I’m just waiting for there to be one episode of the reboot where the women haven’t done something that one of the classic RHONY broads already did but better. Jenna wants to skulk back to her own Hamptons house in the middle of the night? Sure, great. But if you’re not leaving a note about how awful the “lower level†is on your way out like Luann did to Ramona, did it even happen? That is the zen koan of the Bravo age.
I am holding off on officially judging most of the women until episode five, but I am obsessed with Jenna Lyons. No, but like obsessed. Like literally. First of all, I have never felt there was a Housewife who was aspirational until we met Jenna, and the more we know about her, the more I absolutely stan. I stan so hard, I am married, divorced, and remarried to Dorothy Zbornak. Here is a lady who just wants to wear jeans and sweaters and have sex with women and then maybe sit alone in her Hamptons home, paging through her art books while she dreams about Cara Delevingne’s eyebrows. But there has never been a Real Housewife like Jenna, and so far, all three episodes have been about trying to get her to fit in.
If I were to liken Jenna to another one of Andy’s ladies, I would say she is most like Mary Cosby. No, she did not marry her grandpa, run what might be a cult, or tell anyone that they smell like a hospital, but there is something about both Mary and Jenna that wants to be on the show but has no idea what is expected of them or how to square those expectations with how she’s willing to act. It’s like staying at Erin’s house. Yes, she might have had an early call. Yes, they might have been partying at 10:30 p.m., and it drove Jenna crazy. Yes, it was colder than Jessel when her husband tries to stick it in, but that is not the job. The job is to stay in that house, to become friends with the ladies, to grow bonds so that you can fight about stupid things all across the globe for our entertainment.
When Jenna shows up the next morning, Ubah tells her that it’s nice to wake up with the girls in the same place. Exactly! Jenna says she’s never had a group of female friends; she doesn’t get it. I don’t think it ever occurred to Jenna that she was being rude. It seems that, for all of her confidence in her own taste, she’s also very self-conscious. She says, “I didn’t think you would even notice,†to the women. Later, when Ubah is picking out a dress for her, she says, “I would never look good in anything that looks good on you.†Though everyone in the house is trying to impress her — especially Erin, who is determined to be Jenna’s bestie — she feels like a little wadded-up bag of McDonald’s discards on the side of the LIE.
She also has no idea how to handle herself in this group of women. At lunch, everyone brings up Jessel totally trashing Jenna’s gift of lingerie from the night before. (It’s confirmed in this episode that the line was made by a friend of Jenna’s.) When the other women are talking about it, you can see Jenna is visibly uncomfortable, but she doesn’t really pipe up other than to say it “didn’t feel great†when Jessel is ranting about her Christmas-tree dress. It’s like each one of these things is slowly coaxing her out of her shell, but I don’t ever think she’s going to be one of those Housewives who shares her feelings about every slight. I think she’s going to store them all up inside, and one day, three seasons from now, she’s going to go full Chernobyl at a reunion and take out the power grid for the whole Eastern seaboard.
I did get one amazing glimmer of hope, though. When she comes back to Erin’s, and Erin walks off in a huff because she says Jenna obviously hates her house. In a dig against Erin’s house having broken heating, Jenna says under her breath, “My glasses are fogging up from the cold.†Yes, Jenna! More of this, please! I don’t know if Jenna is going to be a good or a bad Housewife, but unlike everyone else at Erin’s, she seems to be the only one who doesn’t understand the assignment, and I am fascinated by watching her try to shimmy her way into this whole new world.
What else happened in this episode? Brynn shows up the next morning wearing a Harvard sweatshirt even though she came about as close to attending the school as her not-cousin Shereé Whitfield did and says, “This is an interesting part of the Hamptons. South is where it’s at, but this is nice too.†Okay, you don’t get to have an opinion on the various and sundried villages of the Hamptons until you have a house there yourself. If you are one of the poor relations invited to stay in someone else’s beach home, you say, “Thank you, this is lovely,†even if the house is so close to a gas station that you can smell petrol when someone is (not) cooking you shakshuka for breakfast.
When Brynn finds out that Jenna left in the middle of the night, she immediately decides there is a double standard. She says that Erin got all bent out of shape when she dissed Catch but doesn’t really mind that Jenna left her house in the middle of the night after Erin fed her two (2) Pringles with caviar on them and gave her one (1) set of monogrammed pajamas. At lunch, Brynn brings this up, and all of the women have an opinion, except for Sai, who says, “I would do better understanding quantum physics than know what kind of point that Brynn is making. Maybe that’s because I am starving.†Yeah, Erin. What happened to the girl who only hangs out in kitchens and bathrooms?
As the conversation deepens, Erin says the only true thing I have ever heard on the Real Housewives. She says, “Maybe I just like Jenna more.†Yes! That’s exactly it. Normalize saying, “The reason I was mean to you is that I don’t like you that much even though Bravo makes us pretend to be a ‘friend group.’†Erin likes Jenna, thinks she’s cool, gives her the biggest room, forgives her after an apology, and is ready to move on. Erin would go full Single White Female on Jenna if she wasn’t already so smug about the wonderfulness of her own life.
After lunch, where everyone is dressed in white and khaki, even though they didn’t understand what that color was just two episodes ago, the women head back to Erin’s to get ready for dinner at home. They all brought dresses to wear except Jenna, who only packed jeans and gray sweaters because, hey, if you have a chic uniform, why deviate from it? Then Ubah gives her a black velvet dress with some cutouts on the sleeves and a sweeping scarf thing across her neck, and she looks absolutely amazing in it.
When Jenna comes downstairs and everyone loves the outfit, she explains that this is how she used to dress, in a way to please a man. Since all of the other women are straight, this is how they think she looks best, in a sort of drag to please the patriarchy. I absolutely agree with Jenna, but also, damn, she looks fucking good. Wait. Wait. Sorry. We’re trying to dismantle the patriarchy. Maybe what we need is for Jenna to just step it up a couple of notches, to dress, not for herself or for comfort, but for us, the viewers. Jenna, we know you got it; it’s time to bring it.
Dinner is mostly a game of two truths and a lie where everyone reveals some good sex stories and then will give us absolutely no details about their filthy stories. Okay, Erin, it’s great you can brag about having sex in a senator’s office, but we need some context. Like, does that mean you let Mitch McConnell rim you after a fundraiser? Oh, and Jessel got a Popsicle stuck in her poonani? Okay, I need every detail; I need to hear about the subsequent yeast infection; I need to know how you got rid of it. The point of this game is to let us get to know you, but, bitch, we need to hear to get to know you.
That’s why I loved the stories Sai was telling after dinner. Jenna and Erin are drinking sake from kids’ cups Erin got at the dollar store. They remark how much they love the dollar store. Sai says she can’t because she grew up poor, and everything in her house was from the dollar store. She tells about one Christmas when her father bought a tiny Christmas tree and put it on a speaker so it would look taller and then propped all the presents on the speaker so it would look like a big fancy Christmas. That just broke my heart but also made me understand exactly who she was and where she came from. This is why we need a more diverse show, so that people like Sai can share their stories and can tell Erin, who has clearly never been anything less than rich a day in her life, that no, the dollar store isn’t as great as you think it is when you need it to survive. We still have a lot to learn about Sai, about the rest of the women, about how to have the hottest trainer in the Hamptons, about how to get to Provisions when it’s still open, and I think I’m going to enjoy that journey toward knowledge. Still, none of us have as much to learn as Jenna (always both names!) Lyons.