The Real Housewives Is the Greatest Television Ever Made
Why did I ever think I was so much better than the beloved Bravo franchise?
It was just me and one other person sitting at a gate sequestered in the corner of a terminal at Washington Reagan Airport in Arlington, Virginia. I was at the tail end of a wearying two weeks that saw me packing up all of my worldly possessions to ship back home to Bismarck, North Dakota, ready to give up on the remaining dregs of some vague dream I had moved to New York City to pursue four years earlier in 2013. I got rid of my NYU Tisch acceptance packet, it had no use anymore after financial barriers kept me from enrolling. I trashed a fabric-bound photo book I had made for the ex that held nothing but painful memories and traumatic triggers in its pages after I spent almost two years crushed under his thumb until I finally gained the courage to speak up, resulting in his cutting me off forever. The empty plastic vodka bottles in my closet were packed into the bottom of a black trash bag, beneath other heaps of recycling, so if I happened to run into a roommate on the way out they wouldn’t be able to catch a red-handed glimpse of the person they had been living with the last couple months. The rest was packed up in three medium-sized cardboard boxes from Home Depot, covered in heavy-duty packing tape, and entrusted with UPS. After a torrential downpour grounded all planes and kept me in New York one night longer, I had finally made it out of the city. I just had to get to Chattanooga, Tennessee so I could break up with my boyfriend.
As the late summer evening light flooded in from picture windows overlooking the tarmac, I refreshed Twitter for the millionth time that hour while waiting for my second of three flights. Suddenly, my timeline was flooded with quoted retweets: “It’s about Tom,” “Don’t tell me it’s about Tom,” “How could you do this to me…question mark.” I didn’t understand any of them, but I did know that they were all inside jokes from the world of The Real Housewives, specifically its New York franchise and one of its longtime cast members, someone I only knew at the time as The Countess.
I was vexed. The Real Housewives was a longtime cultural blindspot, one that I had always been sort of unusually haughty about. I always thought that it was sort of like the gay twitter equivalent to using a Family Guy reaction gif: low, unoriginal, unfunny, and outdated. But as I continued to scroll, watching all my internet friends react in delighted shock to the announcement of a middle-aged woman divorcing her husband of only a few months, I began to feel distinctly left out. My knowledge of the context of The Countess’ tweet was peripheral at best, and once again I felt unable to join in the gleeful camaraderie of the franchise’s highs and lows. But why? Why did I feel that I was so above the long-running and well-loved Bravo reality television franchise just because so many other people loved it? Here I was, beaten down and exhausted in the corner of a random airport in the middle of America on a trip I had booked with the rest of my meager savings from being a dog walker, just so I could break up in person with a long-distance boyfriend who didn’t love me. I wasn’t better than anyone!
I resolved then and there that I would start the show. “After all,” I told myself, “it’s not like I have anything better to do.” My flight didn’t leave for another two hours and my plans for the next month were to hole up in my childhood bedroom and figure out what to do with my life after New York had spit me out. I signed up for a Hulu free trial and fired up the first episode of The Real Housewives of New York, if I was going to do it right I figured it had to be from the beginning.
Not 15 seconds into the episode, I was kicking myself for having waited so long to jump in. There she was, the Countess Luann de Lesseps, then still married to her first husband, twirling around to the camera in a shit-colored brown dress with a plunging neckline, proudly proclaiming, “I never feel guilty about being privileged!” After her introduction was Bethenny Frankel, the only housewife I really knew outside the show. While all the other wives were joined by their husbands and kids in their theme song introductions, Bethenny was accompanied by her shaggy mutt, Cookie. I realized when I glanced up that my giggling had broken the hour of silence shared between myself and the person across from me.
Immediately, my brain experienced the delightful sensation of filling in all of the secondary information it had retained about these women from years of reaction gifs, pictures, memes, and videos. Jill Zarin was the woman who let her chihuahua lick her nose; Alex McCord was the woman who begged, “Go get the pinot grigio! Please!”; Luann was the one who had recorded the infamous “Money Can’t Buy You Class”; Bethenny Frankel was, of course, Bethenny Frankel; And Ramona Singer was the woman who always seemed to gave a glass of white wine in her hand when she wasn’t stomping down a runway with her eyes practically Clockwork Orange-d. That feeling of suddenly starting to get everything is, I believe, akin to waking up from an amnesiac state.
