As my hometown Bravo franchise, The Real Housewives of New York City has always occupied a special place in my heart. The original Upper East Side-centric cast bore no resemblance to my New York, but was New Yorky all the same. This town really is small enough that it’s quite possible four or five women in the same friend group have all dated the same guy. New Yorkers in the aughts really did keep to a small radius around their neighborhoods. It is not all that surprising that Upper East Side women would not have a single nonwhite friend. Even the way they fought — loud and fast, with constantly-shifting alliances and zero regard for the “teams” that have taken over so many Housewives franchises — felt like home.
The RHONY reboot feels the exact opposite. It was past time to cast a diverse group of women, and the downtown-slash-Brooklyn scene was a great next place for the franchise to explore. But the new cast utterly failed at showcasing the vibrant, fashion and arts-centric scene they’re apparently part of. They had no events to attend besides the ones they threw themselves, no mutual friends or acquaintances in their orbits, and nothing to do besides crafting wreaths in an empty bar.
We’re back for a second season of the Real Housewives of Anywhere, and only time will tell whether this season will feel any New Yorkier than the last. Each week, I’ll be ranking the ladies from most to least flop. Out of necessity, I’ll be grading them on a curve — if I was assigning letters, the entire cast would rank between a D and B- for their performances this week, and that’s just depressing. If the show takes a turn for the better, I might change these to power rankings, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. (Because Rebecca Minkoff is only a friend of, I’ll be holding off on including her until she has a few more episodes under her belt.)
7. Ubah
The season opens with a flash-forward, where we learn that Brynn and Ubah are engaged in all-out war. The season trailer showed Brynn belittling Ubah’s modeling career, and Ubah retorting that “Naomi [Campbell] wishes” she were Ubah, so I assume these barbs are part of that feud. This editing concerns me, if only because the last Housewives franchise to open a season this way was Real Housewives of Salt Lake City Season 4, and I don’t believe RHONY can deliver anything close to Reality von Tease. But maybe I’m wrong.
Other than that, Ubah barely factors into this week’s episode, which automatically puts her at the bottom. All we learn is that she has a hot new boyfriend named Oliver who she is considering having a child with because “he’s good-looking and I’m good-looking,” which everyone knows is the most important consideration when it comes to parenting.
6. Racquel
Racquel Chevremont has the kind of resume that every single cast member should have: She’s a Bronx native, a model, an art curator, and has even helped curate a portion of the Tribeca Film Festival. She and Jenna met when they were divorcing their ex-husbands, and they seem to have a real friendship. Hopefully she can draw Jenna out of her shell.
However, it’s obvious that she is very media trained. She also seems very…nice, which is a fine thing to be unless you are a Housewife. Hopefully, these traits do not prevent her from making good television, but I guess we’ll see.
The juiciest thing we learn about Racquel is that her relationship timeline with her fiancée Mel Corpus — with whom she did some truly garish product placement for Ducati — is messy, and maybe overlapped with their past significant others. Love that.
5. Jenna
Of all the disappointments on last season of RHONY, Jenna was the biggest. She’s a fashion legend who modernized J.Crew, styles celebrities, and was even invited to Solange Knowles’ wedding. Unfortunately, none of that translates into interesting reality television. I can’t remember one thing Jenna did last season besides shill her lash company. This is the kind of behavior that is acceptable only if you are clocking into your job at the reality television arts and sciences factory, which Jenna was not.
Jenna seems a little more tapped in this season, but not by much. She returned to RHONY on the condition that she would not have to show her relationship with fiancée Cass Bird, to which I say, if you’re hiding such a major part of your life, get off my television.
Bizarrely, Jenna does film her first time meeting Cass’ mother. I give her some credit for being more willing to engage with the group — she wastes no time getting to the bottom of Erin’s joke that she’s poor and the fact that Sai was talking shit about her. It’s a shame that these two fights are so lame, but that’s not really Jenna’s fault.
4. Jessel
Between Jessel’s list of all the ways her castmates annoyed her and how she handled Erin and Sai’s weird Orientalist hate boner, she was my favorite Housewife last season. Nearly all the goodwill I felt for her evaporated in an instant this week.
Jessel and her husband Pavit head to Carol’s Bun, a Cantonese eatery in Chinatown. Jessel says she hates the subway, has only taken it twice since moving to New York for the show, and spent $990 on Uber last month. When they arrive, she makes a big show of cringing at the Chinatown streets and the dingy storefront.
I’m not going to bother defending the subway or Chinatown, because the girls who get it already get it. What I will say is that Jessel spent 95% of her screen time this week acting like the worst kind of transplant. You know the kind. They move here because they want the status and fame New York can give them, then spend all their time shitting on the things that make this city an interesting place to live. Anyway, I’m not sure who this posturing is for. Everybody takes the subway here, and a $990 Uber bill is low for someone who purportedly lives a glamourous life. Shouldn’t she have more events to go to?
