TUNING OUT REALITY A FAREWELL TO THE REAL HOUSEWIVES
BY Cecelia Barron ILLUSTRATION Leslie Benavides DESIGN Anna Brinkhuis
I was 10 when I witnessed a physical fight for the first time. It occurred at a country club. Upset by rumors disputing her wealth, one woman, Teresa, chased her ex-friend Danielle around the grounds of the estate, screaming expletives as she cut around banquet rooms. Danielle hid in the bushes while crowds swarmed the screaming women. As Danielle was being led away from the chaos, a friend of Teresa’s yanked Danielle’s hair, leaving a pile of brown extensions on the floor. I still remember this moment, my pounding heart, my anxiety about these perils of adulthood. It all occurred on The Real Housewives of New Jersey. After a decade under its influence, I’m quitting The Real Housewives and its brethren. Housewives—and, more broadly, reality TV—has been as central to my coming of age as Harry Potter or Hannah Montana. I can’t remember the first time I watched an episode of Housewives not because the moment was insignificant, but simply because I was too young to recollect the exact timing of my fall into Bravo’s vortex. It has existed as a throughline, connecting the years of my life and dictating the seasons, without ever really starting. However, the anxiety I felt about the world I could be entering as I watched the New Jersey “Country Clubbed” episode in 2010 was justified: the depraved universe of the Housewives wasn’t just contained to the TV. But as I am now actually an adult, I can no longer bemoan the effects of Housewives without action. My participation in the dastardly franchise ends here. +++ Let us start at the beginning. Inspired by the success of ABC series Desperate Housewives—a drama which followed the surprisingly thrilling lives of four otherwise average suburban women—Andy Cohen, the CEO of the Housewives franchise, wanted to capitalize on the public’s curiosity about what happens behind the white picket fence. While Desperate Housewives was scripted—complete with murder and more murder—the Real Housewives began as a documentary-style inquiry into the same American fascination: what do these housewives do all day? While ABC positioned its characters from the show’s title as hopelessly flawed, Bravo offered a more honest lens through which to view modern women. Perhaps these housewives would turn out to be as devious and corrupt as the Desperate Housewives were written to be, but these real women were (at least, in theory) as perceptible to
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these lapses in morality as any viewer. Real Housewives first aired in 2006 with the premiere of The Real Housewives of Orange County. Noticeable in its grainy footage and mundanity, the show’s first season contained few of the brawls and blowouts so closely tied to the franchise today. Most of the first season’s issues were inconsequential. In one episode, a Housewife hires another Housewife’s son to shoot the rabbits invading her yard. Any moments of tension were entirely personal, like the ongoing plot line dealing with the troubled engagement of Housewife Jo De La Rosa and her husband Slade Smiley (they would break up during the second season). Though monotonous, the realistic element of the new show, the seemingly absolute intrusion into these women's lives, was not only intriguing but cathartic for watchers. The women—rich women—were mired in the same petty problems we all were: rabbit invasions, a floundering relationship. All these women claimed to want was what all American women were assumed to desire from life: the perfect husband, the perfect kids, and a multi-million dollar home. Naturally, many American women had dismissed these lofty, patriarchal ideals long ago. And yet these shows thrived, for while we could sympathize with these women chasing some unrealistic model of womanhood, we could also judge them for it. The pilot episode of RHOC debuted on the same day when the first tweet ever was sent: March 21st, 2006. The show now had a medium for which all opinions about the Wives could be shared. Intriguing and cathartic, Housewives were now also uniting. The distribution of viewers breaking up approximately evenly between California and New York, Florida and Nevada, viewers states apart could now both ridicule a Housewife’s new breast implants (“Fake boobs. Fake tan. No hips. No booty,” @bougieknitter tweeted, “I don’t wanna look like none of them! #RHOC”). Friends separated by oceans could unite over their hatred for a particular husband (“Slade is back?!?” @DavidAtlanta complains, “*puke*”). Only eight episodes, the first season of RHOC laid out the blueprint for all of Housewives to follow: a complete dismissal of privacy and an invitation for the audience to judge without consequences. Following Orange County came New York, Atlanta, and New Jersey, all within three years. Each expansion followed the same structure: several women, some of whom are married, many of whom
are divorced, living their wealthy lives and lamenting their wealthy woes. But, as the episodes inched on, the plotlines became remarkably less real and all the more desperate. Though (allegedly) unscripted, the shows began to have the same thrilling edge that the high drama of Desperate Housewives had provided. The catalyzing moment which defined the franchise as dramatic spectacle rather than an earnest exploration was in the first season finale of RHONJ. Cast member Teresa Giudice flips a table in outrage over her fellow castmate Danielle Staub’s refusal to admit she was a “prostitution whore.” From then on, viewers expected more from Housewives. The show could no longer survive as an inside look into the lives of rich women; it had to be an expositor of the evils that existed between these characters. Desperate Housewives faded into obscurity once the same dramatic effect could be reached by featuring real women rather than actors. There was something enticing about the realness of Housewives fights: these women wouldn’t walk off set and hug each other. The stakes of their fights were higher and the consequences were more permanent. Two years after the famous table-flipping and seven Real Housewives expansions later, Desperate Housewives announced its end. Cohen had noticed that the unbelievably dramatic lives of real people were more entertaining than the manufactured conflicts spun out in scripted dialogue on Universal backlots, and he capitalized on it. What began as a mini-series about five women living outside of LA became an international franchise with over a dozen cities and spin-offs, a viewership in the millions, and a cultural phenomenon. +++ A show about wealthy, sheltered, (mostly) white women is destined to produce endless examples of ignorance and unchecked privilege. More surprising, however, is that the audience for Housewives is so quiet about these issues, even while they publicly advocate against them. The creator himself, Andy Cohen, is a self-proclaimed “total liberal” who frequently calls out transphobia and homophobia on his own latenight talk show, Watch What Happens Live. On Twitter, he has expressed his strong opposition to his homestate senator, Josh Hawley, a pro-life Republican who supports President Trump’s policy of child separation
28 FEB 2020
