Hello and welcome to the tenth-anniversary party for the Real Housewives Institute. I know it’s not much of a party. There’s no drinks, food, entertainment, or even a few measly Mylar balloons. There is a theme, though! This whole affair is actually a vow renewal. Haha, jk. I don’t want Daddy Moneybags Vulture III to break up with me three months later.
On January 28, 2014, I wrote my first recap for Vulture, filling in for then-recapper Danielle Henderson, and I crowned myself “Vice President of the Real Housewives Institute.†I guess “President and Founder†was still a few months away, when I got the gig full-time. It’s been an honor to spend an entire decade writing recaps, newsletters, essays, rankings, and Schwartz-Sandoval slash fiction for a wonderful, engaged, and often deranged fan base. There would be no point to the Institute if you guys didn’t come and check it out after every single show in Andy Cohen’s rogues’ gallery.
This month’s newsletter is like a celebration and distillation of all the hard work the Institute does. First, we’re looking at why Monica Garcia is the GOAT newbie and also why she should be one-and-done. Then, we’re checking out Dorit’s London stage debut playing a mermaid with legs that talks. Who has ever heard of such a thing? Then, we’re taking a stroll down memory lane revisiting what the Institute said about the best episodes of the last decade.
I always say Bravo fans are the best fans in the world, and it’s been my pleasure to lead this silly corner of the fandom. Here’s to ten more years of the Institute! (Unless I win the lottery, then fuck all y’all).
—Dame Brian Moylan
It’s So Hard to Say Good-bye
Monica gave us one of the best seasons and best finales in Bravo history. She needs to go.
The age of modern Housewifery has seen plenty of entirely forgettable, completely boring one-and-done Housewives — RIP in peace Peggy Sulahian — but Monica Garcia will never be one of them. She gave us an unforgettable season of RHOSLC, where she became the voice of the common viewer, getting us on her side with her insecurities about fitting into the group of wealthy women and her hellacious relationship with her mother. We loved her so much that the Institute named her the 2023 Rookie of the Year, and my brilliant colleague Bethy Squires celebrated how she Saltburned her way into the cast. But despite a groundbreaking debut performance, Monica needs to be one-and-done, even if we will never forget her.
The reasons are both macro and micro and, of course, have everything to do with the blockbuster reveal in the RHOSLC finale that Monica charmed her way onto the show through her association with Jen Shah, was running a tea-spilling stan account called Reality Von Tease, trolled the women online for years, and was lying to them about it the whole time. It really is a master class in next-level Housewifery, but the problem is that future generations will be taking notes. The franchise can’t withstand the possibility of troll accounts and other shady Bravo-universe satellites infiltrating the shows. (Unless they want to hire me to be the token gay on Summer House.) Just imagine Kyle Richards finding out she has to invite the person who was gossiping about her and Morgan Wade on Instagram to her next White Party. If the women can’t trust production, making a good program will be next to impossible.
It would also be terrible for recruitment. Would we ever get a big name like a Denise Richards or a Jenna Lyons again if they knew that they might be rubbing shoulders with a troll? Bravo already has the “Kelly Clause,†named for Kelly Dodd, that can fine the women for cyberbullying their castmates; they need to set a precedent of not rewarding that kind of behavior if it happens before a woman gets cast.
What’s hard with the Monica situation is that even after she was unmasked, even after her performance in the first part of the reunion, I still like her, still want to root for her. Maybe it’s just the goodwill she garnered during the season. She took on Lisa Barlow, who exasperates her co-stars so much that they don’t even try anymore. Her refusing to back down from Lisa’s attack during Whitney’s sound bath is one of the highlights of a great season. Her telling Lisa that carping about her $60,000 ring was making her look bad was absolutely genius. She was walking, talking, antagonizing proof that we don’t need all of our ’wives to be rich or live in giant houses for them to be entertaining.
What we do need, however, is for all of our ’wives to tell the truth, or at least their truth. Now that Monica has been exposed as a liar to an almost pathological degree, we can never trust another thing she says. Even during the reunion, she told the women that she emailed production saying that the show and their ratings sucked and that’s why they needed to hire her. HR did us the solid of dredging up her initial email, and it was just pleasantries, heart emojis, and enough exclamation points to make a teenage diary blush. She’s told so many lies about big things — being Reality Von Tease — and small things — having been to Meredith Marks’s cursed boutique — that at this point we have no choice but to assume she lies about all things.
