Welcome to a new era, Bravo faithful. Now that Salt Lake City (easily the best of the active Housewives franchises — RIP, Miami) has proved that the best drama can be found in small locales with distinct subcultures, the Bravo powers-that-be have blessed us with an even weirder and more insular franchise based in a smattering of chichi towns in Rhode Island. Now all they need to do is cancel Beverly Hills, New Jersey, and New York, and greenlight Bozeman, Charlotte, and Jericho.
The subculture featured in RHORI appears to be “delusional Italianism.” Featuring a gloriously unhinged cast who all look like Dolores Catania, sporting accents that sound like Massachusetts and Jersey had a baby and fed it quaaludes, RHORI took even less time than RHOSLC to hit its stride. This week, I’m evaluating the clams from least to most Housewife potential. Every post after will be an episodic power ranking.
8. Dolores
I stopped watching New Jersey a decade ago and haven’t watched her season of The Traitors, so I have no sense of Dolo’s bona fides. I do love how much she and Liz, thanks to their shared surgeon and veneers guy, look alike. But her presence on this show feels like a combination of an if-New-Jersey-gets-canceled-for-good bone the producers threw her and what-if-this-cast-can’t-hold-their-own anxiety.
Luckily for us, the cast barely needs her. Her brief cameo at Jo-Ellen’s Fourth of July party felt like a Bravocon meet-and-greet. I say let the clams do their thing, and let Dolores go back to the dried husk that is RHONJ.
7. Ashley
Ashley is a former Bachelor contestant who met and married Rhode Island native Jared on Bachelor in Paradise (but only after he roundly rejected her many, many times).
Normally, crying every 30 seconds and co-owning a tragic coffee shop with a husband who clearly hates you would be a recipe for gold. But as a friend of Rosie, who already feels peripheral to the preexisting group dynamic, Ashley is going to have to put in serious work to set herself apart on this cast. She has good instincts for the social game, cozying up to alpha dog Jo-Ellen after realizing her closest ally doesn’t have much standing in the group, and her personal life is a ticking time bomb. But she might be just a little too random.
6. Rulla
It’s Bravo Law that every Housewives show must feature a desperate to hide the wreckage of her life. On Rhode Island, it looks like that woman will be Rulla, who the other women describe as “calm and monotone,” brags that she’s one of the only female boat captains in the state, and is locked in a blood feud with Jo-Ellen. (“I would never live in Cranston,” Rulla sneers about her nemesis, an insult which I do not know nearly enough about Rhode Island to understand but which is clearly meant to be devastating.)
Rulla’s podiatrist husband Brian is cheating on her. Or, he was cheating on her, and now he’s not, and to prove he’s not, has shared his location with Rulla so she can track him at all times. He is definitely not stepping out anymore. “But he is, ma,” Liz whispers. Jo-Ellen, who shared Brian’s mistress’s photos with Rulla, agrees — the affair is very much still ongoing.
Rulla may be monotone, but she is not calm. She and Brian contacted HR at Jo-Ellen’s job to try and get her fired, which is, of course, insane (complimentary). When Liz doesn’t play along with her attempt to obfuscate her husband’s continued infidelity, she jabs back and says that because Liz doesn’t have biological children with Gerry, she can’t understand the ties that bind Rulla to Brian.
This kind of housewife can only go one of two ways: They can white-knuckle their way through the show, lying and backtracking to keep the lid on (Bronwyn Newport), or they can throw up their hands as their life goes up in flames and rise from the ashes a cabaret star (Luann de Lesseps). Rulla skips out on the group outing that will put her face-to-face with Jo-Ellen for the first time, which does not bode well, but there’s plenty of time to rise to the occasion.
5. Alicia
Alicia’s fifth-place spot on this list only serves as evidence of the absolute strength of this cast. The Rhode Island drawl is especially musical on Alicia, who cannot pronounce words like caricature (“caracterer”) and folklore (“ferklerrr”). She does not know the words to the Pledge of Allegiance (“one nation, under god, deliver us from evil, amen”). She orders her cheese pizzas well done, hates to leave the house without a quick carb, and scrawls an incomprehensible note to Liz during the ripped-straight-from-Secret-Lives-of-Mormon-Wives truth box game: “I know it not true love you? But the news is it true? Asking <3 xoxo” During Jo-Ellen’s Fourth of July party, she lights her giant sparkler from the bottom. Most importantly, she does not like driving because she once ran over a woman with her car. Already, she is an icon.
Besides a 9-year engagement to her fiancé Billy, Alicia doesn’t seem to have the big skeletons in her closet that her other castmates do. So far, she’s mostly served as a scene partner. However, the season trailer shows her screaming bloody murder at a group event. Promising stuff.
4. Kelsey
Ever since Tamra spat “Fuck you, I want a divorce” at Simon in the limo on the way to the finale party, housewives have flocked to Bravo in preparation to leave their husbands. Kelsey and her overlined lips are hopefully following in that time-honored tradition.
