The 'Outsiders' get in on the inn business
— -- Take a bad-boy hip-hopper, a California popster and Marcia Brady, and plop them down in East Tennessee to run a B&B.
That's the fish-out-of-water premise of Outsiders Inn, a reality TV series starring Bobby Brown, Carnie Wilson and former Brady Bunch star Maureen McCormick, premiering tonight (9 ET/PT) on Country Music Television. It's reminiscent of a now-defunct offering on the Oxygen network: Tori Spelling and husband Dean McDermott playing B&B keepers on Tori & Dean:Inn Love.
The Outsiders premise: McCormick leases the real-life Christopher Place Bed and Breakfast Resort in rural Cocke County near Newport, Tenn. She enlists former Gone Country castmates Brown and Wilson to help her — Brown as entertainment director, Wilson as chef.
"I've always dreamed of running a bed-and-breakfast," McCormick says from her California home after taping wrapped.
There was skepticism whether Spelling and her husband actually catered to real vacationers or owned the inn. (They did have a lease with option to buy, but later they "realized it's not where they are in life," says Patricia King, real-life owner of the Oak Creek Manor Luxury Bed and Breakfast that the couple ran for TV cameras.) Some who turned up at the Fallbrook, Calif., property during filming said they were turned away. Others never got a response to a reservation request.
Outsiders Inn folk are more upfront. The nine-room inn was closed during filming, guests were handpicked, and the show was "softly scripted," McCormick says. "It was improvised and we were playing ourselves."
All the furnishings you see "are not really" what's in Christopher Place, says owner Marston Price Jr. The real-life inn has fine, fragile antiques. And as for a B&B entertainment director, that's a stretch.
Situations were set up. City-boy Brown goes bear hunting and prowls for locally made moonshine. In other episodes, Wilson and McCormick get in trouble with the law after a bar brawl with two local women, and they fulfill a honeymooning couple's request for a tub full of green Jell-O.
Still, "I was overseeing everything," McCormick says. "I really started to feel I was in charge of this place. … I'd love to do more of it."
Wilson, who has had gastric bypass surgery and aims to eat healthfully herself, turned out to be an "amazing" purveyor of goodies, Price says. "Macaroni and cheese, cheesecake!"
The series was cooked up after the trio "really connected with our audience and helped broaden it" when they tried to be country music singers on CMT's Gone Country, says network development chief Bob Kusbit.
Though Outsiders Inn producers "controlled who was coming in and out" of the 200-acre Christopher Place property, "folks (on the show) are not actors. They are real people," he says.
Innkeeper Price understands that Hollywood stars in the backwoods make for good TV but hopes the edited version doesn't poke too much fun at the South. Kusbit says that "some other channels would," but "we don't." Price says he and his wife, Anne, had no control over content.
As for the stars, "Carnie cooked her butt off, and Maureen catered to all these folks," Kusbit says. He says Brown, ex-husband of Whitney Houston and former tabloid staple for substance abuse and scrapes with the law, is "a wonderful guy underneath. There was no trouble."
The first time she met Brown on Gone Country, "I was terrified" of his reputation, McCormick says. "But he is such a good guy and has such a good heart."
Kusbit says audience reaction will determine whether the show will be back for more than the initial eight episodes.
Price, meanwhile, is curious to see how Christopher Place comes across on the screen.
"The exposure is far more than any inn could hope for," he says. "But it's yet to be determined how lucky we are."
E-mail kyancey@usatoday.com