Nick Cannon Has Officially Penetrated the ‘Selling Sunset’ Universe

After two painfully boring seasons of Selling Sunset, our favorite real estate Barbies (and garden gnomes) have finally risen from their precious slumber and remembered how to be entertaining. We have Chrishell Stause dropping her nice-girl act and accusing someone of being on crack. We’ve got Jason Oppenheim bringing another one of his exes into the office to start drama. There’s a potential defamation lawsuit on the table. And we even have a Harry Styles-related shoe mystery.

But by far the juiciest conflict, believe it or not, involves Nick Cannon’s seed.

Yes, along with the multiple women who have birthed his children over the past few years, Cannon has now officially penetrated the Selling Sunset universe. Since 2020, the Masked Singer host has fathered a whopping nine children with five different women. (He also has three other children, two of whom are with Mariah Carey, bringing his total to an even dozen.)

The Drumline star has casually chalked up his excessive baby-making to simply enjoying fatherhood. He’s also made comments about going against Eurocentric ideas of family. (What a trailblazer!) I’ve mostly been uninterested and kind of weirded out by his Elon Musk-ass behavior, until now: The new beef he’s inadvertently provided to this season of Selling Sunset has me actually appreciating such serial fertilization.

Netflix must have been aware of how much Selling Sunset had fallen off over the past two years, because I can’t think of any other reason they would recruit one of the mothers of Cannon’s football team of children. But desperate times call for desperate measures!

Unfortunately, it’s not Mariah Carey who shows up here. (Boo!) Instead, we’re introduced to model and new-ish realtor Bre Tiesi, who starts “working” (a loose term on this show) at the Oppenheim Group. The 32-year-old had a son with Cannon in 2022 and has a vaguely defined but supposedly amicable relationship with him. (They seemingly don’t have the best communication, though, as he didn’t tell her about the subsequent child he had with model LaNisha Cole.)

Anyway, Tiesi tells us that she only sold her first house in 2020—which is so this show—but claims to have a huge Rolodex of celebrity clients… whom she refuses to name because she thinks it’s tacky (LOL). She does, at least, give Saweetie a home tour in one episode.

For some reason—maybe my own unreasonable prejudice—I assumed Tiesi would be extremely messy and attention-seeking. The producers had clearly brought her on as an heir to former Selling Sunset villain Christine Quinn’s bitchy throne. What else would someone who talks about how mistrustful she is of people be doing on a catty show like this? As it turns out, though, Tiesi is a pretty chill and friendly woman; she just happens to have, as she puts it, a resting bitch face and lacks any sense of humor.

And while she’s not the most exciting realtor this show has seen, Tiesi surprisingly becomes someone to root for when co-star Chelsea Lazkani starts attacking her unconventional family. Lazkani, who’s married with children, doesn’t agree with Tiesi’s “baby mama” lifestyle because she’s a Christian. (This is a hilarious reason to give when all of your outfits shamelessly expose your cleavage.) She dislikes Tiesi so much that she pulls the ultimate Real Housewives move and invites some women from Tiesi’s past to a showing. Lazkani also openly questions her decision to have a child with Cannon in front of the entire office, while Tiesi isn’t even there.

To be fair, some of Lazkani’s concerns are valid. She mainly thinks it’s unfair that Cannon’s children won’t receive that much individual time with their father because there’s so many of them. I also don’t think it's necessarily fair that his children are being born into this wild media frenzy surrounding their existence.

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Helen Holmes, Tim Teeman

However, Lazkani falls into slippery territory when she starts criticizing Tiesi for essentially raising her child without a present father (even though we have no idea how present or not present Cannon is in his kids’ lives). This rubs Stause, who’s married to a non-binary person and wants to have children, the wrong way. Ditto for single mom Amanza Smith, who also comes to Tiesi’s defense. And ultimately, Tiesi is able to defend herself when she and Lazkani come face to face at a heated dinner.

Even with all the baby chatter, however, Tiesi remains annoyingly private about her family situation, which—I’m sorry!—is the only reason she was cast on this show. I’m shocked that Cannon didn’t make an appearance at all, even on FaceTime or a phone call. But let’s be thankful for what we have: a fun and, most importantly, fresh showdown out of this stunt casting, which Selling Sunset has been sorely missing in recent seasons. I can’t believe we have the former chairman of TeenNick to thank for that.