Katy Perry is partly responsible for The Bold Type

Variety

The Freeform magazine drama series is inspired by the life of former Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Joanna Coles, but its genesis was thanks to a Cosmo cover shoot with Perry. “It had gone really well. The one thing we asked her not to do was to Instagram anything from the shoot, because the pictures wouldn’t be out for another six weeks on the cover of Cosmo,” Coles recalls to Variety. “She promised she wouldn’t, and we all left feeling very high after the shoot. Within 20 minutes, she had posted the exact picture that we were going to use on the cover. I was beside myself. We couldn’t use the best picture because it had already been out there.”  Soon after, Coles went to a group dinner where she was seated next to producer David Bernad. When Coles told him about Perry and other cover shoots gone wrong, she says, “he looked at me and said, ‘Your life is a TV show. I’m coming to Cosmo to follow you around.’ He did indeed show up, and that’s how the show was born.”