Why can’t I quit my women? My harridans, my blatant capitalists, women who would cannibalise me if a plastic surgeon promised them that it would buy then ten more years of a a youthful-ish appearance?
Who are these women of which I speak? They are the Real (debatable) Housewives (sometimes) of [city]. They are a stable of women who have access to some form of high status in the area where they live (or where they rent for the duration of filming, see: Meredith Marks who resides permanently in New York but films as part of the Salt Lake City cast). They form the casts of multiple reality shows, all owned and produced by Bravo, which is run by executive Andy Cohen.
People who don’t watch these shows don’t understand why they occupy so much of my mind. In the interest of informing you, as this is my blog, let me try to provide you with an introduction to the Real Housewives.
There is a strange certainty to a Real Housewives show. Some common threads:
- 15-20 episodes per season (if Season 1 of a franchise, normally 8-10 episodes to see if the series works)
- 5-8 “housewives”
- An intro where the women say taglines about themselves. For instance: “There’s nothing grey about MY gardens!” says Sonja Morgan, who lives in a crumbling townhouse and is growing increasingly eccentric, like the documentary Grey Gardens. “If you don’t like my shade, step out of my shadow!” says Kenya Moore, who regularly eviscerates her foes with words alone.
- Several parties. These can be exceedingly random: a bra party (a slightly baffling RHO New York event), or cliché: a vow renewal (often swiftly followed by a divorce announcement). These can also be expected: birthday parties and book launches, or they can be blatantly shoehorned in: launches of launches of books (Heather, RHO Salt Lake City), and fashion shows (sometimes with no fashion, see Sherée, RHO Atlanta).
- A plotline for each housewife. If things get interesting enough, this plotline gets overshadowed by the way the season develops and conflicts emerge. Like when Luann from RHONY was delirious with joy about her impending nuptials only to find that her wedding plotline became a “He’s cheating on you regularly in your favourite watering hole” plotline. If things do not get interesting enough, you may find yourself painstakingly brought along to every step of the housewife, say, designing and launching a line of statement necklaces or some such thing.
- 1-3 “friends of” – these are friends of the housewives, who may have been tested as full housewives but who ended up on the cutting room floor, or someone who emerges throughout the season as being somewhat relevant to the storyline(s). They can later become housewives, or housewives can be demoted to “friends of”. A demotion often follows a season as described above, where a housewife has no emerging plotline beyond remodelling their kitchen or launching a skincare line. Sometimes a true star emerges, like Britani from RHO Salt Lake City, who cemented her place in Bravo history by interrupting every conversation that didn’t involve her asking why nobody cared about her.
- Talking heads/confessionals, where the ladies, the “friends of” and sometimes the husbands, react to the scenes. Once, Lisa Rinna of Beverly Hills drank from her drink through a straw in an emphatic manner to signify a kind of “I’m not gonna say anything but the moment speaks for itself” kind of way, so now all of the wives do that all the time, and it’s annoying.
- One or two cast trips, where the ‘wives, often accompanied by their “friends of”, travel somewhere. Hopefully, this is an international location but sometimes, as when Jen Shah was awaiting sentencing for defrauding the elderly in RHO Salt Lake City, they must settle on a domestic destination.
- The season ends on a party, mostly, ideally where one or more housewives have a big fight and storm off, then the audience is treated to freeze frames of each ‘wife with a little bit of text to resolve their storyline.
- A reunion, increasingly released in 3 parts, but in earlier franchises and seasons it would be one episode. In this reunion, the housewives all come to a Bravo soundstage where Andy Cohen (mostly – once it was Nicki Minaj, and some international franchises have a different host) holds their feet to the flames for their actions throughout the season. It is typically filmed when most of the season has aired, then it is released the week after the finale has aired. In the reunions, Andy reads definitely real texts from definitely real viewers reacting to the season. This can be very cathartic for the viewer. Sometimes (at least twice), a housewife will unveil a new music career in collaboration with their new surprise girlfriend. It’s not that weird, but it’s weird that it happened twice, with Kim Zolciak and Danielle Staub.
On average, I watch about 4 episodes of Bravo shows per week, most often of the Real Housewives variety. I have a mental rolodex of women who wield power through their businesses, husbands or horrible tempers. Every so often, I zone out and flicker through them, wondering who would be better in real life, who would be worse and, weirdly, who would like me. Because, as much as the show revolves around “lifestyle porn” and excess, it is a lot more about social dynamics.
The ‘wives think that they are signing on to do a show where they shock audiences with their diamond-encrusted toilet roll holders. Mostly, they think that the worst they will have to endure is our disgust at their material excess. They think that their castmates will make disgraces of themselves, but the housewife herself? Infallible. Rich, excessive, otherwise infallible.