A certain amount of enjoying these shows is based on deciding who you believe and arguing about it. Are you Team Bethenny or Team Carole? Or, more recently, do you think that Dr. Nicole knew Ana had it out for Marysol and Alexia when she invited her to brunch? There will be fans who can argue either side of both debates, and those arguments are the lifeblood of the fandom. But any argument about Monica will ultimately end in a ruling against her because of what happened this season. Even if we want to believe and agree with Monica, how can we?
It’s also going to be hard to root for Monica now that we’ve seen how she reacts to being backed into a corner. At the Bermuda Triangle dinner, she and Lisa spent a full 30 seconds calling each other a “dumb bitch†across the table. Then she shouted at Angie K to “watch yourself,†repeatedly saying nothing. Then she said to Lisa, “Fuck you, you old, dumb piece of shit, leather, rubbery bitch, Donald Trump fan.†Okay, the Trump bit got me, but it’s just all too much. It takes the show from arguments about what someone did or did not do or how someone made one of the other women feel and replaces them with petty name-calling. Sure, a read can be fun, and petty name-calling certainly has its place on these shows, but when all we’re getting is shouting and cross-talk, it’s less Housewives and more an episode of The View. We saw it happen again at the reunion when Monica kept coming for Angie K, our first alien Housewife, calling her a “bench-warming bitch.†If Monica comes back next season, this is all we’re going to get, group events where everyone piles on Monica, she brings up baseless rumors (“Pay the IRS!â€), calls everyone old and ugly, and nothing gets accomplished. We’ll be on the same hamster wheel until all the fans who are currently clamoring for Monica to stay are shouting, “God, why can’t everyone get over it?â€
The problem is that they can’t and they never will. There are two precedents for what a second season with Monica might look like, and neither is appealing. The first is RHONJ season two, where all the women were turned off by Danielle Staub and refused to film with her. She was on a desperate island alone, and the only time we saw her interact with the entire cast was at the Posche fashion show, which literally turned into a physical altercation. After that season, Danielle had to be axed for the good of the show, and we moved on to the never-ending Gorga-Giudice feud we’re all sick of after more than a decade. When Danielle came back as a friend-of, she behaved so badly toward Margaret Josephs that she had to be fired again. There are some stars in the Bravo firmament that burn too brightly to last, and it seems like Danielle and Monica are two of them.
The other analogy is this season of RHOP, where we have Gizelle Bryant and Candiace unwilling and unable to forgive each other for comments Gizelle made about Candiace’s husband and dragging all of the women into their never-ending battle. Everyone seems miserable, no one is having fun, and the idea that this is a “friend circle†is completely shattered. This whole franchise is based in conflict, but its continued existence is dependent on there also being conflict resolution. That resolution is what the RHOP women are missing, and what I can imagine RHOSLC will also find hard to come by. If we’re stuck in the same fight, we can never move on, the show gets stale, and this whole beautiful thing is ruined (and I’m out of a career). Based on the reunion, it seems like the women are a long way from forgiving Monica. If none of them will get over it —and if she trolled them online for four years, I can totally understand why they wouldn’t — then the whole show will become more leaden than the bars of Jen Shah’s prison cell.
As much as I love Monica and would love to see her on The Traitors, Ultimate Girls Trip, House of Villains, or any other show that will have her, for the sake of everything we hold dear as Housewives fans, she needs to be fired. It may be hard to accept, but as solace, I’d like to leave you with this reminder: The star of that amazing final episode was not Monica, who had been lying all year, but Heather Gay, who figured it out and gave us a quote that immediately rocketed to the top of the Housewives lexicon with, “Receipts! Proof! Timeline! Screenshots!†We already have Heather, an excellent cast of snowflakes, and whatever Angie K is. We can and will endure.
Stage Dorit
Our Lady of the Accents shows off her weirdest one yet in her London stage debut.
Even when she was onstage, glowing in a giant blue gown that looked like a cheap knockoff of Cinderella’s wedding dress, I couldn’t believe it was her. Sure, people were shouting “Dorit!,†but why would the Dorit Kemsley, Chanel earring ambassadress, be here onstage in London? “Is that Dorit?†I asked my date and fellow Housewives chronicler, Louis Staples, who answered with an incredulous “yes.†Maybe I spaced, because I decided that if I was going to see a children’s play starring a Real Housewife then I needed to do it the way the Catholic Jesus intended: stoned out of my gourd.