To top off this disappointment, Pavit thinks Elon Musk is cooler than Beyoncé. Let this be a lesson to Househusbands everywhere: Be seen and not heard, because there is nowhere for you to go but down.
3. Erin
Somehow, Erin — a humorless bore with a nasty habit of calling women of color “scary” and who I cannot believe is 50% of this show’s native New Yorker representation — spent the episode at the center of all the drama yet did very little to interest me.
Her first storyline is like the world’s most boring game of telephone, so bear with me: Jenna’s car broke down when she and Erin were in the Hamptons. Erin got her a $250 Uber home (was Jenna’s phone dead too?), which Jenna never paid back. Brynn says Erin insinuated Jenna was having serious money troubles, while Jessel says she was probably just joking.
Anyway, Erin is mad because she thinks Jessel didn’t have her back, texting her “So disappointed,” which made me laugh. When they sit down to talk, Jessel reiterates that she defended Erin, but Erin freaks out anyway and says Jessel is being “so mean” to her. Sorry, but I cannot even pretend to care about this. Moving on!
More interesting is her scene with Abe. They film at Serendipity, a frozen hot chocolate shoppe that was last cool in the aughts. Abe jokes that a townhouse Erin is scoping out, which has a mural of cherubs on the ceiling, would be a great place to shroom out. Erin snaps that he shouldn’t joke about drugs.
“There’s a difference between joking with friends and saying it on camera,” she says. Bless the editors for cutting to the joke Erin made on camera last season about doing shrooms. She clarifies in a confessional that her gripe isn’t really about the joke. She and Abe are actually having relationship issues, but she doesn’t want to talk about them.
It’s very Heather Dubrow (derogatory) to lecture one’s husband about what he is allowed to say on-camera. Even worse, it’s a clear admission that Erin and Abe are controlling their images for the cameras, and hiding what’s really going on in their lives. If this is how Erin is moving this season, she and Jenna can get off my television.
It’s not totally surprising to hear the Lichys are having issues. Last season, all the shit they talked about Jessel and Pavit’s marriage felt like clear projection that was also quite racist: Both insinuated that the only reason a man would travel to Vietnam is for sex tourism, and Abe went so far as to say he’d absolutely cheat on Erin after a few months of no sex. If that’s what happened here, the vow renewal curse will have struck again.
2. Brynn
Brynn, the world’s sexiest baby, has moved to a Gramercy apartment that doesn’t have a key to the park but does have an elevator that opens right into it. Her whole shtick exhausts me (of course she quipped that her decor inspiration was ‘balls in your face’), but the girl can decorate.
The real reason Brynn is telling everyone that Erin called Jenna “poor” is that she’s mad at Erin, who she says went on Jeff Lewis’ podcast and claimed Brynn sleeps with men for money. Rolling the tape proves that this did not happen. Jeff is the one who insinuated she was a sugar baby, which Erin replied wasn’t true. Yes, that is all.
Brynn’s fatal flaw as a Housewife is that she’s always trying to drive storyline, but not in an interesting way. This entire feud is too untethered from reality to have any real stakes. What’s more, she ends up running away from the fight, which everyone knows is against the rules. Stirring shit is fine, but you’d better finish what you started. (Meredith Marks, take note.)
However, it is revealing of Brynn’s particular neuroses. Brynn, who dresses like a “quiet luxury” TikToker and craves status even more than Alex McCord did, cares a lot about how she’s perceived. But she’s also presented herself as a coquettish ingenue for two seasons now. Shouldn’t a PR professional know that this “I’m going to fuck your dad” persona would inevitably start rumors? Getting mad now at the insinuation that she attaches herself to more powerful men seems off-base.
Also, it would be far more glamorous and chic if Brynn was a sugar baby instead of what she actually is: Someone who once did PR for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, on the side of the oil spill.
1. Sai
Sai is on a ~hilling journey~ to find out why she was “so easily upset” last season. She’s sucking up to everyone in the group, but especially fan favorite Jessel, so she won’t be on an island this year.
A Housewife kowtowing to public opinion is never a good sign, but luckily Sai’s rage isn’t far beneath the surface. Apparently, Brynn told Jenna that Sai has been going around town saying she hates Jenna and thinks she’s boring and standoffish. Fair!
Sai litigates the semantics of whether she said “hate” or “can’t stand” for a bit, but cops to it and gives a genuine apology. She sets her sights on Brynn, who takes issue with Brynn exaggerating the story. Brynn retaliates by revealing that Sai once said Pavit looked like Dory from Finding Nemo, which is a very rude but also very funny insult, and also the reason she lands this week’s “least flop” spot.