How the diamonds have fallen…
For those playing at home, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills was my introduction to Real Housewives as general; you could make the argument that RHOBH was my first love. Once I was hooked, I began going through the other franchises, and now I sit here a self-confessed Bravoholic and Real Housewives fanatic.
But you never truly forget your first…
Well, until your first takes a massive nose dive in terms of quality and entertainment and becomes the least watchable franchise of all the Real Housewives franchises.
Let’s take an unnecessarily deep dive into what made Beverly Hills so good, and where the disconnect with fans such as myself came.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen… (CREDIT: Bravo)
From its conception, Beverly Hills was immediately recognisable for its lifestyle porn and this is what set it apart from other franchises that existed at the time like New York and Atlanta. You had the obnoxiously enormous wealth of Lisa Vanderpump and Adrienne Maloof, in the Rodeo Drive setting of Beverly Hills, and you had an evolving group of women all with the healthy balance of delusion and aspiration for glamour. On top of this, the cast members put in the work to create compelling and real drama, to the point where I firmly believe that the first two seasons of RHOBH are some of the best Real Housewives seasons ever.
This momentum continued on, through accusations of witchcraft and doing coke in someone’s bathroom, until around season eight, which fans proclaim to be one of the worst seasons ever. Tbh I can’t even remember much from this season, besides Snoreit being super late to a lunch with Teddi, and Erika reading a lil frightened Teddi for filth for being accused of having pretend amnesia. On top of that, season eight saw two unfortunate recurring themes begin here:
1) They used a friend of (Camille) as the main villain for the season, and;
2) The unnecessary alliance of the Fox Force Five really sprouted here.
No Housewives season ever should use a friend of as a main season villain for the sole purpose that they are not a main cast member. If a cast is that desperate for a villain that they’re willing to get a friend of to fit that role, then something is wrong here.
In addition to this, Housewives alliances can be good, but they are mostly detrimental to the franchise as some housewives will even attest to, and the Fox Fraud Five are largely considered the worst Housewives alliance ever. Because five of them controlled the majority of the cast, it just seemed like anyone who was not in that group were immediately considered outsiders, and in an ensemble cast show where all of the women are meant to bond in some sort of way, it makes that objective sort of impossible to achieve.
Season nine, while introducing one of my all time favourites in Denise Richards, also saw a decrease in entertainment value as the main source of drama for the season was whether Snoreit gave a dog back to a shelter or not. This pitiful excuse for storyline was blown up that much that LVP refused to film with any of the other cast members besides Denise for the majority of the season (and ultimately skipped the reunion), and production were forced to pivot to find another person to fit the main villain role for the season… so they resorted to friend-of Camille for the role again. Watching the women gang up on this iconic friend-of at the reunion really began to signal the beginning of the end of the golden years for this franchise.
Speaking of gang ups, season ten saw one of the most heinous gang ups in the history of Real Housewives as the Fox Fraud Five led a blind charge against Denise solely because Denise didn’t want her children to overhear adults talking about sex, and Denise may or may not have had consensual sex with another woman. This was a prime example of how alliances, especially the Fox Fraud Five, can ruin a franchise, because any member of that group was basically untouchable while everyone else was considered fox food. And they all turned on Denise so hard I’m surprised they didn’t catch whiplash from it.
And genuinely, from season ten onwards, my interest in the franchise has noticeably slipped, to the point where we’re at now after season 15 has finished airing that I confidently believe that RHOBH is the worst franchise out of all of them, and it would take a miracle to revive this dead franchise from the ground.
For starters, the lifestyle porn aspect of RHOBH slowly disappeared after LVP’s dramatic exit from the franchise. Sure, Kyle is still wealthy and boring af; Snoreit likes to exude wealth in her obnoxious designer label outfits; and this was the city that really introduced glam squads thanks to Erika Jayne; but the aspirational wealth of these women became less and less prominent, and the perception of them changed from having “fuck you and your mother” money to just having a lot of money. Their nice houses just don’t slap the same when someone isn’t walking a camel through it.
Even though the Fox Fraud Five has since dissolved, their damage had been done, and the cast became so fractured and disjointed that you truly didn’t believe that they were all friends by the end of it. When Garcelle, Sutton and Crystal became a fan-favourite trio in seasons 11 and 12, it didn’t really seem like a true friendship, but more of a friendship of convenience because they knew they were the outsiders compared to the FFF and they had to stick together if they were expected to survive. Plus, we all know how fake the friendships within the FFF were.
On top of this, some of the casting choices over the past few years were absolutely abysmal. Annemarie Wiley will go down in history as one of the worst housewife castings of any franchise ever, and trailing not so far behind her was the utterly bizarre casting of Diana Jenkins. Annemarie’s main storyline was Sutton’s esophagus, and Diana lacked any shred of human empathy that makes a housewife even remotely likeable.
And now, for the cherry on top of the RHOBH Downfall Cake – and this is something that I think is a major fault of most if not all of the Housewives casts across the board – is that the cast have become too aware of their edit and how they present themselves when the cameras are up. Of course, I can understand that whenever a camera is present, you automatically become more self-conscious and aware of yourself and how you come across on screen, but what made the golden years of RHOBH so good was that the women were showing their true authentic selves, and nothing about it seemed self-produced at all. We all knew where we were when Kim accused Kyle of stealing her goddamned house, because that pain from Kim was so real that it was almost uncomfortable for us viewers to watch.
Now, we’re stuck with Kyle the lesbian pretending that sending her kids to college was showing the deepest and most raw parts of her life, meanwhile she’s questioned other women’s marriages, sexualities, finances, and livelihoods all for the sake of the show ratings; we’re stuck with Dorit still pretending to live a life of wealth yet we all know she’s facing money struggles, and her pretending that going through a divorce is equal to the life of a war-torn child in the Middle East; we’re stuck with the women pretending like Amanda Frances was this massive gamechanger disruptor to the cast, when in reality she was a small raindrop compared to the tsunami disruptor that was Brandi Glanville; and we’re stuck with women too scared to speak up and say what’s truly on their minds for fear of a bad edit.
These women are so aware of their edits that very little of what we’re getting is real, and we’re left to question what is actually going on in these women’s lives. As fans of reality TV, we shouldn’t be second guessing what we’re watching on screen because the show should be producing raw and real entertainment. Instead, we’re being fed scraps with a cast that’s too lazy to get off their asses and do the fucking work.
I want to see RHOBH come back from the grave and be as good as it once was, but for that to happen, there need to be some major changes. Like I’m talking RHONY season five levels of recasting, because this cast can’t thrive and we can’t enjoy the show for what it is if we’re forced to endure Vile Kyle vs. Snoreit for the third season in a row with Sutton throwing in quirky one-liners every now and then and Boz blindly agreeing with anything Snoreit says.
In conclusion, I’m going to leave you with five choice words: Give Dorit Her Pink Slip.
Please. For the love of all that is holy.
– by The Black Widow
Widow's Lure 