Mama Joyce's basic nastiness towards Todd Tucker on "Kandi's Wedding" continues unabated. This was her thematic throughout season six of "Real Housewives of Atlanta." As the wedding gets closer, she doesn't let up.
She loves stating unprovable allegations as fact - as long as those rumors make Todd look bad. And she does it with no regret, no apologies. Nothing. All in all, she continues to come across as a truly unpleasant, unfair human being. (Fortunately, Kandi Burruss is nothing like her mom. Her problem is she enables her mom and doesn't properly defend her husband from her mom's attacks.)
The bombshell from last week: Mama Joyce said Todd's long-dead father was a pimp and her mom a prostitute.
Kandi this week tells Todd half of what she said. She only tells him the pimp part, not that this particularly pleased Todd.
"I'm tired of biting my tongue," Todd says to Kandi. "I can't let this go on. I have to say something."
So when the three of them get together, he says something.
"I have respected you ad continuously bit my tongue," he says. "You have continuously made things up. It hasn't stopped. I know you don't like me."
"I like you," she says disingenuously. "I don't like the game." (She has said over the past year that she thinks Todd is marrying Kandi for her money.)
"I heard about this game," Todd says. "My dad was a pimp. I learned the game from my dad. He died 37 years ago when I was three."
She says she heard about the pimp line from folks she knew in New York "on the streets."
He challenges her to call those so-called "street" people up now. Instead, she diverts attention away from her own rumor mongering and accuses him of saying she "set him up' by having an undercover detective follow him around with a camera. She says she only hired the guy to follow Todd around, not to actively set him up - as if that matters all that much. Just the fact she even did that shows massive disrespect for a man who has shown nothing but respect toward her daughter, based on what we've seen on the show.
Then Mama Joyce gets agitated although he never raises his voice. "You can control her," she says, referencing Kandi, as her voice elevates. "You can't control me."
(He can't control Kandi either. That is a total mischaracterization of what we've seen so far>)
Then she says that she gives them her blessings for the wedding, without an ounce of sincerity.
She tells the Bravo cameras that she wishes them a happy wedding but "from this point on, she's on her own." (I bet she's bluffing there.)
Todd leaves, really upset and wonders if the wedding should go forward at all.
***
The wedding itself is coming together with less than a month to go. With Carmon out of the picture, Johnny steps up. He gets the lions she wants and they are able to reserve a venue: Le Fais Do Do, a big open space Don Juan didn't find particularly appealing. But Kandi figures a lot of draping will help.
She also auditions dancers to imitate the African dance from the wedding theme based on the film "Coming to America." She also ties down Musiq Soulchild to sing her favorite song "Don't Change."
Kandi meets up with her father, who wasn't around much when she was a child. She wants him to preside over the wedding. He is honored. He blamed Mama Joyce for keeping him from her, including a restraining order. Mama Joyce denied all that, saying he cheated on her and chose not to be around her. "He has selective lying amnesia," she says. Who's right? Who knows?
"If she doesn't stop her own bad behavior," Kandi's dad said, "she'd be cutting her own throat."
Kandi also asks his mom to give her away. She declines - in front of Todd. "That's asking a lot," she says. Later, to the cameras, she said, "I'm not sure if that's the man I really want to give my baby to."
Sigh. She just won't stop, will she?
NEXT WEEK
Todd's mom shows up and when she meets Mama Joyce, things do not go well.
RATINGS
Last week's show opened at 2.4 million viewers, the best opening of any Bravo spinoff wedding show to date, outdoing both NeNe Leakes' and Kim Zolciak's wedding series.
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