This week on our favorite television show, Rich Women Doing Things, the rich women did things. They ooh-ed and ahh-ed over a really hot chef who didn’t know what amuse-bouche meant, as if any of these very available women would date someone on a chef’s salary. They led their 16-year-old daughters to the driveway, where they were greeted with the gift that every girl dreams about on her sweet 16: a brand ambassador named Marilyn. They sat in the back of a van and talked about their favorite online “mims” because they had never met anyone young enough to teach them how to correctly pronounce “memes.”
But what they did was mostly get mad that this is Kyle Richards’s show. Let’s just face it, it is. Nothing has made that more stark than how her storming out of Boz’s Sisterhood Serenity (Girls and Gays Never Forget All White Seafood) Soiree was treated. Not only is she the only one there since the beginning, but she has sacrificed a lot for our enjoyment: her privacy, her relationships with her sisters, her marriage, her interior decorator, the Morally Corrupt Faye Resnick. When she wasn’t the center of the story itself, she was producing the other women to get them to deliver the drama, or she was (cringingly) going after Denise Richards for having an affair that should have been left off the show and seems like her husband might have known about it. I’m not saying she’s always good at her job or even that she’s a good person, but this is her show.
In any ensemble, there is always one person who gets the most attention. Michael Jordan is the undisputed king of the Chicago Bulls. Posh Spice still makes the most money and gets the most tabloid coverage of the group. Heather Locklear was the only one who was a “special guest star” on Melrose Place, no matter how many times Lisa Rinna complained about it. And just like Michael can slag off Scotty Pippen, Posh can skip the reunion tour, and Heather got more money than the rest of the cast, there are different rules for Kyle.
It seems like that is at the center of several of the fights Kyle currently finds herself in. Dorit has been right since the beginning of the season that there are certain rules for Kyle and certain rules for everyone else, and she’s sick of it. Garcelle and Sutton make it even more clear when Sutton goes to Garcelle’s beach house and says, “I am not going to bow down at the altar of Kyle Richards.” Sutton makes an excellent point that when anyone else in the group cries or storms out, Kyle holds them to task for it, but when Kyle does it, she gets to stand around and patronize all the women by saying they should be ashamed of having these fights at her age.
Just like Rinna wanted to make as much as Locklear, Sutton, Dorit, and the rest of the ladies want to be treated like Kyle, and they won’t be. She’s the face of the show. She’s the all-star. She’s the one that people come to watch, even if it’s because they hate her so much they can’t turn away. I’ve said it a million times, but in late-stage Housewifery, all fights on the show are about the show, and this one is so much more about the show than any others. They can fight about it as much as they want, but it won’t change the fact that Bravo, the producers, and certain pockets of the fandom are always going to have Kyle’s back. If they don’t like it, they need to find another show.
While all of this is true, this fight is perhaps the most wrong Kyle has ever been on screen, and the fact that she’s continuing to fight a losing battle might be adding to the cast’s continued frustration. Let’s look at all the ways that Kyle is wrong. She says she was only texting memes and jokes to PK, a booger chimichurri sauce on a bull scrotum steak, when there was more to it than that. She says that Dorit always encouraged her relationship with him, which may have been true, but once circumstances changed with Dorit and her husband, she should have reevaluated that friendship. Kyle says she doesn’t owe reading her text message aloud to the whole group at Boz’s house, but (as Sutton said) she’s the one who disclosed it in the first place to select members of the group, so she kinda does owe it to Dorit to reread it. Kyle says she is being made to feel like she did something wrong when she didn’t, but isn’t she not disclosing this text and the extent of her relationship with PK, the sound of playing George Michael’s “Faith” backward, doing something wrong?
