We owe VH1's reality TV renaissance to this one couple
The odd pairing that birthed a small army of reality TV stars in the 2000s.
Does the name Flavor Flav mean anything to you? What about Brigitte Nielsen?
These two has-beens (sorry, no nicer way to say it) linked up once upon a time on a little reality show called The Surreal Life in 2004. As MTV prepares to debut a new season of the vintage series, I thought it would be fun to excavate how important its third season was to reality television history.
In short, Flav and Brigitte had something resembling a flirtationship on their season of The Surreal Life. This was during the mid-2000s, before interracial dating was regularly represented on scripted TV. He was the cooky rapper, complete with gold teeth and a gigantic clock around his neck. She was a classic beauty with a European accent. What could they possibly see in each other??
Whatever it was, they rode the high of it all the way to the bank with their own spinoff, Strange Love. The fascination that VH1 aimed to inspire with the series was essentially the question “How could such a beautiful, seemingly sane woman love this ugly man?” The series ran for one season, and when it ended, so did any sort of connection between the two.
But the offices of VH1 were impressed with Flav, so they hit that boardroom and went back to the drawing board. The entire lot of the …of Love universe can be credited to executive producers Mark Cronin and Cris Abrego. I’m sure the two of them brainstormed at VH1 towers, and the meeting went went something like “How do we take this concept and make it more absurd…….we need something that will leave audiences coming back for more.” And then, some sniveling intern looked at the first episode’s title from Strange Love, “The Flavor of Love,” and said “What if we did our own version of The Bachelor with Flav, and we called it Flavor of Love?” Mark or Cris snorted a line of coke off the table and said “Goddammit Phil, you’re a genius!!!”
And Flavor of Love was born.
Premiering on New Year’s Day 2006, the dating competition show was an instant hit. Brigitte, along with Flav’s mother, appeared throughout the season to assist him in parsing the real from the gold diggers. Most prominently, the series gave us Tiffany “New York” Pollard, perhaps THE most infamous, beloved, and meme’d people (characters?) to ever grace reality TV. She has given us a reaction GIF for any situation, truly; I’m sure we’ve all seen the “Beyonce?!” GIFs a million times by now. Here’s the full clip, in case you can’t remember the original context.
Who could forget when Pumkin (yes, PuMkin, sans second p), spit in New York’s face at an elimination, leading to her getting her wig metaphorically snatched? The first season gave us other memorable characters that would go on to do other things we’ll discuss in a bit, such as Hottie, Safaree, Buckwild, and Goldie, whom I personally feel was underrated for her hilarious quips.
In all of the show’s seasons, the romantic hopefuls were majority Black, with a few white chocolates1 thrown in. The subtext of this was that The Bachelor at this point in history rarely featured Black contestants, and VH1 thought it would be subversive and feature a majority Black female cast. Nevermind that the women were almost certainly asked to represent the worst stereotypes of Black women for our entertainment.
For better or worse, though, these women had a longer 15 minutes than most Bachelor contestants of their era, and we still remember and quote them. We take the good with the bad, I suppose.
Flavor of Love ran for three seasons, but not before giving birth to several spinoffs or offshoots. Please understand that this series was Mother in the most literal sense: its children had children!!
In 2007, VH1 premiered two new …of Love shows. After appearing and earning runner-up on two seasons of Flavor of Love, New York was given her own dating show, I Love New York, 53 weeks after the former began. Her spinoff did not feel so soon at the time — chalk it up to the slow crawl of adolescent years, but it really did feel like she’d earned that series by the end of her tenure with Flav. Still, it’s bonkers to consider how fast VH1 was turning around these shows!
A few months after New York’s spinoff, rejected castmates from the first two seasons of Flavor of Love were welcomed back via Charm School. The premise of the series, hosted by Mo’Nique (pre-Oscar win, crucially), was that the women needed to abandon their classless behavior previously shown to the world and learn to act like “ladies.” The only thing I remember from this series is Hottie taking an apple out of her titties and giving it to Mo’Nique. But in viewing old clips, I was reminded that this series was classic 2000s slut-shamey misogyny. Hearing Mo’Nique unflinchingly call Pumkin a whore felt like opening an old tin of stale cookies and being smacked in the face by the aroma.
A couple months later, a similar-but-unrelated …of Love series debuted, Rock of Love with Bret Michaels2. It saw Poison frontman Bret Michaels court exclusively white women of the Playmate or punk rock variety. I’ve always interpreted this iteration of the …of Love series as throwing white people a bone. Nevertheless, it matched its predecessor in popularity. Bret’s rejects also got to extend their 15 minutes by getting their own season of Charm School, this time hosted by Sharon Osbourne, that premiered in late 2008.