What we actually get from them is an oblivious performance of their foibles. For instance, a HW might think it perfectly reasonable to demand silence to tell a birthday party full of 7 year-olds, at great length, about the traumatic birth of her two daughters (Alexis, Real Housewives of Orange County). She might think it appropriate to bring protection in the form of Hell’s Angels and a recently released convict named Danny to a cancer benefit for a little baby, then proceed to threaten attendees because she was told she was in for “a surprise”, and to be outraged that her donation of zero dollars did not net her a table for her and her biker gang (Danielle, Real Housewives of New Jersey). She might think that filming a scene in her church where attendees break down in tears at the pulpit and call her their mother and an aspect of God will bust those nasty rumours that she is running a cult (Mary, Real Housewives of Salt Lake City). The through line here is that, to these individuals, they are coming across as normal and relatable.
I have always wished to know what it is about me that would make viewers cringe in the way the above scenes made me cringe. If Real Housewives is to be believed, all people are walking around life thinking that they are being perfectly reasonable while acting absolutely batshit. Even the sane people in RH have moments where you remember “Oh yes – these are the type of people who would agree to be on this show.” No amount of apparent sensibility can outweigh that fact.
As a generally anxious person, I would like to know what is my “bringing a Hell’s Angel to a child’s cancer benefit”. We all have our blind spots, and in our real housewives, we get to see these blind spots performed and platformed and underlined. There’s a strange comfort to that.
We can tell ourselves that our blind spots are not bad, in the grand scheme of things. Maybe you interrupt people accidentally. Maybe you are always late. Maybe you phrase things inelegantly. But there is a comfort to knowing that, however annoying you suspect you are, you will never interrupt a Black Shabbat dinner to talk about how Jewish people have always seemed to conspire to make you, a white Christian woman, feel unwelcome (Ramona, Real Housewives of New York).
The curse of being a real housewife is every season, you must reckon with that which you had no idea was an issue. There are different ways that housewives deal with the revelation of their blind spot.
The Camille Grammer approach: Switch the bitch
Season One of the Real Housewives of Beverley Hills was incredible. Camille, then-wife of Frasier’s Kelsey Grammer, was the villain of the season, clashing early on with Kyle Richards, a seemingly innocent and sensible LA native.
Kyle often gets a favourable edit, as she is generally quite sane, and can competently deliver a quip or two. She is also very much in the Hollywood mix: her sister and fellow castmate Kim is a troubled former child star and their other sister, Kathy, is mother to Paris and Nicky Hilton. Above them hovers the constant spectre of their mother, the ominously-named Big Kathy.
Back to Camille. The conflict between Camille and Kyle began when Kyle said, off-camera and according to Camille, that if Camille went to Hawaii without her husband Kelsey, nobody would be interested in that. Kyle vehemently denies this (the clip repeats for the rest of the season: “You’re such a fucking liar, Camille!”).
As the season progresses and the feud deepens, Camille does a number of infuriating and entertaining things. She compares herself to Jesus, she demonstrates a wonderful vocabulary in calling Kyle “pernicious”, slightly lets down that vocabulary by also calling Kyle “Machiavellic”, and she flirts in a weird, arch way with her married friend Nick.
She tops it all off with a deranged dinner party featuring Allison DuBois, the psychic who inspired the show Medium. Du Bois spends the dinner vaping and threatening not to assist Kyle if anyone she loves ever goes missing, and promising Kyle “Your husband will never emotionally fulfil you”.
Camille kicked off the brand new franchise known as RHOBH with great style. The downside is that she set up a long tradition of intangible, offscreen feuds founded on unprovable things which continue to hound the show to this day. Did Lisa Vanderpump tell people to tell people that Dorit abandoned a dog? Eh, probably, but we’ll never get the satisfaction of a reveal onscreen.
Side note: if you like insane feuds and rumours which always come to be fully revealed in all their horror, watch Vanderpump Rules, a spin-off of RHOBH following Lisa Vanderpump’s desperate oversexed restaurant employees.
Back (again) to Camille. Her arc comes to a sad end, as it became clear to the audience and to her that Kelsey had no interest in their marriage. It’s later revealed that he was having an affair the entire season.
If we were to summarise Camille’s blind spot, it’s a flair for the dramatics that goes beyond the realm of normalcy. If Kyle’s original sin were, in fact, true, Camille certainly overreacts to it. She slinks around sexily like a Disney villain for her friends, and she summons strange allies to eviscerate her foes. Part of what makes her so compelling is imagining how mortifying it would be to be Camille, watching her behaviour on S1.
