“The Real Housewives of New York City” is a great show. Of course, if by ‘great show’ you mean ‘terrible abomination,’ then yes, it is indeed a great show.
“The Real Housewives of Orange County,” while obviously no “Six Feet Under,” was at least moderately watcheable. The OC housewives epitomized SoCal’s lifestyle of McMansions, Botox, and fake boobs, but they looked like they still liked each other at the end of the day, and they seemed to be in on the joke. They weren’t even really housewives. Yes, Laurie was a “jewelry designer” engaged to a billionaire, but the other women were independently wealthy entrepreneurs and business owners. The show was about following the lives of five pretty silly women who happened to also be pretty rich, and we never begrudged them for either.
Those New York ladies, though…ugh. Bravo eliminated all of the tongue-in-cheek humor of the original, and cast the most humorless bitches they could. “The Real Housewives of New York” is a pretty typical sequel – chock-full of flash and cash. When Alex and her husband go shopping, they brag about their Black AmEx. (Ooh, it’s made of titanium!) Jill sends her 13-year-old daughter to a $700-a-day fat camp (sorry – it’s a “holistic detox center”) on Martha’s Vineyard – in a private plane. Apparently, all these women do is go shopping and namedrop and backstab each other. The constant one-upmanship isn’t fun to watch; it’s exhausting and petty. There must be women in New York that lead lives that are more interesting than attending fashion week as hangers-on, or getting snubbed at dinner parties in the Hamptons. Why couldn’t Bravo find them? These women represent the worst of moneyed New York – hyperconscious about measuring their own wealth against everyone else’s, and hellbent on showing off their loot as garishly as possible.
The most egregious problem of the show is the central conceit that the women are part of New York society. They may be wealthy, but they are not bluebloods. They are New Money. While the ladies of the OC reveled in their noveau-riche lifestyles, the New York housewives put on an elaborate show, trying to convince us that money can buy class. Obviously, it can’t. The first rule of money is that people that have it don’t talk about it. Real society doyennes would regard these women as basely ostentatious and gauche. Old Money doesn’t appear on a reality show. Old Money isn’t made from a carpet-cleaning company, or a line of tacky religious jewelry (which is how two of the womens’ families made their fortunes). The only one with a legitimate claim to aristocracy is Luann, whose husband happens to be a Count. The other housewives’ assertion that they are part of the elite is fundamentally flawed, because they are wrong. In New York today, they are a dime a dozen. They are every gold-digging wife of every hedge-fund manager or investment banker. They are Eurotrash.
The Housewives are the worst of what’s wrong with New York today…histrionic label whores who refuse to attend a fashion show if they can’t sit in the front row. If you need more proof that these women are tacky, Jill drives a yellow Ferrari. The only really pleasurable parts of the show are the moments of schadenfreude, like when Ramona’s daughter tells her she looks like a hooker. The children are the most sympathetic characters, because, as young as they are, they have the good sense to look embarrassed about the whole thing.
The housewives, though, just don’t seem to get it. They are Jay Gatsby, gazing at the light at the end of the Buchanans’ pier, hungering for a life of real privilege. They haven’t yet discovered that putting on the uniform doesn’t guarantee that you’ll make the team. It’s like the old saying goes…No matter how wealthy you are, if you have to leave your house in order to make money, you’re just middle class. And even a yellow Ferrari doesn’t change that.
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