Listen to me. This show is overlooked,underestimated,and I adore it. Since the moment I first watched it,I haven’t been able to think of anything else. Did I binge-watch 12 seasons of it over the course of lockdown? Yes. Is my whole family “worried” about me? Yes. Am I going to take up an entire column to tell you all aboutReal Housewives? Oh,you bet your Negroni-Sbagliato-with-Prosecco-in-it,I am!
You’d be forgiven for lumpingRHOBH with low-brow reality shows such as Flavor Flav’sFlavor Of Love,Toddlers and Tiaras,orTemptation Island. But I’m here to tell you,those shows are for gutter dwellers.RHOBH is different. The show is a brutal chandelier of feminism,family,and friendship. I’m not the only star who thinks so;acclaimed academic Roxane Gay and actor Meryl Streep have both confessed to being superfans. Streep even cited it as the reason she started to fight global warming,fearing that “If we don’t survive,we won’t be able to watchHousewives.”
Yet,even with the GOAT’s nod of approval,the show’s brilliance remains,in my opinion,sinfully underrated by the world at large. I’m just confused. How is it that this triumph can have a defamatory score of 5.3 on IMDb? To make matters horrifyingly worse,review website Rotten Tomatoes hasn’t even acknowledged it with a score. For shame! Has the world gone mad?
I mean,come on! It’s a show about a group of women being assembled into a faux friendship for no other reason than to do wild things in designer clothes. What more do you want,you cretins? It’s not trash TV. If anything,it’s TV’s answer to Botticelli’sPrimavera.
And as with the most infamous Italian Renaissance masterpiece,RHOBH is equally beautiful and enigmatic. To this day,no one really knows what these works of art are actually about. Neither seems to convey any clear meaning whatsoever. But that doesn’t seem to matter to the throngs of people who flock to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence or the 30,000 fans who attended the recentHousewives convention,BravoCon,in New York City.
I know what you’re thinking... Intellectualising a show about eight women who drink too much and fight? Yes,there is a common impulse to scoff. But I challenge anyone to name another show that features,let alone stars,a pack of women over the age of 40 who don’t constantly talk about men. To say the show passes the Bechdel Test is a bold understatement;it goes a step further and behaves as if men never existed in the first place.