Categories
Real Housewives Tips for You

The Real Housewives is an American TV Series

The Real Housewives was first announced as one of six reality TV series ordered by American TV channel Bravo in May 2005.

Inspiration

It is inspired by the scripted soap opera Desperate Housewives and Peyton Place and documents the lives of upper-class women who “live glamorous lives in picturesque Southern California gated communities where the average home has a $1.6 million price tag and residents include CEOs and retired professional athletes.”

Real Housewives of Orange County- It’s just Beginning

The series was announced as the Real Housewives of Orange County in January 2006 and premiered on March 21 of the same year.

Real Housewives of New York City 

In September 2007, Bravo began production on the series Manhattan Moms, which “follows an eclectic group of Gotham socialists and their families.” The series was later renamed as The Real Housewives of New York City in January 2008, serving  as the first spinoff from the Real Housewives franchise. It premiered on March 4, 2008.

The Real Housewives of Atlanta

The second spinoff, “The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” was announced in June and premiered on October 7.

The Real Housewives of New Jersey

The third spinoff The Real Housewives of New Jersey was mentioned in May 2008 before the confirmation of The Real Housewives of Atlanta. It then premiered on May 12, 2009. The Real Housewives of DC was announced in October 2009. It premiered on August 5, 2010, and ended on October 21, 2010 after one season. It gained notoriety as the only Real Housewives franchise to be canceled.  The cancelation was largely due to the public outcry resulting from one of the housewives,  Michaele Salahi and her husband crashed an official White House function (without an invitation).

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills was announced in March 2010 and premiered on October 14, 2010. In March 2010, Bravo ordered a series titled Miami Social Club. The series was later re-titled The Real Housewives of Miami. It premiered on February 22, 2011 and ended on November 4, 2013 for the first time in three seasons.

The Real Housewives of Potomac

In November 2015, Bravo announced two new Real Housewives series, The Real Housewives of Potomac and The Real Housewives of Dallas. Before it was announced, The Real Housewives of Potomac was first titled Potomac Ensemble during early production. It premiered on January 17, 2016.

The Real Housewives of Dallas

The Real Housewives of Dallas was originally titled Dallas Woman during its early production, but a potential spin-off series to Ladies of London. The series premiered on April 11, 2016.

The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City

In November 2019, the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City was announced. It premiered on November 11, 2020.

The Real Housewives of Miami

That same month, Andy Cohen, executive producer of Bravo’s Real Housewives series, confirmed that he was trying to get streaming service Peacock to welcome The Real Housewives of Miami for a fourth season. In February 2021, it was confirmed that The Real Housewives of Miami would reboot on Peacock.

The Real Housewives: the Future

On December 2, 2016, Cohen spoke about the future of the franchise and said it could be set in Nashville, Tennessee, if there is a new insanity in the franchise. Cohen also said the All-Star version will as the franchise’s ultimate goal as ratings begin to go down. He added that eight housewives with “big personalities” from each series on the island are likely to feature together. In December 2016, in an interview with Harry Connick Jr., Cohen said he was looking for a city with a strong personality and agreed that New Orleans would fit that standard.

The producer and Andy Cohen appeared in Chicago, Greenwich, San Francisco and Houston, but did not pursue them.

The Real Housewives and Criticism

The reality series has been criticized for promoting consumerism through programming. It is also seen as perpetuating gender stereotypes by highlighting women more as shoppers than career women. Their lavish lifestyle also contributes to the misconception that financial wealth equals happiness. [Citation needed] feminist leader Gloria Steinem has vociferously criticized the “Housewives” franchise for “giving women rich, spoiled, dependent and hateful each other.” Steinem summed up her distaste for the show in 2013:

‘It’s an incredible amount of money spent, being a woman, not getting along with each other with all the dress-ups and inflatables, plastic surgery and fake boredom.’ Fight each other. It is a minstrel show for women. I don’t believe it, I must say. I feel like they’ve been manufactured, that the fights between them are going to be manufactured and they’re supposed to chase each other in a kind of conflicting way.

The New York Times published an article in October 2019 criticizing how the cast of the different Housewives franchises are “separated” by their skin color. Author Tracy Egan Morrissey points to  Potomac and Atlanta for an almost entirely African-American cast, while other iterations (Beverly Hills, Orange County, Dallas, New York and New Jersey) are overwhelmingly white, with few women of color. The Real Housewives of New York didn’t have an African-American cast until 2021, but in 2019 she joined Dallas with Carly Brittingham, having become the show’s first Hispanic cast member. Beverly Hills featured a “racially homogeneous cast throughout its run” until the addition of Garcell Beauvais in 2019, with the exception of Joyce Girot in Season 4.

