Since I first watched this show, I haven’t been able to think of anything else
If you’ve never heard of RHOBH, the acronym sounds more like an awful diagnosis one gets at an optometrist clinic rather than the title of my favourite TV show. Ironically, if you’ve watched it half as much as I have, you’ll probably end up in a doctor’s chair regardless.
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (abbreviated RHOBH) is an American reality television series that premiered on the US cable network Bravo in 2010. This understated masterpiece describes itself as offering “a glimpse inside the world of luxurious wealth and pampered privilege of the wealthiest ‘housewives’, sometimes with fabulously dire consequences.” The series mostly follows housewife Kyle Richards (Paris Hilton’s aunt) throughout her fabulous life in Beverly Hills, along with her girlfriends and two sisters, but as we all know, in Beverly Hills, luxury and exposure have their price.
RHOBH: If it’s good enough for Roxane Gay and Meryl Streep, it’s good enough for you.Credit:Marija Ercegovac
Listen to me. This show is overlooked, underestimated, and I adore it. Since the moment I first watched it, I haven’t been able to think of anything else. Did I binge-watch 12 seasons of it over the course of lockdown? Yes. Is my whole family “worried” about me? Yes. Am I going to take up an entire column to tell you all about Real Housewives? Oh, you bet your Negroni-Sbagliato-with-Prosecco-in-it, I am!
You’d be forgiven for lumping RHOBH with low-brow reality shows such as Flavor Flav’s Flavor Of Love, Toddlers and Tiaras, or Temptation Island. But I’m here to tell you, those shows are for gutter dwellers. RHOBH is different. The show is a brutal chandelier of feminism, family, and friendship. I’m not the only star who thinks so; acclaimed academic Roxane Gay and actor Meryl Streep have both confessed to being superfans. Streep even cited it as the reason she started to fight global warming, fearing that “If we don’t survive, we won’t be able to watch Housewives.”
Yet, even with the GOAT’s nod of approval, the show’s brilliance remains, in my opinion, sinfully underrated by the world at large. I’m just confused. How is it that this triumph can have a defamatory score of 5.3 on IMDb? To make matters horrifyingly worse, review website Rotten Tomatoes hasn’t even acknowledged it with a score. For shame! Has the world gone mad?
I mean, come on! It’s a show about a group of women being assembled into a faux friendship for no other reason than to do wild things in designer clothes. What more do you want, you cretins? It’s not trash TV. If anything, it’s TV’s answer to Botticelli’s Primavera.
And as with the most infamous Italian Renaissance masterpiece, RHOBH is equally beautiful and enigmatic. To this day, no one really knows what these works of art are actually about. Neither seems to convey any clear meaning whatsoever. But that doesn’t seem to matter to the throngs of people who flock to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence or the 30,000 fans who attended the recent Housewives convention, BravoCon, in New York City.
I know what you’re thinking… Intellectualising a show about eight women who drink too much and fight? Yes, there is a common impulse to scoff. But I challenge anyone to name another show that features, let alone stars, a pack of women over the age of 40 who don’t constantly talk about men. To say the show passes the Bechdel Test is a bold understatement; it goes a step further and behaves as if men never existed in the first place.
It’s a gender-reversed Sopranos, and like the female characters on the hit HBO mob show, on RHOBH the husbands are similarly repressed. When they are lucky enough to be invited to the women’s table, the men are only to speak of women’s business, lest they are banished from the cocktail brunch with a 12-inch Louboutin heel speared into their thigh.
The show is unique, as it not only celebrates menopausal women, it worships their entire messy lives. Because I’m a TV writer, I know it’s a rarity. At work, I wouldn’t be able to pitch a scene where two women hold each other’s hands crying while getting mammograms, or two mothers bickering over which one has had the most miscarriages, or even craft an entire episode set at a dinner party with a psychic without being questioned by my bosses if that’s “entertaining enough”.
In a world that claims the obsession of youth over all and constantly warns women that our most valued commodity is slipping through our fingers with every minute, RHOBH smashes that narrative with a black SUV. Leaving behind a show with moments like when Jamie Lee Curtis tells one housewife at a luncheon, “I couldn’t care less about your grey hair, all I care about is your heart!” and a generation of viewers thinking, “wow, I can’t wait until I’m a 55-year-old divorcee!”
People (men) have always deluded themselves into thinking they’re the gatekeepers of what is to be admired in a woman, and they have made a great attempt at excusing RHOBH as another vapid, shrill, and gaudy corner of TV land to be tossed away on bin night. But just like the bloke who criticises Disneyland without having tried the rides, dissing RHOBH without trying to understand or even watch, is simple misogynistic contempt disguised as critique.
In a world where women have gotten the short straw of screen time, RHOBH is here as undeniable proof that women’s lives are, at a bare minimum, completely engrossing and entirely underrated.
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