Dorit came on early in the production of Peter Pan, a pantomime (or “pantoâ€) that had been touring England for six weeks headlined by Boy George, her mate in PK oppression. A panto is a uniquely British enterprise. They happen at Christmas, are almost always based on fairy tales, and star a universe of D-listers culled from former sitcoms, stalled-out boy bands, and other deep corners of the celebrity industrial complex. They’re meant for children but also have saucy jokes to keep the trapped adults chuckling. The crowd for this one was about 80 percent families and 20 percent Housewives gays shouting for Dorit. Louis told me that the production values were high for a panto, which makes me terrified of what regional panto in Blackpool looks like, because this looked like it was put on with a budget that couldn’t afford a Real Housewife’s reunion gown.
Dorit’s first role of the evening was as the children’s mother who comes onstage and wanders aimlessly as Peter Pan pulls faces behind her and the crowd shouts, “He’s behind you!†English people are deeply weird. She acquitted herself nicely, though her accent sounded decidedly more American than usual given the context. Dorit could always deliver a line in a confessional, and she shows the same skill here. She’s no Eileen Davidson, but still. As she was leaving the stage and giving the dog Nana a pat on the way out, Peter Pan said, “She takes care of the dog, she puts the kids to bed, she’s a … [wait for it] … real housewife!†I groaned deeply and loved every second of it.
We didn’t see Dorit again until near the end of the first act, when she returned as Dorita Mermaid, who is supposed to save Tinkerbell from poisoning. I have no clue how we got to this point in the plot, which was less of a plot and more of a pretense for onstage shenanigans: Boy George as Captain Hook singing “Karma Chameleon,†Peter Pan having a lettuce fight with a bunch of kids in the audience, and a shockingly hot Smee making me want to walk his plank. When Dorita Mermaid showed up, I leaned over and asked if it was Dorit again. “Yes!†Louis shouted, possibly annoyed but more likely embarrassed since “Dorit†was literally in the character’s name.
She arrived onstage as part of a trio of singing mermaids. Well, two of them were singing. Dorit was supposed to be lip syncing, but she knew the words about as well as Oprah singing along to literally any musical guest on her talk show. Dorit, you had one job! There’s good footage of this on Instagram. The video I took is compromised because the bald man in front of me had a giant head. Luckily, Louis and I annoyed him enough with our endless Housewives references that he and his party left at intermission. Sorry. The interval.
As shocking as not knowing the words was, when Dorita Mermaid opened her mouth to speak, she floored me with an accent even crazier than the one she sports normally. It was like Fran Fine from The Nanny auditioning for the role of a gangster’s girlfriend. She looked amazing in a shiny blue satin gown and a beaded headpiece that looked like Bob Mackie designed it for Cher. But why did she have legs? And why did she sound like a high-school production of Guys and Dolls? It really does prove that when you travel the world you can speak in any accent you want.
But she still wasn’t horrible. I mean, it’s not hard to be good in a production as silly as this one, but by the time she was shouting at all of us in the audience to toss inflatable “cannonBAAAWWWWWLLLLLLSSSSS†at the pirates, I was done trying to make sense of any of it. She could have been terrible, she could have made a fool of herself, no one could have recognized her. But none of those things happened. I have to say that I was impressed with Dorita Mermaid, even if her choices were odder than every prime number. Maybe she has a future in this? Maybe we’ll see her in another panto next year? Maybe she’ll take over for Ariana in Chicago? Or maybe that’s just the weed talking.
The Institute Recap: A Decade of Hits
Revisiting ten years of the Housewives’ most iconic episodes, in recap form
The thing about writing as many recaps as I have (and I don’t think I could count that high even with someone else’s brain) is that not all episodes are created equal. When they’re boring or the girlies aren’t girly-ing, they can be worse than getting a root canal while a clown punches you in the balls. But when the episodes are good, whoo-boy, they are a lot of fun to write. Here are some clips from some of the best episodes over the last ten years of the Institute.
March 2014: The Amsterdam Dinner (RHOBH Season 5, Episode 16)
Then she goes back after Harry again, alleging that she knows something about Lisar’s home life, but before she can get it out, Lisar lunges for her, threatens to choke her, and then throws a glass down on the table, sending wine shrapnel in every direction. When Bethenny Frankel was watching last night, right at that moment she got out her iPhone, opened the Notes app, and just wrote, “Ask Julia about Skinny Girl Wine Shrapnel.â€
July 2014: Aviva Throws Her Leg (RHONY Season 6, Episode 20)Â
Aviva Drescher threw her leg. That’s all there is left to say, ladies and gentlemen. Aviva Drescher threw her leg and we watched it on television. Yes, that is right, a 44-year-old mother of four who went to Vassar and has a master’s degree from NYU hurled her prosthetic leg at another woman in front of television cameras and a gasping room of image consultants, facialists, social-media interns, pet psychics, people who have used the phrase “glam squad†without irony, and reality-television stars. Aviva Drescher threw her leg. Aviva Drescher threw her leg. Aviva Drescher threw her leg and there is really nothing left to say.