Categories
Real Housewives Tips for You

The Real Housewives Versus Reality

The recent Season 12 reunion of “The Real Housewives of New York City” was a strange affair: since March, Andy Cohen, who has endured zoom reunions for Bravo shows like “The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” After enduring zooming reunions for Bravo shows like “Real Housewives of Atlanta,” “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” “Vanderpump Rules” and “Summer House,” Andy Cohen finally brought the women together. It was a small return to normalcy, even if, in the midst of the impending economic crisis, they had to sit six feet apart and cover the vast space between them with enough rug to keep Empire from going into the red. But before Tinsley Mortimer could finally berate Dorinda Medley, before Ramona Singer could apologize for everything she’d ever done, before Sonja Morgan could repeat, “We’re all going to die, but you can catch a nice dick while you’re at it. But first, everyone had to fight for ten minutes about COVID.

On a recent Instagram Live by Leah McSweeney, the latest apple holder, Cohen wrote, “I was having a great time during my quarantine in Florida and then …… I’m back in New York and I’m not taking this shit seriously: …. Bringing up her criticism of the “fuck yous” and the performers, she clearly directed her comments at Ramona, the only housewife who had survived the worst of the segregation in the South. Dorinda was also upset with Ramona, but this was already unfolding on social media, as just a few days before Guilfoyle tested positive for the virus, Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle attended a Hamptons Republican It was revealed that Ramona had been a guest at a fundraiser attended by Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle. In a decidedly political turn of phrase, Dorinda said that Ramona was hanging around Mar-a-Lago and not worried about the virus.

This argument was followed by Leah and Dorinda criticizing Ramona’s behavior, saying, “I didn’t have the virus. I didn’t have the virus,” “I don’t wear a mask in the ocean. I don’t wear a mask in the ocean,” she said in the affected tone of a five-year-old, pretending as if she hadn’t done anything terrible. It was the same kind of reality as watching my aunt and her high school classmates interacting on Facebook.

What made this part of the reunion strange and upsetting wasn’t the fact that the housewives were fighting. We’re used to it and welcome it like Kim Zolciak-Biermann welcomes lip fillers. That’s not to say that the housewives were fighting over who was assigned what room during the vacations, or whether someone deserved an apology. Now, all of a sudden, they’re fighting about things that really matter.

It’s a strange time for the Housewives series, which will celebrate its 15th anniversary this March. It became a cultural phenomenon because we loved to watch awful rich (sort of) people behave awfully. It was escapism. It was also a way to feel better about their lives. Sure, they may have been monsters, but they were our monsters. But will our monsters ever get over this particular cultural moment?

The battle of the RHONY reunion COVID reveals two major problems that Housewives, along with much of reality television, are staring at right now: the first is one of the reasons why Kardashians failed; the second is that we have no idea what to do about it. Reality shows take a very long time to get to us. We’ve already seen the battles being waged in the press and on social media long before they appear on our TV screens: on Twitter and Instagram, and perhaps on Pinterest and Grindr, where women and gays who love housewives congregate, by their ardent fans. How can this battle feel fresh when it’s already being analyzed?

Another problem is that the reality of COVID life has begun to invade the franchise, and our escapism is no longer escapism. The time lag in production is a blessing in disguise in this regard. During our confinement, we ate episodes that were filmed in a blissful time when no one knew what the R number meant. (Are we sure it’s not the number of a woman with the last name Richard in one episode of RHOBH?) Sure, we were cooped up in the house, but at least we had this to watch and heal us in between tumbles of fate. Now it’s coming to an end, and I don’t think any of us are ready for it.

According to the trailer, the vision of the future of reality TV is not a very good one. The trailer begins with the usual housewives debacle, but reveals that this season will eventually coincide with the start of incarceration. Producers tell the women to sit six feet away from each other, Kelly Dodd wears a mask with a zipper as if she believes masks don’t work, Shannon Bieder cries, “People don’t follow my rules,” and she breathes into what looks like a respirator! or breathing into some kind of breathing apparatus.

In particular, Shannon Storms Bieder is a woman so concerned about her health that she once had an enema shoved into her back. And these episodes appear just as we are on our way.

Even the upcoming “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” is shockingly more diverse than dinosaurs like RHOC and RHONY. Can a city with a white Mormon faith and a reputation as the home of Mitt Romney’s clones have more people of color than New York or Los Angeles?

How can they make a movie when most restaurants are closed, families are kept separately, and public events are harder than covering your face at Trump rallies? But given that you’ve checked your bingo card for 2020, things are different now. Without political conflicts, public protests and pandemics, our favorite fearsome women could have been free to keep doing bad things forever. But now that more and more fans are held accountable to public officials for what they say and do on camera and in their personal lives, reality stars who grew up in aty will find a way to respond or, as Bravo has told us for years, the only way to find out is to “see what happens.”