After a few days spent in Tennessee with my boyfriend, we broke up as exactly as we expected to do, and I was free to go home to contemplate my life and every choice I had made that led me back to my childhood bedroom, which is where I could finally be left in peace to binge more RHONY to quell my sorrows. I flew through the franchise’s first four seasons, they kept me company and gave me some lasting joy while I laid in my bed, depressed and listless and without any driving force in life. After a while, spending time with the New York housewives started to feel like spending time with my friends. I knew all of their idiosyncrasies. I could find myself reacting to situations in the show as if they were playing out in my real life. “Oh, Ramona won’t like that,” I’d think to myself when one-and-done cast member Cindy Barshop invited the Pinot Grigio Princess to Quogue without stocking a full bar of her favorite alcoholic beverage. When Jill Zarin arrived unannounced and unexpected on Scary Island, crashing a day of relaxation to surprise the cast members she was on the outs with, I was as shaken up as the perenially flushed Alex McCord! These women were giving storyline after storyline of the most astonishingly entertaining fights, fêtes, and fractured friendships I had ever seen on television. Even the most formidable scripted shows were nothing compared to The Real Housewives.
I started to develop a nagging feeling I didn’t think I would have so soon after moving: I missed New York. RHONY reminded me that New York is a city of the absurd, where even the most powerful and wealthy inhabitants are doomed to eventually look like absolute fools just because they choose to reside there. The city makes all of us crazy — it’s inescapable, and that’s sort of part of its charm. I started to resent that I never gave myself the chance to make peace with that day-to-day insanity and find some semblance of contentment in it. There’s no shame in leaving a place that drives you absolutely fucking bonkers, but I loathed that I had let anything win out over me. I watched as the women of the franchise coped — sometimes unhealthily but always honestly — with divorces, cheating scandals, bankruptcy, drinking problems, arrests, lost limbs, and permanently lost loves. I so admired their boundless resilience and eventually became so inspired by it that I began to feel like I might have it in me for one last go at the city, promising to give myself more time and a whole lot more grace. I had to be okay with stumbling this time around. It was going to be trial by fire, but at least I had curbed my vices enough that I wouldn’t be making any slurred Dorinda Medley speeches.
I think that’s part of what makes The Real Housewives some of the most compelling television ever made, every cast member who has signed on to any franchise is essentially acknowledging that the show is going to bring out some of their most vicious traumas and demons while offering the opportunity to work through them if they’re willing. Casey Wilson and Danielle Schneider, creators and hosts of the long-running podcast Bitch Sesh: A Real Housewives Breakdown, often say in their weekly recaps that no one out there is making stories quite like this for women, especially not women in their mid-30s and above. These imperfect characters are deeply watchable not just in spite of their flaws, but because of them. Watching them grow as women, sometimes falling a step back but always moving forward again, is enchanting. They’re messy yet marvelous, sometimes tragic but always true. They give real reality to reality television. It’s that level of indisputable authenticity that makes people identify so strongly with the women of a Housewives franchise — the sea of Real Housewives fans is endless, and they’re loyal to their favorites, sometimes to a fault.
Returning to New York in the early days of 2018, I saw the city for what it is: just a running comedy of errors; a place to take the good with the bad until you learn to relish the good so much that it feels euphoric when it comes around. I was happier here than ever before, thanks largely to the wisdom and humor imparted on me by the tough broads of RHONY, who always had my back on Hulu after a bad day. In the years since, I’ve devoured the Potomac, Beverly Hills, New Jersey, and Atlanta franchises, with a good chunk of those new friends coming into my life over the past year with all the spare time I’ve had. There was even the introduction of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City to wind down 2020. And yet, I always fall back on my original girlfriends, the ladies of New York. They’re the ones who have given me the most laughter, the most quotable moments, and the most warmth on the hardest of days. They’re scrappy. They’re charming. They’re lovable even when they do or say something truly awful. Most of the time, they’re not good people. But they’re my people. The imperfect women of an equally imperfect city, one that can spit you out but will leave you with a lasting affinity, drawing you back in when you least expect it. I guess you really do never forget your first.