Throughout the entirety of this season, it seemed like nobody wanted to be in the mix less than Bronwyn’s husband Todd (save for Robert Sr., who simply avoided the cameras altogether), so imagine our shock to see him show up to the reunion guns blazing. In fact, he went after Lisa so quickly that our chivalrous king, John Barlow, had to step in to tell him to watch his tone. In Salt Lake, that’s the equivalent of an uppercut to the chin. Not only that, but John goes on to say, “This is a friendly environment.” That’s the first time in history anyone has ever described a Real Housewives reunion as a “friendly environment” — and the next forty minutes quickly debunks that assessment.
Luckily we move on from this spat with Todd before John can be accused of elder abuse, and we instead move on to the feud between Meredith and Angie, which you may recall began last year with those Shawn gay rumors. That drama spilled over into this season when Shawn went on a podcast, and the host asked whether Meredith was using her son, world-famous fashion designer Brooks Marks, as some kind of gay shield to protect her from backlash for spreading gay rumors. “Shawn was asked by a gay podcaster,” Angie begins to explain, putting “gay podcaster” in air quotes for some reason, but luckily for her production has the clip ready to go. Roll footage! “That’s what this fight was about?” Andy wonders after hearing what he considers to be a leading question that put Shawn in a corner. Nonetheless, Meredith is furious at any implication that she used Brooks’s sexuality to her advantage, and in her defense, she doesn’t need a gay son to be a gay icon. She’d be getting invited to the GLAAD Awards with or without Brooks on her arm.
While I understand that what Meredith did or didn’t say about Shawn is the root of this long-standing rivalry, I have little patience for rehashing last year’s drama at this year’s reunion. But something I do love about this exchange is the fact that Bravo is now doing something that the presidential debates somehow weren’t able to: live fact-checking. As Meredith and Angie argue over what exactly Monica said about these rumors, Andy gets word in his ear from production, who seemingly went back to see what really went down. The verdict? Angie is correct; she was, in fact, told by Monica that Meredith started these rumors. “Thank you, justice for Angie!” she declares.
But Meredith demands they play the other clip, where Monica backtracks and clears Meredith’s name. In fact, she fully gets up and threatens to walk unless production vows to play that clip. Even Mary, who once skipped an entire reunion herself, says, “Meredith don’t leave, you can’t just leave.” Not wanting to let Meredith escape before she reaches her full hollering potential, the control room quickly returns to Andy’s ear to clarify that, yes, there was a second moment in which Monica said she didn’t hear the rumor from Meredith after all. Thank god that’s enough to appease Meredith, and she sits back down.
With that put to bed, our attention turns back to the husbands, and all the new rumors from this season, like Lisa bringing up Shawn’s name in regards to circle jerks. “Yes, I did,” she says, standing firmly on all ten toes but clarifying that it was simply an analogy. Unfortunately, Real Housewives have a long history of not understanding how analogies work, so if you are a Housewife, my advice is to simply steer clear. Nonetheless Lisa tries to explain, adding that she knows Shawn does not partake in circle jerks, a term that she only learned of two weeks prior. Wait, stop everything. How did Lisa Barlow find out about circle jerks? Andy, why was this question not asked? Who, just two weeks before her cast trip, told Lisa Barlow what a circle jerk was?
The world may never know. Instead, the conversation turns to Seth calling Whitney a “biotch,” which he apologizes for. Seth explains that that’s simply how he speaks and that it was meant playfully and not as aggressively as it came off. He also maintains, and this I agree with, that “biotch” is different than the more intense “bitch,” which he points out Angie just called Meredith twice. “Oh, I missed it. Well, that’s abusive according to your husband, so I guess you’re an abuser,” Meredith gleefully tells Angie. I love seeing a husband and wife work in tandem to drag an enemy — it brings me right back to Nene saying, “Let ‘em know, Greg! Honk the horn on they ass!”
