In high school, one of the common summer activities would be taking a day trip to Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, New Jersey. I am an elder millennial, so in my day, you could bring a Coca-Cola can and get into the theme park for the day for, like, 35-ish bucks. Now, I was never much of a roller-coaster gal myself, but every year there would be a heavily promoted ride that my friends just had to check out. One year it was the Nitro ride’s obscene drop; another was the Superman coaster; one was experiencing Kingda Ka, which was supposed to be the tallest and fastest coaster. Sometimes, the relentless advertising with the dancing Six Flags guy in commercials delivered what was promised; other times, it was just a silly rebrand that annoyed my friends.
The same feeling I used to get with the bombastic promotion of roller coasters with mixed payoffs is how I am starting to feel about this season of Potomac. The trailer promos consistently showcase high-stakes drama to bring us back week after week, and it is not always able to deliver consistently. In this week’s case, a lot of noise happens, but the context is annoyingly unclear, and the cast is so busy trying to shadow produce that it is more frustrating than enjoyable.
At the top, we have Mia and Jacqueline. Apparently, they have cracks in their friendship, beginning at Karen’s live show, with Jacqueline feeling entitled to Mia’s support, which explains why that scene they filmed at Mia’s house after the show was so painfully stilted and awkward. My first question is, if Jacqueline is supposed to be like family to her, and the nanny is Jacqueline’s sister, why do they keep referring to her as “the nanny� Is that not bizarre to anyone else? Even if they are paying her, I don’t know a Black household that wouldn’t have their children call her an auntie, even if they would still seek to enforce some agreed-upon professional boundaries. Mia keeps framing it to suggest that Jacqueline is availing herself of her nanny services, not her own sister, which I am sure she is getting at a friend-and-family discount. Regardless, they get into a blowout argument about this on the way to Mexico for Ashley’s birthday — Jacqueline’s “it takes a village to raise a family, but you wouldn’t know nothing about that†dig sends Mia over the edge.
Up to this point, the conflict makes sense. Mia is smarting about a low blow; Jacqueline feels like Mia is manipulating a situation that isn’t going the exact way she wants, where she controls all of the moving pieces in their dynamic. However, their fuse continuing to burn in front of the group becomes incomprehensible very quickly. Mia brings up Jacqueline throwing a brick at her head in high school (I need the full context of this story), and then Jacqueline says Mia needs to get laid so she can stop being so controlling and carrying on about how Jacqueline has no friends. Suddenly, Mia warns Jacqueline to back down and follows it up with a classic Nene quip — “Keep your legs closed to married men†— which sends Jacqueline into full-on hysterics. All of a sudden, we are in a Tyler Perry stage play, but no one is clear why. Did Mia accuse Jacqueline of sleeping with G or plotting on G? Is Mia, who got with G while he was still married, going to pretend to have a moral objection to infidelity? We have a bevy of fireworks with no real clarity.
Meanwhile, the long-awaited Charrisse and Karen standoff commences and is more befuddling than ever. Before leaving for Mexico, Gizelle and Robyn debrief and insist that it’s some grave and petty omission to continue to exclude Charrisse from invitations. Charrisse is not even in the main cast; Wendy, who has her own tagline, has had to accept that Gizelle and Robyn will not invite her to anything that isn’t all-cast and navigate accordingly. Still, somehow Gizelle is invested in reconciling a friendship? I’m all for playing a chaotic agent for TV, but at least make the premise believable. Pretending that those two need to mend fences for anything other than giving Charrisse camera time that Karen refuses to grant her is laughable. Notice how no one insists that Candiace invite Gizelle to things. It is understood that they do not get along anymore and don’t need each other to survive on the show.
While this orchestration makes Charrisse look pathetic, the ultimate confrontation with Karen at their first dinner in Mexico is baffling. For the most part, Karen has been on her p’s and q’s, serving as a co-host for Ashley’s birthday trip–slash–the second all-cast trip to make up for that first abomination of a Real World episode they had in Miami. They put welcome bags together for all the girls — vibrators for everyone! — including little customizations specific to each cast member, like Robyn’s tiny little veil that washes into the ocean not five minutes after she puts it on. They throw a little surprise party for Ashley so that Karen can remind everyone of the proper protocol for honoring someone’s birthday. They spend the sunset beachside with a shaman, a tried-and-true Housewives trope. At dinner, however, common sense apparently came along for the vacation. Gizelle immediately admits to having misrepresented the situation behind Charrisse putting the titty-bumping video in the group chat, and Karen pretends that the video didn’t rattle her. Charrisse pretends that she’s cool with not being friends with Karen when she has made a round-robin of the issue.
Somehow this evolves to Charrisse not being able to call and share the video one-on-one with Karen and sharing it with the group chat instead because Karen never called her during her divorce or her father’s death. (This is all very funny, by the way, because Charrisse claims not to have known who Karen was in Potomac before they were casting the show.) Karen says she texted; Charrisse says she went to her mother’s funeral. Somehow this leads to Karen screaming that Charrisse can’t use her mother to get back into this group like she’s in a community-theater performance. Suddenly, they’re both standing and making violent gestures and threats at each other from across the table. How did we get here?
Right now, we have a lot of chaos and chatter but not much structure. For me, it’s not enjoyable to watch. I end up irritated because it usually means that the cast is overproducing themselves and intentionally excluding us from critical information. Or they tried their best to cobble a story line from very loose threads, aided by the ill effects of mezcal, to maintain the episode order. Hopefully, next week will settle some of this noise.
Cherry Blossoms
• The Dixons are finally getting fitted for suits for their intimate wedding in the Chesapeake Bay. Damn, Robyn, not even your kids believed it would ever happen. Also, your wedding can be small or cheap, but it can’t be both. Pick one. Go to a nice destination and get it over with; they’ll do all the setup for you.
• Gizelle and Robyn continue to get their digs in on Karen’s event, which Bravo conveniently cut dance-house icon Cece Penniston from the episode.
• Gizelle finally talked about her dating life on television again. She even mentioned sex! Quick, make a wish, run some lottery numbers! The apocalypse is nigh.
• Wendy is too smart to let herself be used by the likes of Ashley. Ashley claims that she brought Wendy early to make sure that she isn’t excluded, but she is clearly strategically aligning herself and earning goodwill so that she can have someone to help neutralize all the deserved attacks she will get at the reunion for all her malicious behavior this season. No one was going to be able to ban Wendy from a trip she and Karen had organized in the first place.
• For all the jabs at Karen’s age, many women are going through health issues this year. Fibroids is a common issue that plagues Black women, and a hysterectomy is nothing for Gizelle to sneeze at. It’s bizarre to see all of them talk about Karen being an old lady when most of them aren’t that far from her, and all are confronting their mortality with serious health scares.