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Unsung R&B Veteran Miki Howard Explains How Biopic Came to Fruition

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Shareif Ziyadat/Getty ImagesThe biopic based on the trials, tribulations and triumphs of R&B veteran Miki Howard will premiere tonight — starring Teyonah Parris in the lead role as the chart-topping songstress.

Titled Love Under New Management: The Miki Howard Story, it is directed by Christine Swanson, who co-wrote the script with Rhonda Baraka. Hollywood veterans including Vanessa Bell Calloway, Gary DourdanDarius McCrary and LisaRaye McCoy round out the cast.

Howard, who serves as a producer and the narrator of the project, said watching previous episodes of the network’s Unsung series sparked her interest in the award-winning franchise.

“I was motivated before I did the Unsungs to do the Unsungs by seeing Phyllis Hyman and The Debarge,” she told ABC Radio.  “I was watching the Unsungs and I said, ‘Oh my God, they’re going to call me. I know they’re going to call me’ because that was my group of people.  And they did and they said, ‘We’d like to do an Unsung‘ and they found me through someone and I was like, ‘Yeah, okay. Sure.'”

Shot in Savannah last year, the film delves deep into the chart-topper’s life of rejection, abandonment, drug abuse and domestic violence.

“I’d heard her music and sung it many times as my parents blasted it in the house but I didn’t know that this was her story and that she had gone through so much.  Miki came up in a time when there was no Snapchat …so she really lived a full life very much under the radar.  So it was exciting to read that and find out that yes, all of this is true and it has not been embellished for television,” Parris says.

Love Under New Management: The Miki Howard Story premieres tonight, June 12, at 7 p.m. ET on TV One.

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