When Season Two rolled around, viewers were treated to a humbler Camille, almost penitent. The other women pitied her for her marriage breakdown and seemed to have chalked her insane S1 behaviour up to that. She became a fan favourite, no longer the centre of attention but held in affectionate regard by viewers and ‘wives alike. She got the best of both worlds – an iconic season of jaw-dropping reality tv moments and a gentle landing into being more of a fun occasional addition. In a sense, she villained so hard in S1 that she earned an eternal place in the hearts of RHOBH fans, and she ceased it so crisply for S2 that she managed to avoid the general viewership thinking she is a fundamentally bad person. She still has her moments, though.
The Ramona Singer approach: Never stop never stopping
Ramona – the Christian jewellery self-described “maven”, who says she looks like she’s the sister of her teenage daughter Avery, who starts her own brand of Pinot Grigio and brings it to every party she attends by the crateload, who pretends to get trauma flashbacks if she’s stuck on a girls’ weekend and finds out there’s a great party happening back in the city, who throws wine glasses at the faces of her frenemies, who has defecated multiple times on the floors of holiday rentals and expects the staff to clean it up, who speaks ill of a recently deceased man to his former partner because he was an addict. Ramona, who has basically always been a nightmare of a person.
Ramona has claimed repeatedly, season after season, to be learning from her mistakes. She has claimed to be a different person now every time a new season begins. Every season, she continues to be this exact way. But why would she change?
Ramona still has friends, she’s invited to events, she lives a life free from shame for the litany of horrors that she has released upon on the world. Her Bravo career finally ground to a halt after she allegedly called a producer the n-word, to the surprise of nobody. But still, she perseveres!
She is not just incapable of change, she is uninterested in it. She doesn’t need it either, because she is a wealthy white woman who spends her spare time a Mar-a-Lago, trying to hit the jackpot by catching the eye of some vile slug of a man. When her friends have finished destroying the world and climate change has wiped humanity off the planet, she’ll still be there, pooing on the floor of a hotel room bathroom and looking for a staff member to clean it up. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as staff in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.
What would I do?
OK, so let’s say I’m a real housewife. I’m me, but I’m very thin and have had some ill-advised filler. My husband is a billionaire and he spends most of his time working in another country. I have two children and perhaps too many pets.
While filming my first season, I would think that I am perfectly reasonable and nice and normal. Upon watching the show, I see that my castmates and viewers find me to be:
- Occasionally foul-mouthed or purveyor of “too much information”. I’ll curse a lot, I’ll overshare about bodily functions and things that I get up to with my billionaire husband. This will certainly alienate some of the housewives and some viewers, but equally some viewers will find my critics to be prudish and prissy, and will rally to my side.
- Untidy – my home will be lavish but cluttered and messy. One of the women sits on my couch and frowns. Seconds later she pulls a Louboutin stiletto out from under a cushion, a quizzical expression on her face. Unfazed, I say “That’s where it went!” Cue a confessional from the housewife who sat on the shoe, advising me to hire a cleaner. I will not (unlike other housewives) have dog shit on the floor, but, having too many pets, there will be hair everywhere and always a cat or dog underfoot.
- Two-faced – Housewife A tells me that she thinks Housewife B was rude at the luncheon. I agree, and list all the many times that I found Housewife B to be unconscionably rude. Later, Housewife B talks about how Housewife A is always singling her out and being judgmental of her. I let B cry on my shoulder, reassuring her that she is perfect and flawless. I will argue at the reunion that I sincerely am just easily talked into people’s point-of-view, but I will be shouted down and will have to admit, tearfully, that I am two-faced.
Following my first season, I will attend therapy for my two-facedness. My tagline for my second season will be “I may have two faces, but I keep them cute”. When people bitch to me about others, I engage with it but I constantly, annoyingly, walk back my statements immediately and provide alternate points of view. I find myself saying “but then again” a lot.
I start selling a line of storage solutions for homes, having become (at least publicly) incredibly tidy. They’re called MessyGirl boxes. I also unveil a miniature version of my home where my pets live, named Chateau Animal.
I continue my foul-mouthed ways but I have not forgotten the judgment of my castmates. Pretending to be light-hearted, I never mention it, but viewers can see through my façade to the seething rage below.
It all unleashes itself on a booze-soaked trip to the Bahamas. Following my humiliating breakdown in the Bahamas, I become sober but I’m super condescending about it, especially at the reunion. In the interim between my second and third season, I am arrested in the Hamptons, drunk as a skunk, for public indecency and vandalism.
Clearly this isn’t the first time I’ve thought about this.
I hope that this post served as a kind of intro to a pop culture language that I am proud to be able to speak. When I meet someone new and find they also watch the Real Housewives, you instantly have hours of conversational inspiration. The Real Housewives franchises are probably bad things, overall, for and about the world, but they are cultural artefacts and deserve a place in the annals of television history.