Opposites attract, yes, but they also bicker like third graders sometimes. When the 170cm rapper Flavor Flav -- whose group, Public Enemy, emerged as the Black Panthers of the hip-hop generation in the late 1980s -- met the 184cm former action-film star Brigitte Nielsen, a battle of bling versus brawn began.
He balked when she tried to touch his gold teeth; she towered over him, swiped him with her makeup bag and proclaimed that she would wear the pants in the house.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
The house in question was the set of American music channel VH1's reality show The Surreal Life, Season 3. Flavor Flav, Nielsen and four other C-list celebrities were settling in for what appeared to be a fraught 12-day stay, which was shown last fall.
Not long after their arrival, though, Nielsen, 41, had a few drinks and began parading in pint-sized skivvies and an apron, and Flav, 45, toned down his irritation. He brought her dinner in bed, where she lay in a drunken haze, then joined her under the covers. The next morning, as he watched her serenely cooking breakfast, he said he just might fall in love.
And if Flav, Nielsen and VH1 are to be believed, that is essentially what happened. Within two months of the Surreal Life September season premiere -- the most watched show in VH1's history -- the channel announced the new couple would be getting their own reality series: Strange Love, currently playing in the US.
The show is part ebony-and-ivory cliche, part believe it or not: the outspoken rapper who once epitomized black power dating the Nordic giantess who used to embody, well, blonde power.
Even devotees of The Surreal Life and its always strange interpersonal dynamics were taken aback by this oddball couple. Grousing about the spectacle of "the original public enemy" canoodling with the bleach-blond Nielsen, whose former husbands include Sylvester Stallone, one viewer wrote on the VH1 Web site, "What a sellout."
Another viewer, SnowflakeGirl, wrote on FansOfRealityTV.com that the hookup "seems as unnatural and unlikely" as that between a giraffe and a house cat.
But VH1's audience could not seem to turn away as Nielsen flirted with other men and Flav called her "loose"; as Flav promised he would give up his gold teeth if Gitte (Nielsen's given name) would marry him; as Nielsen proclaimed her love for "William Drayton" (Flav's real name).
More recently, as Flav and Nielson have appeared together to build interest in Strange Love, some fans suspected a setup. The image the two project of an over-the-top caricature of an "it" couple began to seem too deliciously (or horrifically) odd to be true.
"VH1 must think I'm a fool to believe that," said Tommy Smith, a DJ in Los Angeles and a longtime fan of Public Enemy, with evident disgust. "At what point can we stop calling it reality TV?"
A viewer using the name Deny predicted on FansOfRealityTV.com that the "new show will be a fake."
Is it? Mark Cronin, a producer of Strange Love, said that Brian Graden, the programming chief of MTV Networks, VH1's parent company, had asked him exactly that when the idea for the new show came up.
Cronin's reply? "Well, producers see Flav and Brigitte when the cameras aren't around, and we can tell you: it is real," he said.
Dave Coulier, who was Flav's roommate on The Surreal Life, is not so sure. He has no doubts the couple were once an item. "They called me from a hotel room the day after the show ended, obviously feeling no pain," he said.
By now, however, their relationship has become "a cartoon of itself," he said, "at which point I don't think it's believable."
Viewers of course are well aware that reality television manipulates reality in its casting, editing and coaching of cast members. But there is a line between inflating reality and inventing it, and suspicions about the Flav-Nielson romance raise the possibility that Strange Love could backfire on its producers.
Fans, especially on the Internet, are quick to ridicule reality shows that seem to be hiding something, like Fox's recent Who's Your Daddy?, which reunited with her biological father a woman who was linked last week by the Web site Gawker.com to a soft-core porn film.
Ben Silverman, a producer of reality shows including The Restaurant, said that Strange Love should not be taken too seriously.
"Like Paris Hilton," he said, Nielson and Flav "are so larger than life they're almost caricatures of themselves. Any sense that their show should be real should already be dismissed."
But don't tell that to Flav. On a recent snowy afternoon in Manhattan, he showed up at the Viacom building in Times Square, home of VH1 and MTV, to set things straight.
"Whatever y'all saw between me and Brigitte was all real, nothing phony," Flav declared in an interview in a VH1 office. "That's why they call it reality TV." He paused. "Well, OK, there's a lot of people that do act phony on reality TV, but not me and Brigitte."
Behind a car repair business on a nondescript Thai street are the cherished pets of a rising TikTok animal influencer: two lions and a 200-kilogram lion-tiger hybrid called “Big George.” Lion ownership is legal in Thailand, and Tharnuwarht Plengkemratch is an enthusiastic advocate, posting updates on his feline companions to nearly three million followers. “They’re playful and affectionate, just like dogs or cats,” he said from inside their cage complex at his home in the northern city of Chiang Mai. Thailand’s captive lion population has exploded in recent years, with nearly 500 registered in zoos, breeding farms, petting cafes and homes. Experts warn the
The unexpected collapse of the recall campaigns is being viewed through many lenses, most of them skewed and self-absorbed. The international media unsurprisingly focuses on what they perceive as the message that Taiwanese voters were sending in the failure of the mass recall, especially to China, the US and to friendly Western nations. This made some sense prior to early last month. One of the main arguments used by recall campaigners for recalling Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers was that they were too pro-China, and by extension not to be trusted with defending the nation. Also by extension, that argument could be
Aug. 4 to Aug. 10 When Coca-Cola finally pushed its way into Taiwan’s market in 1968, it allegedly vowed to wipe out its major domestic rival Hey Song within five years. But Hey Song, which began as a manual operation in a family cow shed in 1925, had proven its resilience, surviving numerous setbacks — including the loss of autonomy and nearly all its assets due to the Japanese colonial government’s wartime economic policy. By the 1960s, Hey Song had risen to the top of Taiwan’s beverage industry. This success was driven not only by president Chang Wen-chi’s
Last week, on the heels of the recall election that turned out so badly for Taiwan, came the news that US President Donald Trump had blocked the transit of President William Lai (賴清德) through the US on his way to Latin America. A few days later the international media reported that in June a scheduled visit by Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) for high level meetings was canceled by the US after China’s President Xi Jinping (習近平) asked Trump to curb US engagement with Taiwan during a June phone call. The cancellation of Lai’s transit was a gaudy
RSS