Her guy is a decades-older boyfriend who did not sign the Bravo release and whose face is therefore ripped out of every photo she shared with production. I hope this man (who is rumored to be John Caprio, son of a late Rhode Island judge) knows that the Bravo fandom will figure out his identity in approximately 3 business days. They met on a boat when she was 19, and he keeps her in a life of luxury in a 16,000 square foot mansion with 79 televisions (?!?!?!) while spending half the year in Miami with his other girlfriend. Now Kelsey is 31, itching for a life and partner that are all her own.
Kelsey’s lore is salacious enough that I can’t even hold her initial hesitation to talk about her relationship against her. She makes up for this reticence by going along with the producers’ truth box game, and is forthcoming enough in confessionals and with the cast members she’s close with that we have plenty to chew on. She’s also refreshingly clear-eyed about her arrangement: “From day one there were rules. I accepted them, and that’s it.” There’s no Kim Zolciak-esque eyelash-batting or obfuscation, just 11 years of straight-up sugar.
Personally, I don’t know what she’s so worried about. One man paying the bills, a boyfriend on the side, and now she wants a family on top of that? This is Biblical greed. But the arc of a kept woman spreading her wings is one of the most compelling Housewives tropes, and Kelsey seems savvy enough to have come into RHORI with a plan. Let’s hope she isn’t Ashley Darby 2.0.
3. Rosie
Rosie, a newscaster with a Frank Sinatra impersonator for a husband, is messy as hell and dresses like a Barbie doll of Katy Perry. At one point, she wears pink lace-trimmed bike shorts under an article of clothing that is either a way-too-long peplum top or a way-too-short dress. It’s foul. She’s perfect.
Jo-Ellen doesn’t like Rosie because she talks a lot of shit, and is a broke bitch who brought $6 wine and stale cookies to a girls’ night. Jo-Ellen is right to judge, but these are actually reasons to love Rosie.
To be fair, Rosie is kind of random. Of the core group, she’s only friends with Alicia, and shares the requisite outsider role with the even-more-random Ashley. But women like Rosie are the glue of Housewives. She throws the first brick (clam?) of RHORI by asking whether Kelsey is a polygamist, and immediately deflects the blame to Jo-Ellen when Kelsey confronts her. She seems to understand that as someone who did not attend kindergarten or communion with the other clams, her value to this show lies in getting in the mix immediately. And get in the mix she does. The season trailer clips of her screeching “Sucking dick is not a fucking career, bitch!” and “You’re literally fucking NO ONE!” at Kelsey would make Vicki “Does she even work?” Gunvalson so proud.
2. Liz
Here are some facts about Liz:
- She has a Bengal cat named Ganjes who she walks on a leash and, according to Alicia’s mom, a “very big fear of frogs”
- She owns a cannabis company with her husband Gerry, who she discovered she was related to through a home DNA test
- One of her stepdaughters is named ‘Skyla,’ which is the actual spelling of her name and not just me writing out how a Rhode Islander would pronounce ‘Skyler’
- She is rumored to be having an affair with some guy named Dino, who has a daughter with Aaron Hernandez’s widow and appears to be facing multiple felony charges. Stay safe, Liz!
Do I even need to say more? Liz is the anchor of the show and the matriarch of the group. If you close your eyes when she speaks, she slurs her way through sentences just like an Italian Meredith Marks. She’s willing to start shit with everyone: pressing Rulla on Brian’s affair, defending Kelsey to Alicia, and coaching Kelsey on confronting Rosie. Liz says Dolores knows where the bodies are buried, but Liz clearly does too. I can’t wait for her bullshit allergy to kick in. Hide the Epipen.
1. Jo-Ellen
Jo-Ellen, who looks like an angry Italian Topanga, checks every box in the Housewives Holy Trinity: mean, messy, and traumatized. She’s got mommy issues and makes one of those jokey offhand comments about not having enough sex with her husband that might be nothing but on Housewives is usually a sign of marital trouble, and doesn’t back down from a fight, telling Rosie to go fuck herself and threatening to ruin Rulla’s life. “If she knows something she can say mean, she’s gonna say it. And that’s the beauty of Jo-Ellen,” Alicia sagely observes.
Jo-Ellen is also a bit of a floozy who might be a swinger. She’s married to her sister’s ex-boyfriend after deciding freshman year of high school that she wanted him. Every woman’s “how I know Jo-Ellen” story seems to involve her dating someone they knew. Kelsey says Jo-Ellen used to date her sugar daddy’s brother. In high school, Jo-Ellen was involved with the owner of a tanning salon Kelsey’s friend worked at, and then started hooking up with the owner and his wife, which is a beautiful sentence to type out. It’s like she was cooked up in a lab specifically for Housewives obsessives. I could not be happier.