At this point, VH1 was killing it in the ratings. As much as these shows were absolute gutter television, they pulled in ratings. I’m talking an average of 4-6 million viewers per episode. I’ve discussed at length how I yearn for monoculture again, and this zeitgeist of reality TV is one reason why. Everyone was tapped in, from the losers to the popular girls!
Seeing this, MTV made their attempt at cashing in on the genre with A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila3. They hoped to attract interest by featuring a bisexual woman as the bachelorette, and courting both male and female contestants. To my knowledge, this was the first dating show to feature a non-straight star, and we wouldn’t see any sort of follow up until fairly recently with series like The Queer Ultimatum and I Kissed a Boy/I Kissed a Girl. A Shot at Love got a second season as well as a spinoff with the Ikki Twins, contestants from the first season.
In the summer of 2008, VH1 ditched the dating format and went straight up competition mode with I Love Money, which saw a hodgepodge of male and female cast members from the VH1 universe of shows compete in mental and physical challenges for $250,000. In 2008 money, that could actually take you places!
Merely one week after Rock of Love Girls: Charm School premiered, we got yet another spinoff, this time from New York’s series. Real Chance of Love4 saw brothers Real5 and Chance, both contestants on I Love New York, look for their respective loves. Once again, their rejects were featured on the third and final season of Charm School alongside more Rock of Love cast members.
And all of these shows began — and ended!! — within a span of about 5 years. Oh VH1, your reign at the top of reality TV was short, but it was MIGHTY! Perhaps not coincidentally, VHI’s …of Love empire fell just shy of the debut of MTV’s Jersey Shore, so while we can’t exactly blame the guidos for usurping VHI’s throne, perhaps the network sensed a disturbance in the force beforehand.
Nevertheless, facts are facts: the impact of one playful relationship for the cameras on a D-list celebrity reality show is still being felt today. Most obviously, Tiffany Pollard is a television legend. More than that, the way that networks and streamers approach reality TV was forever changed. Casting for reality TV mimics the chain reaction of VH1’s …of Love universe. Alongside MTV’s Real World/Road Rules Challenge (now simply The Challenge) , VH1 was the first to figure out that if you cast a season well, you are making long-term investments in your programming slate. They created their own well of stars to re-cast in later seasons or other series entirely. Everybody wins — formerly everyday people get to make more money, and viewers get to spend more time with their favorite characters beyond one season.
What’s remarkable about VH1’s renaissance is their stars earned their popularity on screen time alone; there was no social media to tip the visibility scales in one or another direction. Because of that as well, the people cast really went for it with their words and antics. There was no fear of immediate backlash in the form of harassment or doxxing for “bad” behavior. Villains were truly villains who didn’t attempt to straddle the line of likability to maintain a social media following. On the flipside, the good-hearted contestants felt more genuine; you never got the vibe that any of them were putting on a saccharine front to become an influencer afterward because, well, that kind of career path didn’t exist yet.
I’m unsure why VH1 has fallen off so drastically in the reality TV space. It seems that the hit shows they either created or acquired (particularly Love & Hip Hop and RuPaul’s Drag Race) have moved to MTV. I know they are all under the Paramount banner, so the money is going into the same pockets either way, but it still feels odd when VH1 at one point had such a distinct identity from MTV. They were sisters who lived on different coasts.
Perhaps the network’s fatal mistake was oversaturating the market they created and exhausting audiences with all of the spinoffs. They really said we’re not here for a long time, we’re here for a good time, and ran the concept into the ground. It makes sense that the universe was short-lived — the same person can only believably “search for love” so many times. Even if we were burnt out by the end, I’m inclined to applaud shows that had short, super successful runs over ones that continued far beyond audience interest.
So, thank you VH1 for capturing lightning in a bottle with Flavor Flav and Brigitte Nielsen. You gave us years of entertainment that will live on in internet infamy. Sorry if you weren’t there to witness history!!!
The white women featured were often of the “wigga” variety. IYKYK. They walked so the “cashmeoussidehowboutdat” girl could run.
This version spawned two spinoffs, Megan Wants A Millionaire and Daisy of Love, that I don’t recall watching. Too many to include but still worth a mention!
The show was executive produced by SallyAnn Salsano, the same woman who would go on to produce Jersey Shore. Her time was coming!
It STILL pisses me off that they went with “of Love” in the title instead of “AT Love,” which makes more grammatical sense. I get wanting the consistency of titles, but it just sounds bad!!!!
Real sadly passed away of cancer in 2015.
I did not watch these shows, but I did watch Vh1's I Love the decades series as well as top 100 songs of the 80s, 90s, etc. That is where we got our pop culture history lessons and the children need that today