We did it, RHORI faithful. After just eight episodes, our beautiful clams have delivered their first truly great fight. Not even in a group setting, but in an audienceless one-on-one, done just for the love of the game. I’m buzzing. Let’s get into it.
7. Liz
After six episodes atop the clam-off, our resident stoner queen has slipped all the way down the rankings, past even random Ashley.
For these last two weeks, Liz just hasn’t had that much to do. Even though we get what may be her first truly vulnerable moment — as a fiftysomething woman, she feels out of place watching thirtysomething Rosie, Kelsey, and Ashley flirt with the barely-legal mansion butlers, and decamps to her bedroom to hide — she’s mostly been a scene partner, minus some truly snoozeworthy solo footage with Dolo where the two soft launch their menopause weed gummy line. I am not uninterested in a storyline about the ravages of menopause, but without it I have little attention to spare for yet another Housewives product launch. Liz produces another fantastic confessional by yanking her swollen, menopausal feet into frame, but it’s not enough. Sorry, Liz!
6. Rulla
Normally, skipping two cast trips is a Housewives death sentence. But Rulla’s solo footage is so wretched that I almost didn’t mind her fleeing yet another call time.
To shore up Rulla’s sickout, the entire Pontarelli clan do their best “Leave it to Beaver” cosplay. Brian tries to make Rulla tea, but doesn’t know her favorite kind, and her children spontaneously have the idea to make her drawings while she convalesces in a full face of glam. I hope they got a good day rate. Rulla dutifully recites the list of her supposed ailments that she memorized ahead of time, and shares an incredible photo of her reclining in a hospital bed with a towel over her head, doubtless concealing another full beat for whatever event she attended instead of going to Newport.
But Rulla — really, her philandering husband — makes up for it at a truly harrowing dinner with Alicia and Billy. Brian, who says he’s had two shots of tequila but sounds more like he’s railed six lines and mainlined truth serum, cannot stop prattling. We learn that he’s been microdosing Ozempic and steroids for two years, that his podiatrist (?) clinic offers Botox (?), and that he likes his steak medium-well because the texture reminds him of foot surgery. Okay!
Worst of all, he reveals that the night he and Rulla met, he asked the bartender to secretly make all of Rulla’s drinks doubles while he drank singles. Alicia and Billy do their best to suppress their reactions, but like the rest of us, they’re aghast.
5. Ashley
It’s an exciting week for Ashley, who for the first time has broken out of last place. She’s still far from essential, but now that she’s done the legwork of building individual bonds with each of the women — fragile and new, but bonds nonetheless — she’s ready to step in and defend Rosie.
Ashley is a pretty good mediator in The People vs. Rosie Woods. It’s less that she’s gained the group’s respect and more that they seem to regard her as too harmless to get mad at, but all things considered she does a decent job, at least until she starts crying again. Rosie will need every bit of social capital Ashley’s accrued to get through the next few weeks, and while it almost certainly won’t be enough, it’s a good thing that Ashley has played the ant to her grasshopper.
We also get a glimpse into the financial imbalance at Casa Haibon-Iaconetti. Ashley gets multiple brand deals a year that pay her more than Jared makes in a year at Audrey’s, and is trying without much success to get Jared to take advantage of his 652,000 Instagram followers. But Jared would rather continue working 300 coffeeshop hours a week until Ashley physically drags him out in a straitjacket. (As an aside: My best friend sat next to Ashley at that Jonas Brothers concert that Jared booked himself a Saturday shift during. All roads really do lead to Bravo.)
4. Alicia
Poor Alicia. After Jo-Ellen’s friend sends her a supposedly unassailable bit of evidence that Brian’s affair is still ongoing — we don’t see the video, but it seems to involve enough ass-grabbing, extended hugging, and head-caressing that the women agree it’s settled the question once and for all — Alicia is somehow stuck with the job of delivering the news to Rulla.
There really couldn’t be a worse choice for this mission. Skittish and nervous on her best day, Alicia gets completely distracted by Brian’s bizarre stream-of-consciousness patter and decides she’ll try again another day.
She makes up for it with Jo-Ellen. Sent by the producers to delve into their personal trauma, they walk along the Rhode Island coastline and dig deep into their troubling lore. Alicia muses that maybe she doesn’t want to get married because she doesn’t have anyone to walk her down the aisle, and that she always wants to leave men before they leave her like her father did. We can only hope that she faces the financial limbo she’s in with Billy sooner rather than later.
3. Jo-Ellen
Sometimes, solo footage can be an exhausting slog between more dynamic group scenes. Not Jo-Ellen’s. We learn from her trauma stroll that her mother sent both her and Jen to teen behavioral camp. Jo-Ellen was banished not once, not twice, but three times: the first time to drug rehab that sent her home after a week, the second time to somewhere “rough” for a month and a half, and the final time to a place with violent offenders, kids attempting to self-harm, and “male and female” predation, for just over a year until her mother balked at giving up full custody and brought her home.
Most Housewives would hang up their boots for a week after getting so vulnerable. But Jo-Ellen is a star, and so she follows up with a scene with her mom and Jen. Jo-Ellen cries, her mom cries, and the family resolves to try harder to build a genuine connection. “I have been waiting for this my entire life,” Jo-Ellen says in a confessional, and though I’m too much of a Housewives cynic to believe that this on-camera conversation is the first time Jen and Jo-Ellen have tried to process with their mother, the emotional stakes are real — and that’s all we can ask for.
1. Kelsey, Rosie, and slam pigs everywhere
After their masked-dinner spat, Rosie and Kelsey hug and make up, pledging to move forward with one another. Then, they participate in the time-honored Housewives tradition of lightly sexually harassing their boytoy staff. Upon returning to Rhode Island, Rosie invites Kelsey over to her house to cut her hair again, this time pledging to post and tag Kelsey on Instagram. Things are going great.
But not for long. Rosie pulls out the blueprints for her house and a tape measure, while Kelsey rolls up with a siren blaring, intoning into her intercom: “Suspect says 8,000 square feet, but it’s more like 8,000 square inches.” It’s all lighthearted fun! Right?
Wrong. Rosie flips out, reeling off one devastating insult after another — she calls Kelsey a “slam pig,” screams that she’s “literally fucking NOBODY!” and that “sucking dick is not a career, bitch!”, accuses Kelsey of sleeping with married men, and claims her ex bought her pageant title. She kicks Kelsey out of her house, who is reduced to sputtery physical comedy as she tries to wrest her equipment bag out of Rosie’s grasp. The cherry on top? After she’s banished from the house, Kelsey forces her way back in to declare, “By the way, I won the pageant fair and square.”
Kelsey’s pissed that Rosie’s mucking up her liberated-woman narrative by pulling out the skeletons in her closet, and won’t take accountability for her weird fixation on Rosie. But Rosie’s hardly innocent — her plan to establish her place on the cast by stirring shit has blown up in her face, and she’s envious of how Kelsey’s social ease and higher standing in the group have shielded her from her alleged dishonesty. While she has been on the receiving end of Kelsey’s jabs for weeks, she’s also conveniently forgotten that she got in the muck with Kelsey first.
Next week, Kelsey shows up to an outing wearing a “Miss Slam Pig” sash, and Rosie digs in her heels even further. It’s a beautiful display of Housewifery from them both, and I hope they hate each other forever.