Despite the bumps in the road that we’ve seen on the show, I thoroughly enjoy everything about Meredith and Seth’s marriage, and I firmly believe that Seth is key to Meredith’s success on the show. She’s someone who can easily get very worked up and serious, so to have him waiting in the wings to be an absolute goofball feels like a much-needed pressure release that keeps her from exploding. For example, when they’re asked if Seth has a side chick when he’s in Ohio for business, Seth jokes that he has two, holding up each of his hands. He’s a star!
Someone who isn’t a star? Todd. When the conversation turns to his emotional affair that Bronwyn brought up on the boat, it’s interesting watching the difference in how she talks about it when he’s sitting right behind her. Suddenly, she says she’d no longer describe it as an emotional affair, but rather conversations that went too far? Heather, who feels like she rallied firmly behind Bronwyn on the boat, is now confused about what the truth is.
Lisa also calls her out, especially considering that she and Meredith got flack for giving Todd too much grace during that conversation. Both of them were even accused of siding with the cheater because they’d both been accused of cheating themselves, so to now hear Bronwyn backtracking and granting Todd far more grace than either of them did to begin with must feel strange.
Through all of this, Todd is relatively tight-lipped. In fact, this whole reunion feels like Todd and Bronwyn used all the money they didn’t spend on that necklace to hire a media trainer to coach them through reunion prep because their answers all feel canned and polished. He basically just says that in an ideal world, Bronwyn wouldn’t have brought it up at all. The rawest they get is when Andy asks about Gwen being the one to discover the texting, which trips up Todd in a way that makes me wonder if that was the first he heard about that being said on camera.
In stark contrast to the Newports’ lack of transparency, Mary has been incredibly open and vulnerable this season in sharing her son’s battle with addiction. She tells us that the purpose of having that conversation on camera was the hope of helping others and that she didn’t know where it would lead when they sat down. It’s been said a million times already, but her handling of that is truly remarkable, especially in light of her hearing those things for the first time. She tells us that Robert Jr. went to rehab for 30 days, and since then, things have been good — but nonetheless, hearing what he was going through was incredibly painful as a mother, and discussing it makes Andy and all of the women emotional. They’re able to show Mary the real positive impact of sharing that conversation, with Heather and Whitney saying they both watched it with their kids, spurring open conversations that they wouldn’t have otherwise had.
It also struck a chord with Angie, whose mother dealt with addiction, and who says Mary’s insight was valuable in recontextualizing her own experience. In turn, Mary credits her friendship with Angie as the reason she was more engaged throughout the entirety of this season. But didn’t she also have a good friendship with Meredith in previous years? Yes, Mary said it was a beautiful friendship, but it was just different.
But as we know, there was a hiccup in that friendship at Mary’s Audrey Hepburn-inspired brunch, which Meredith and her bangs were thrown out of. “Those bangs were a little bit a type of suffering,” Mary says, but luckily, Meredith says she doesn’t care what people say about her bangs. What she does care about is what everybody else says about her. Would you like an example? If so, I have great news for you because Meredith proceeded to pull out her phone, where she had a list ready to go. It’s her very own scroll in a way! The list is so brilliant that I simply had to transcribe it. Feel free to read in the cadence of “I’m a bitch, I’m a lover, I’m a child, I’m a mother…” from the song “Bitch” by her namesake Meredith Brooks.
“I have been called a drug addict, a bulimic, a cheater, homeless, mentally unstable, next level psychotic dissociation, multiple personality disorder, snitch, liar, my appearance has been made fun of, my hearing aids have been made fun of, I’ve been insulted as a mother, I’m a grudge holder, a whore, and I play the victim, and those are the ones I remember.”
I can’t wait for drag shows to start interloping that into mixes. It’s a beautiful list, but one that Angie quickly responds to by asking what Meredith has said about other people in turn. Right on queue, production rolls a supercut of everything Meredith has said about her castmates. Is Angie editing this reunion? Whether it’s Angie or production, they’re doing a phenomenal job rolling footage when the moment calls for it.