In a power move at 2023’s BravoCon, Netflix lined the Las Vegas Strip with Selling Sunset billboards featuring slightly bitchy Bravo-centric copy to amuse the tens of thousands of swarming Andy Cohen acolytes. In an obvious nod to #Scandoval, one giant ad read, “Hey Ariana, we can help you find a new house.†I was thinking of this when clips from Netflix’s other real-estate reality show, Buying Beverly Hills, started skittering around Housewives Twitter (calling it Housewives X makes it sound like a supervillain). It looked as if we were about to learn more about the split between Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Kyle Richards and her husband, Mauricio Umansky, who stars on Buying Beverly Hills with the couple’s three oldest daughters. After their 14 years as Bravo’s First Family, Netflix was getting one-half of reality TV’s most interesting divorce. You know Bravo had to be pissed.
To see if there would be more about the separation over the rest of the ten-episode season, I spent an entire day bingeing it and gathering clues about the world’s slowest-moving divorce. Turns out we got a more authentic and rawer version of Kyle on this show as well as the perspectives of her husband and her daughters, which had been entirely left out of RHOBH. But when it comes down to it, Mo was just as tight-lipped as Kyle was about whatever incident set this off.
The second season of this show about the Agency — the real-estate office Mauricio founded and works at with daughters Farrah Brittany (technically his stepdaughter), Alexia, and Sofia — starts off with his telling the girls that Kyle is the one who asked for the separation and who said they could both date other people. In a classic Housewives move, we then get a “6 Months Earlier†title card and a rewind to how it all went down.
The same conversation is shown again at the end of the season, but this time we see a clearly upset Sofia saying, “Don’t sit here and say you did so much. You didn’t.†We also discover that the girls learned their parents were officially separated the way the rest of us did: when Mo made a statement to TMZ. The daughters also said they learned about the split from a People article. Sure, this famous family likes to sweep things under the rug, but that’s just ridiculous.
Mauricio admits that he “caused their mom pain,†which sounds like an allusion to the rumors of cheating that have swirled for years — and it echoes what Kyle said in the RHOBH reunion. Mo also tells them that the couple’s main problem is communication and that there are “reasons we haven’t communicated,†but he doesn’t want to share what those are.
From this season’s first episode, however, we see a lot more of Kyle than we did in season one, in which she appears for only a single FaceTime. By the second episode, Mo is off on a golf trip with some of the agents who work for him and says he and Kyle have to figure out a new relationship now that the kids are older. (Didn’t Allison DuBois say that once the kids grow up they’ll have nothing in common at the Dinner Party from Hell in 2010? #Justice4Allison.)
Mo finally opens up about why he left Hilton & Hyland, the real-estate firm started by his brother-in-law Rick Hilton. When this clip hit social media, it started a feud between Mauricio and his niece Paris Hilton, Rick’s daughter. In the third episode, we see Kyle rebuff Mo’s physical affection more than once, and she tells him she’s going to Nashville to shoot a music video for Morgan Wade, the country star who became her very close friend and whom the internet believes she is having an affair with. Mo says “of course†when he hears the news and adds, “It feels like we’re losing you.â€
The breakup story becomes a C-plot for the remainder of the season until the eighth episode, when the People article lands and everyone at the firm and in the family is talking about it. It is a little coincidental that the story leaks in front of a camera crew with the whole family assembled for a work trip to Aspen.
It turns out the daughters learned about the article while they were paddle-boarding with Kyle, who got a panicked look on her face when she saw the story online. They hadn’t even told the children they were having difficulty, so there’s a palpable sense of shock. Afterward, Kyle and Mauricio are in the kitchen and he jokes that he’s glad the affair rumor is about her this time instead of him. It’s a line we see repeated in the RHOBH season-13 finale, though now we know this scene was filmed first. Looks like Bravo got the dramatic re-creation rather than the real thing.
In the final episode, Mo tells his business partner that he never asked Kyle directly if anything was happening between her and Morgan, though he says in a confessional that he doesn’t think anything romantic is going on there. He says if Kyle’s connection to Morgan is helping her through the separation, then he doesn’t want to mess that up. Yeah, but is she the cause of the separation?
When they all sit down to dinner in episode 8, Kyle decides to engage in an ancient Housewives tradition: addressing the elephant in the room. As she starts to talk about the People article, Farrah interrupts her, but Kyle stops her. “I just want to get through this conversation,†Kyle says with tears in her eyes that never quite overflow. Afterward, Farrah says in a confessional that she wishes she had asked her parents how this was going to play out and what steps they were going to take to reconcile. The D-word never comes up. Kyle, who apologizes for not sharing information with her daughters and for letting them find out about the split from a gossip magazine, also says she has to go back and film RHOBH because they want her reaction. Knowing that the emotional dinner scene on BBH was filmed before Bravo got to Kyle makes the Netflix version of events seem like the real deal and the Bravo version planned for the camera.
By the finale, things don’t look good for this pair. Mauricio tells his partner that Kyle has taken the whole second floor of the house as her own and that he’s sleeping alone in their bedroom. He is still hoping things can be fixed, but it appears Kyle is the one holding this up. Mo also says he wants his own space. “Where Kyle was six weeks ago, that’s where I am now,†he says. He wants to see whether he’ll miss her if he moves out. He thinks reconciliation can happen only if they have some absence.
The season doesn’t end on the Kyle-and-Mauricio drama. Instead, it focuses on Mo saying that he wants to spend a month in Aspen to get away from Kyle and that he needs to hand some of his business over to one of the agents at the Agency. He selects Ben Belack, another star of the show. Belack just sold a house to — you guessed it — Ariana Madix, taking this deal outside the Bravo family once again. Looks like those billboards might have been written by Allison DuBois too.