‘Too Close to Home’: Kelly Sullivan on Going From Soaps to the New Tyler Perry Series

Michael Logan August 19, 2016, 7:00 am

She died horrible deaths on General Hospital and The Young and the Restless, but now Kelly Sullivan is in a happy place—literally. The daytime fave has landed a juicy role in the new TLC drama Tyler Perry’s Too Close to Home, playing single mom Bonnie, a diner waitress with four kids who lives in a rundown trailer park in Happy, Alabama. Bonnie is the oldest of three sisters. The youngest, Shelby (Brooke Anne Smith), is a hopeless drug addict and middle sib Anna (Danielle Savre, above left, with Sullivan) comes running home to Happy when a sex scandal ends her promising Beltway career. But you gotta have hope, right?

“Tyler is bringing light to a part of the country we don’t get to see on television,” Sullivan says. “Bonnie and her family represent the forgotten ones, people who have been dealt a really rough hand in life, people who don’t have a voice. And that is a big part of America.”

If all this sounds wildly political, it’s not. “You certainly feel the intense contrast between the worlds of Washington, D.C., and small-town Alabama, but we don’t take a stance or hit you with a message,” Sullivan says. “This is a story about what happens when the s–t hits the fan—and who bounces back and who can’t handle it. It’s real and it’s raw.”

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Hey, it’s also a Tyler Perry show! Where are the nasty secrets and jaw-dropping shocks? “Oh, don’t worry,” Sullivan says. “Everybody in Happy has their skeletons—and when they are revealed, it is spine-tingling.”

Too Close to Home, Series Premiere, Monday, August 22, 9/8c, TLC.