The tea is about to be spilled. One half of Big Brother’s successful and historic Cookout alliance has teamed up for a podcast with more in the works.
Tiffany Mitchell, Hannah Chaddha and Derek Frazier, who all placed in the top six of season 23 of the long-running CBS series, recently started “Royal Tea,” where they break down all the big Hollywood headlines, talk about their favorite reality shows and yes, occasionally poke fun at each other.
“We had all been talking about what can we do together,” Mitchell exclusively tells Us Weekly. “We, The Cookout, are such a close-knit family, even outside of the game, we always communicate with each other. We try to think of things we can do together and we have a ton of ideas, a lot of intelligence, a lot of personality, and it seems like certain people would still love to hear more from us.”
Enter “Royal Tea,” which will be the first endeavor in a bigger network that they’re launching with the goal of adding more podcasts and voices from across the reality TV landscape. “Tiffany had the brilliant idea of coming up with this network of podcasts called the Heavy Crown Network,” Chaddha explains. And the whole idea behind that is of the community, by the community, for the community. Because at the end of the day, we three are passionate about all these reality shows. And the idea is we wanna be able to share our passion with those who have that same passion. So we’re really excited to be doing this and hopefully, the Heavy Crown Network one day can grow into a slew of podcasts and a ton of people can use this as a stepping stool to have a platform.”
Tiffany Mitchell, Hannah Chaddha and Derek Frazier. Cliff Lipson/CBS
While Mitchell is also working on something with costar Kyland Young, which she jokes will come out in the “year 2030,” the group can see that “there are a ton of podcasters that are coming up and people that go into the [Big Brother] house and come out and say, ‘Oh, I would love to have a podcast,’” the Detroit native explains. “So, I was like, ‘What if we have a network that’s already established and people want to join, then they have a place where they can come?’ And even though we’re new to it too, hopefully by the time people join, we’ll have our feet wet and we’ll know what the recipe is for success.”
The “Royal Tea” podcast will cover more than just their experience and opinions on Big Brother. ”We are three individuals that play competition shows and we want to talk about reality TV in general,” Frazier tells Us. “It could be from Big Brother to The Challenge, Below Deck, The Kardashians, Real Housewives, Drag Race. We just wanna be able to talk about all the competition shows and not kind of just be stuck in the Big Brother world, which is fine, we’ll touch on it, but we want to touch on everything because we all watch different shows.”
The Philly native adds, “We’re always talking, like, ‘Did you see this?’ or ‘Did you see that?’ So we’re like, ‘Hey, let’s put all our heads together, talk about these competition shows and have fun and just spill the tea, and also just gossip about things we might have heard on the blogs. Just have fun with it.’”
In addition to the three of them and Young, fellow Cookout members Xavier Prather and Azah Awasum may also be popping up with their own projects. “The one thing about having a big family with six siblings is you’re gonna have a different relationship with every sibling,” Chaddha, who is also currently pursuing a career in medicine, explains. “So when it comes to me, Big D and Tiff, all we do is gossip about Housewives and this reality show, and ‘Oh, did you watch this documentary on Netflix?’ So we thought, ‘Well, we’re having these conversations privately anyway, why not share them?’ And the three of us have such a funny dynamic. You have Tiff and Big D shading each other and then me kind of, like, subtly shading both of them, but they don’t even know I’m shading them. And I’m just like the younger sister who’s really bothersome and it works for some reason. I feel like the three of us have just developed this formula and this chemistry together, and we’re really excited to put that out there.”
As for what else listeners can expect, Mitchell tells Us: “We definitely keep each other humble. Like, if nothing at all, they are there to bring me right back down to Earth. … It’s the keeping me humble part that I love because that’s what makes us family. We can all get out there and forget. Sometimes fans will gas you and make you believe things were different than what they really were. But these people here – and not just Big D and Hannah – X and Ky and [Azah], we will all humble each other real quick.”
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New episodes of “Royal Tea” drop Thursdays. You can check them out on YouTube and podcast platforms like Spotify and Apple.