October 2016: The Ireland Bus Ride (RHOC Season 11, Episode 16)
I can’t believe this shuttle ride. Remember, everyone, that someone is driving that shuttle. There is a 54-year-old Irish guy named Brendan whose job it is to take groups of people to Shannon airport, and this is the first time that four howler monkeys have been let loose in the back of his van, belting the back of his freckled neck with their shouts and insults, recriminations and petty name-calling.
April 2017: Kim Returns the Bunny (RHOBH Season 7, Episode 20)
Just like Kim’s “cries, lies, denies†line, it is so obviously scripted and planned out that it is desperately sad. Kim has been sitting at home for months, dreaming up ways that she could possibly hurt Lisar, and she dreamed up this amazing moment with the bunny as she sat in her darkened living room in her robe clutching a mug of hot coffee with hazelnut Coffee mate with both hands and the lightbulb went on and she never looked back.
July 2017: The Fight at the Quiet Woman (RHOC Season 12, Episode 3): While Shannon is an easy victim, Kelly Dodd is an excellent villain. Not only is she entirely abhorrent, she’s delightfully bonkers. The best bits of the whole affair are when Kelly cackles at Shannon as she tries to lumber her way to safety through the restaurant’s kitchen, and later, when Lydia and Peggy are out front talking about it and she presses her face against the glass of the front door like she is one of those fish that cleans the inside of an aquarium with its suctioning rictus. She drives me absolutely insane, but man is Kelly Dodd great TV.
August 2018: Boat Ride From Hell (RHONY Season 10, Episode 17)
The camera crew had to stop filming “for the safety of everyone involved†a title card told us on the screen during the episode. Everyone involved? What about us? I am not safe. I needed that footage.
May 2023: Scandoval (Vanderpump Rules Season 10, Episode 15)Â
I did love that Lisa offered Ariana a place to live. Can you imagine if Ariana moved into Villa Rosa, a Sweetgreen flagship store that only sells miniature ponies? Where is that sitcom? Too bad there is a writers’ strike on or I’d be scripting it right this minute.
Recap Highlights
A selection of the best Vulture’s Bravo Recaps Industrial Complex had to offer this month.
Real Housewives: Ultimate Girls Trip: Sonja Tremont Morgan of the Butt-Covering Beach Wraps Morgans says, “I don’t know where to go with Kristen except soccer practice.†What? I don’t know, but I love it. [Season 4 finale]
Real Housewives of Beverly Hills: What has Annemarie done other than talk about Sutton’s esophagus? Even Crystal Kung Minkoff is doing more, and she is a rich woman who has not done a single thing during three seasons on Rich Women Doing Things. [Season 13, Episode 11]
Real Housewives of Miami: This week they’re going to Marysol’s house, where she held an exorcism just so that she could turn her backyard into a gifting suite complete with a caviar ice sculpture, a whole rack of free muumuus, and some giant flamingo ass table decorations that not a single person would be able to see over if they remained on the table. Is the only thing these women do now hang out with each other and give each other shit? Is this The Real Unboxing Videos of Swag Gulch? [Season 6, Episode 11]
Real Housewives of Potomac: The Grande Dame, Karen Huger, has been held hostage in Texas for so long that she is now entering her 60s at a public hotel pool, preparing to acknowledge her milestone with a sip and paint, apple pie, and a group appearance at a drag show. [Season 8, Episode 8]
Real Housewives of Salt Lake City: “Archangel Michael, please protect us,†Whitney says. Imagine being Archangel Michael and getting this assignment. If God’s hand can be seen in anything, it’s this season of RHOSLC. [Season 4 Reunion, Pt. 1]
Southern Charm: Olivia says Austen gets off on girls fighting over him. Uh, duh! Everyone’s talking about how Austen is so horrible, selfish, and narcissistic. Uh, duh! Have they not been watching this here reality-television program, with all episodes now streaming on Peacock? Of course he is. That is literally him. [Season 9, Episode 15]
Married to Medicine: It’s almost as if the producers were trolling by naming the episode “Take a Napa,†since this was one of the most boring hours of Married to Medicine we’ve seen in a while. [Season 10, Episode 8]
Below Deck Mediterranean: Max is undoubtedly acting like a child, but, like most things this season, this whole situation based on miscommunication is being blown way out of proportion. [Season 8, Episode 14]