Tiffany “New York†Pollard is sitting in front of the camera, wearing no makeup and a simple green tank top. Offscreen, a producer asks her about her fellow cast member on Big Brother UK, Gemma Collins. Without pause, Pollard launches into a minute-long string of unending, eloquent vitriol. It begins with “Pretty much, I would let Gemma know that she is a fat c*nt,†but she also gets in that Collins, “doesn’t have the vernacular that she thinks she possesses.†It’s a remarkable monologue, performed with a surgeon’s precision, and Pollard is as crude as a Victorian-era sailor and as witty as a 19th-century gay playwright. Seven years after that monologue, and 17 years after she made her debut on reality TV with Flavor of Love, Pollard is still starring on reality TV, and, upon her elimination from House of Villains on November 2, she proved that her monologuing skills are still well-intact.
E!’s House of Villains is a perfect idea — bring in reality TV’s biggest, most love-to-hate personalities, like Survivor’s Jonny Fairplay, Bad Girls Club’s Tanisha Thomas, and The Bachelor’s Corinne Olympios, and make them compete. Despite the competition, the most focus-pulling are two women of equal stature in reality TV history: Pollard and The Apprentice (and the White House) star Omarosa. With Pollard set to be eliminated in the fourth episode, she let loose a read on Omarosa so intense, so demeaning, and so well-calibrated that it deserves to be in the Library of Congress.
Asked to deliver a speech about why she should not go home, Pollard tells the house that she doesn’t, “want a sympathy vote.†Omarosa responds with the type of harsh jab she’s adept at, saying, “So you don’t want my sympathy vote? That’s what you’re saying?†Given a prime opportunity, Pollard lets the read of the year rip: “Since I already said that, Omarosa, may I also say that I find you to be a cock-sucking, cum-guzzling Republican cunt,†she went in. “And I sleep better at night knowing that you’re not in the White House.â€
The joy of House of Villains comes from all the styles of confrontation the contestants come up against. Fairplay’s duplicitousness sits right alongside Olympios’s weaponization of white-woman tears. But Pollard takes the cake by being the most outlandish, the funniest, and the most surprising. Despite the anger in her words, she delivers the read with a zeroed-in calmness, an intensity that makes it all the more compelling. As always, she’s entirely in control, and she had fun doing it.