Hello! I’m Rima, and I’m filling in for Brian this week. All you need to know about me is that, like Luann and Sonja, I am a beautiful woman with three to seven flaws. Let’s get into it.
It doesn’t matter that it starts with blood. Four episodes in, this show continues to be wholesome. Luann and Sonja are warming up to the town, and the town is warming up to them — or, at the very least, thinks they’re both fine. This is the most soothing version of a Real Housewives spinoff imaginable, and in that way, it feels like the American version of the Great British Bake Off. Never mind that there’s already an American version of that show — this is the show that’s scratching the itch for entertaining but stress-free reality TV but for people who need to hear Sonja Morgan say things like, “I have to post my liposuction or I’m not gonna get paid.â€
Even if they’re settling into town, Luann and Sonja are still who they are. Is Lu or Sonj cleaning up after Crappie Hour? No. Does the episode open with Sonja going Sisyphean, rolling a boxed grill across the ground instead of just picking it up? Sure. But you can’t say they haven’t reached a certain level of intimacy, however surface level, with their new friends. After Akash, the motel owner, accidentally rips off his big toenail and spurts a medically upsetting amount of blood, Luann reminds us that she is two types of essential worker: countess and nurse. She patches his foot together while a horrified Sonja reads instructions on how to care for the wound that she found after Googling something like, “toe ripped off blood everywhere forsaken by god helpppppp.†It’s a higher-level emergency than a tooth popping out, but problem-solving is problem-solving. Akash, by the way, barely reacts to the blood streaming from his foot. Like those who came before him in the American tradition of Gujarati motel owners, he has seen too much to be fazed, even by something this grotesque.
But Crappie Hour must go on because where else will Lu and Sonj be able to publicly disappoint Mayor Fred about the playground? Sonja, multiple sangrias in, breaks the news about the jungle-gym scarcity. The mayor hopes they can still get the jungle gym, and that’s kind of that. Those are the stakes on this show, and thank God for that. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I don’t want anything more complicated or upsetting. This is Bravo Xanax.
We also learn some motel guests are in town for something called the Testicle Festival, which gives Sonja the opportunity to remind us 45 times that she’s looking for human balls. After deep research (one Google search), I learned Testicle Festivals happen in other places around the country in addition to Benton, which is great news for any black-market veterinarians out there looking to get rid of spares. Sonja has a lot of questions about what a Testicle Festival entails that make me feel as though a parallel-universe Sonja has been to one of these. She’s not sure what they’ll look like — will it be like meat, or will it be in a box like popcorn? Or how many balls can be on one animal? Is it two? Yup, Sonja, I think you’ve got it. Time to see who’s single at this thing.
What follows is an exhausting series of ball puns that I will allow because this country does not have universal health care and, at the very least, people should be allowed to have fun with what we have. Today, what we have is an all-out bonanza of cow, turkey, and various other fried animal testicles. There’s a guy whose lower third is “Professional Testicle Eater.†There’s a pig with a first and last name. There’s a woman named Sarah Lisa Dawson with a tie-dyed shirt and nose ring who’s on an anniversary trip with her husband. She tells us, “We stay one week here, just to eat balls.†And in case we weren’t sure, she adds, “I love the balls.†She has an impeccable aura. I would bury a body with her if she asked me to.
Luann is a good sport and tries multiple types of testicles, which are sort of like chicken but “there’s a certain slime factor to balls that chicken doesn’t have.†Sonja attributes Luann’s ball experimentation to being desperate to get laid, which feels bold coming from a woman who can’t stop talking about her desire for human balls in front of a child. And that’s why we love her! Luann rings a celebratory bell and sprays one of those pocket Listerines into a guy’s mouth, so maybe Sonja’s not wrong. Neither of them finds someone to make out with, but they race each other and Akash in a three-person version of the “Undie 300,†in which they wear tighty-whities and bounce on giant blue balls to the finish line. Sonja wins a banana trophy and hopefully gets to keep the underwear for her reserves.
Sonja’s focused on the goal, which is drumming up interest for auditions and also promoting the show. She pulls out the Benton Follies T-shirts they made to help advertise the show since “everyone wears T-shirts here.†It sort of makes sense. A lot of these visitors are from out of town, so maybe this is an effective way to increase tourism to Benton. Yet this is a balls crowd. “If you like balls, you’ll love live theater†feels like a hard sell. I respect the hustle!
Sonja also takes the opportunity post–ball feast to promote auditions at high tea at Café Bloom, which is owned by a woman identified in last week’s recap as Schmigadoon! cosplayer Christen Drew. I will say “Midwest ModCloth†is an aesthetic you can find in any college town in the area. Benton is 40 minutes outside of Carbondale, a college town, and an hour and a half outside of St. Louis, not a college town per se but I went to college there and it’s like the saying goes: Any town can be a college town if I’ve drunkenly peed on the street there. Anyway, this café owner loves a good acoustic concert and is capable of murder, maybe by poison or hatchet, if her business is threatened. This Barbie can do it all!
We meet Christen’s husband, Bryan, who’s wearing a powdered wig and what looks like a Revolutionary War–inspired coat? Or maybe he’s supposed to be British? Either way, it’s clear this is a man who knows he can be poisoned at any time. We all have something to learn from Christen. The highlight during this is that Luann and Sonja recruit Trey, the one gay man still in town, to audition for the Follies. I hope he secured an unpaid internship with Sonja for the remaining episodes.
A full parking lot meets Sonja and Luann for the second round of auditions, and unfortunately, Carly the Saw girl didn’t come back to demand a recount. Theater director Bill “Mean Girl†King introduces a ruthless scoring system to help whittle down the hopefuls, but it feels like a buzzkill since Luann and Sonja are having so much fun this time around. There’s a singer-songwriter I thought we saw in the last episode but is different, a cheerleader, a dancer, a stand-up comedian. Trey is tap-dancing so hard he makes a baby cry. A contortionist freaks out RN de Lesseps by doing a bit where he pretends he has dislocated his shoulder.
Now our problem is that we have too much talent, and next week’s episode preview shows them washing a dog at an animal shelter? How will our girls do it all???