Rather, she says, "Ryan & Tatum: The O'Neals" is intended to help people.
"My whole reason for doing it is that people (will) learn from it. That's why I put it on TV," O'Neal said in a recent telephone interview from New York City.
"I've never seen anything in television ... that speaks to (the) very real dynamic of dysfunction which I have with my dad. I think we did a very good job of being ourselves and showing the dysfunction that we really live with and I think people, just being able to see that, will get a lot out of it, good or bad."
Dysfunction may seem like an understatement when it comes to the relationship of Tatum and Ryan O'Neal.
The pair became inextricably linked in the public eye when they co-starred in 1973's "Paper Moon," a film which made Tatum the youngest-ever actor to win an Academy Award.
But, according to a lightning fast set-up of their rift in "Ryan & Tatum: The O'Neals," there was trouble early on.
In the debut episode, airing Friday on OWN, Tatum O'Neal says her mother struggled with addiction. Her father, she charges, abandoned her when he became involved with actress Farrah Fawcett.
"She got left at the curb," Ryan O'Neal concedes in an onscreen interview. "But I always said: Just stay at the curb, I'll be back."
But his daughter didn't stay, choosing instead to move to New York at age 19 — turning her back on her father.
The "Love Story" heart-throb star complains in the reality show that he didn't get an invitation to his daughter's 1986 wedding to tennis star John McEnroe (the now-divorced pair have three children). He says he "took it very hard" and "erased her."
The episode then ticks off their troubles from there: Tatum struggled with substance abuse; a gun went off while Ryan argued with his son Griffin; Ryan was furious about Tatum's 2004 tell-all memoir "A Paper Life."
But, viewers are told, after the 2009 death of Fawcett, father and daughter decided to give their relationship another chance.
"Life is too short for all this fighting," Tatum O'Neal says in the pilot episode. "After 25 years, it's now or never."
"I don't know if you get second chances in this life," adds her father. "But this could be one."
Those statements attempt to set the tone for the series, which sees Tatum O'Neal moving from New York to Los Angeles with the aim of forging a new relationship with her father after their 25-year estrangement.
Not surprisingly, it's a difficult process. Conflict erupts almost immediately when the elder O'Neal gets into an altercation with his grandson. Then, his daughter — whose other film credits include "The Bad News Bears" and "Little Darlings" — plans a birthday party for herself and worries her father won't show.
Tatum O'Neal says that while she doesn't regret making the series, she admits to having "second thoughts."
"Remember, I'm having a life experience that was just caught on tape for a minute. That was eight weeks out of our real life. So I think about it all the time," said the actress, 47.
"Because he hasn't accepted what my reality is ... we're still in a very kind of — I wouldn't call it a shallow dance, but ... superficial. We do love each other in a very superficial way. Certainly there's been no real healing because my dad can't look back and I'm OK with that because my life is moving on and I don't need his permission to be the woman that I want to be."
The last few years haven't been easy for the actress, who stars on the TV series "Rescue Me." In 2008, she was arrested for allegedly trying to buy cocaine in New York City. She later pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct.
She claims in her reality series to have been sober for a year and documents the 2008 incident in her new memoir "Found: A Daughter's Journey Home," which coincides with the OWN series.
"It tells a different story than I wrote in my first book," O'Neal said. "It tells a story of how do you live with ... a lot of trauma you've experienced ... how do you then turn that around and make that a positive message?"
And, she has spoken of the series and book as a way of developing a "brand" for herself.
"A brand comes from having been very, very close to death with addiction, and then turning that into how to come back from that and, really, make an even better life than you might have had, had that not happened," she explained, musing that she may write more books down the line.
"With the recovery and with my writing and with the show and now I'm producing, and I'm producing things that mean something to me."
"Ryan & Tatum: The O'Neals" premieres Friday at 9 p.m. ET on OWN.
(via Brandon Sun)