Kyle is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong about all of this, and, as the women say, she knows it. She got caught doing something she shouldn’t have, using vague language that is quite incriminating, storming out of an event because she couldn’t take the heat, and trying to cover the whole thing up. Kyle is wrong, but she can’t say the one thing that every Housewife needs to get comfortable with, which is, “I shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”
Even Dorit managed to eke out a years late apology to Garcelle. When they’re at Boz’s getting massages from the hunks at Manly Handz Massage (here is the link, you horny bastards), Dorit goes to interrupt Garcelle’s massage to talk about the moment at the Viper Room when Garcelle asked Dorit how she was and Dorit questioned her motives. I thought that Dorit was going to relitigate that moment, but she went a totally different direction saying that she now sees how she hurt Garcelle over the years, how she was sorry about it, and is willing to learn how to do better. See! It’s not that hard, and it’s all Garcelle wanted. She was so appreciative that she didn’t have to sit through another one of Dorit’s defenses about how she did nothing wrong.
Kyle can’t do that. She’s not there. Why? Because it’s her show, so she’s never had to do it before, and she doesn’t have to do it now. If the tabloids are to be believed, Kyle would rather have Dorit leave the show than admit she might have done something wrong. That’s the power Kyle has, and that is what all of the other women really resent. When Dorit says that Erika is scared of Kyle, what she really means is that Erika is afraid of pissing off Kyle and losing her job. Dorit is afraid of losing her job too, since she need her job more than ever. Erika needs her job, too! But Erika defends her spot on the show by defending Kyle, and Dorit defends hers by going after Kyle and creating the drama.
While I think Kyle is wrong here, I think there is room for interpretation about what her text to PK, someone who asks for three samples at the ice cream parlor and then orders another flavor, actually says. At issue is the sentence, “I’ve never repeated anything you’ve shared with me and never would.” For me, a reality television nerd who loves to see how the show affects these women’s lives and psychology, the best moment of the whole episode is when Kyle says she didn’t mean that she would keep secrets from or about Dorit, but when she says she meant she wouldn’t share it with production, that she wouldn’t bring it up on the show. Oh, let us all light a candle and do a dance for St. Alainis, the patron saint of irony, that this has now become the centerpiece of the show.
When Kyle and Dorit have a teary conversation sitting on a flower box somewhere on the street in Holland Park, Kyle tells Dorit what she meant about production, about the show, and about her meaning. She tells us in confessional that, of course, she and PK, the TikTok ban, have talked about other things, but most of them were show-related, like they talked about Lisa Vanderpump. [SCREECH SOUND EFFECT] Excuse me, what? There are texts between Kyle and PK and LVP and they have not seen the light of day. Who understands the dark web? Who can hire a Russian hacker? I have $384 set aside for someone to break into one of those phones and get us those texts.
Kyle tells Dorit there is nothing bad in the texts, but even as Dorit is telling Kyle how her soon-to-be-ex used to yell at her all the time and treated her badly, Kyle is still defending him, taking his side rather than her friend’s. That doesn’t sound like the girls’ girl she’s always purporting to be. Also, Dorit disagrees about what PK, a kiddie pool full of donkey vomit, might have told Kyle because he disclosed things to everyone, at least according to Dorit. Dorit gives us a good breakdown, saying that Mo and PK would have dinner together, and then he would go back to Mo and Kyle’s house and talk about his relationship.
I know this is Kyle’s house, and the rest of us are just playing in it, but I’m on Dorit’s side about this. When Dorit and Erika go to get facials, Dorit wants to quiz Erika about why she was defending Kyle the whole time at Boz’s house. Erika says, “Of course, Kyle’s message sounds suspicious. So what? I’m choosing to believe my friend.” Ideologically, I’m with Erika. If this were happening in my friend group, I would take what my friend says at face value and believe her because she is my friend and I want to move on. If you can’t believe your friends, why are you even friends?
However, this is not my friend group, and I don’t need to be bound by ideology. This is happening on a reality television program, and we are allowed to interrogate everyone’s meanings in search of the truth. Erika says that she has friendships with both Dorit and Kyle, and she doesn’t want what Dorit says about Kyle to be true. Dorit asks Erika, “If you knew it was true, are you going to be okay with it?” Erika answers no as she rightfully should, and that is a problem for Kyle because, well, it looks like she had a lot more to say about Dorit behind her back than she is letting on, and she’s caught in a trap. I don’t care that it’s Kyle’s show or that she gets to play by different rules, but the longer she holds out that she’s innocent, the longer she tries to obfuscate what really went on, the worse it’s going to be for her and no amount of storming out of spa days is going to change that.