ABC announced today that it will be airing a new reality television show in March, entitled “Whatever Happened to Brandy?”. The show consists of a group of 20-somethings who share an apartment/hot tub in Manhattan. Each week the group attempts to answer the question: what happened to the 90s television star and pop princess Brandy?
The show is the brainchild of Executive Producer Larry Weinstein, who found himself wondering about the former pop-singer and sitcom star last summer during a bender.
“I was just sitting around one day and I guess I must have seen someone on TV that reminded me of her or something, but it just sort of occurred to me that I haven’t heard anything about Brandy in a while. I mean, I know she had that sitcom on some network and she was a singer too, maybe a rapper, I’m not sure.”
Upon interviewing Weinstein, Tiger investigated the matter further. In fact, Brandy, whose full name is Brandy Rayana Norwood, is perhaps best known for her starring role in the sitcom Moesha, which ran on the UPN network from 1996 to 2001. Brandy simultaneously enjoyed a blossoming music career as an R&B singer-songwriter, with a successful self-titled debut album earning her 2 Grammy Award nominations and 4 Soul Train Music Awards.
Unfortunately, since 2001, we haven’t heard much from the artist who gave us such hits as “I Wanna Be Down” and “What About Us?” Weinstein was quick to point out, however, that Brandy is indeed still around and has been “doing things here and there” in the past few years.
Weinstein explained the format of the reality show:
“Each week the contestants get together and talk more about what Brandy might be up to, if anything at all. It’s like a mystery that they explore together and work through, getting closer to a fuller picture of her post-2001 activities each week. At the beginning of every episode we give them a new clue, which usually consists of a fact about something Brandy has done between now and the end of Moesha. At the end of every episode, the audience votes off one contestant, until we’re left with one winner who is awarded $250,000 in cash and a week’s supply of hoagies.”
We managed to get a sneak peek of one of the season’s first episodes in which the surprise clue was a tape of Brandy appearing as a guest judge in a 2005 episode of American Idol. This sparked a flurry of debate amongst the contestants, who had apparently not been entirely convinced up until that point that Brandy was still alive.
– BE
