the way that most people imagine it. The whole show is about everything fluffies need to know about relationships, and we are very serious about ensuring that all the content stresses consent and pleasure for every fluffy involved. I mean, even the stupidest fluffies know how to enf instinctively.
- But some people think that you shouldn’t be showing the actual… um, enfing.
- Look, these are fluffies we’re talking about. They don’t retain purely verbal instructions, we know that. They don’t understand metaphors or euphemisms. OK, they say things that are euphemisms from our point of view, but so far as they know, those are the normal words for those things. And the sexual intercourse is about four, five minutes tops of the whole show. Every episode takes a couple from their first meeting to the stallion caring for the mare during her pregnancy. And fluffies can’t act, that’s why they have to be real fluffy breeding pairs demonstrating how to have a healthy relationship. And like I said, every fluffy knows how to enf. If you’ve got a mixed-sex fluffy pair and you don’t want them to reproduce, just get them fixed! They aren’t humans, and trying to enforce total ignorance and abstinence on them is just cruel and doomed to failure.
- It’s been suggested that you should be using animations.
- No, I think fluffies can tell the difference between reality and human-voiced animations. The only time we use animation in the show is for the “Harvey the Dummy Meany Worstest Stallion” segments, and that’s because there’s no ethical way in live-action that you can depict a stallion trying to rape a filly and then getting his lumps chopped off before he’s tossed in a shredder. And we already know that “Special Huggies” works. I have had shelters and stores writing to me, uninvited, to say that after only two weeks of the show they had eighty, ninety percent drops in incidents of sexual aggression, even in single-sex stallion pens. And if they have to buy a few more enfie-stuffies and disinfect them more often, that’s worth it.
- You came in for some negativity on Twitter a couple of weeks ago.
- That was absolutely ridiculous, to speak frankly. If there actually are any human viewers who are jerking off to “Special Huggies” because they prefer it to human porn, which they can get online much more cheaply and easily, then they obviously have issues that are far too deep-rooted for our show to have caused them.
- You’ve been getting a lot of praise for “The Ferals of Fluffydale”. The New Yorker described it as “almost prestige TV”.
- Oh, we’re all very proud of “Fluffydale”. If you asked me a couple of years ago, I’d have said that the idea of a fully animated prime-time soap was absolutely ridiculous. We’re so happy when we hear subscribers say that it’s the only show that they actually enjoy watching with their fluffies. And we have fluffy behavior experts to make sure that every plot arc on the show is something that could realistically happen in a feral fluffy herd.
- It might be a bit too realistic. Haven’t you had letters from subscribers saying that they thought that their fluffies were permanently traumatised by the arc where Nutmeg and Mimosa left it too late in the summer to conceive, and had to eat their own foals so that they didn’t starve to death during the winter?
- Oh, I’ve had letters from subscribers saying that THEY were traumatised by that story! But one of our principles for “Fluffydale” is that we need to make it clear just how tough life is for feral fluffies. The last thing we need is for fluffies to think that their owners are being mean to them by keeping them in their saferoom instead of letting them run free in a magical wood! But we do have to tread a fine line with that kind of cautionary material, to get the message across to fluffies without being too dark and scary. Last year the channel showed a “spay your fluffy” PSA which had real footage of unadopted ferals being gassed in a shelter, and I don’t think we’d go anywhere near that far now when real fluffies are watching.
- And finally, Veronica, have you got any new shows coming up that you want to mention?
- Well, I can reveal that we’re doing an urban spin-off from “Fluffydale”, called “Pegasus Street”, which will start off by following what happened to Slam after he was banished from the herd. And we’ll be introducing a show for fluffies whose owners let them out in the garden, about which plants will give them tummy hurties if they eat them, and how if they poop in the right place it can help the flowers grow!