Grayson Kelly
usc annenberg
12/17/2021
The Heightening Stakes of The Real Housewives
It’s 2008, and the cast of Bravo’s The Real Housewives of New Jersey is gathered around a banquet table (located in what could only be described as a Marriott conference room) filming the penultimate scene of the penultimate episode of their first season. Suddenly, chaos erupts.
“I’d like to talk to all of you for a minute. There’s a lot of lies spread about me. I didn’t appreciate that people had to talk about me behind my back. This was written by my first husband,” season one housewife Danielle Staub says, pulling out a hardcover book from her lap and slamming it on the table. “Two things were written that are true,” she screams across the table at castmate Teresa Giudice. “Name change, I got arrested. Pay attention, PUH-lease!”
We flash to a confessional of Teresa, who explains to the camera (in her best English) that Staub’s outburst was “totally uncalled for.” “Who is she?” Teresa asks her figurative audience. “Is she God? No. Don’t ever tell me to pay attention.” Back at the sad Marriott banquet table, one thing is clear: Teresa has had enough. As the dramatic music builds, so does Giudice’s voice—and temper.
“Obviously, there has to be something else,” she shrieks. “It’s not just name change and arrested. There has to be something else!” The camera pans to Danielle, glowering, lips pressed together so tightly that they seem to be disappearing into her skull. Teresa continues: “Were you stripping? Prostitution whore!” What happens next would go on to be a franchise-defining moment, and one that solidified Bravo’s The Real Housewives’ status not only as a household name, but as a cultural phenomenon.
Teresa’s eyes dart around the room at the other partygoers, all of whom are wearing varied expressions; some look entertained, some look mortified. Some look away. Her hands frantically find the edge of the table. “You were fucking engaged 19 times! You fucking stupid bitch!” Giudice furiously lifts the table about a foot off of the ground. She drops the table; goblets of pinot noir and plates of spaghetti scatter across the white linen tablecloth and into the laps of those caught in the crossfire, including both Staub’s and Giudice’s young daughters.
Looking back 12 years later, Giudice’s “table flip heard around the world” is still regarded by fans as one of the most–if not the most–“iconic” Housewives moment of all time. The famed “flip,” to be fair, is really a misnomer for the scene, as author and television critic Brian J. Moylan wrote earlier this year in a retrospective recap.7 “The ‘flip’ is more of a shift, sort of like how Sheree Whitfield claims that she didn’t ‘pull’ Kim Zolciak’s wig, she just shifted it,” Moylan writes, referencing a physical scuffle that took place the same year between two castmates from a different franchise, The Real Housewives of Atlanta. But for Moylan, it wasn’t the flip or the shift that made the scene so iconic, but that it had everything that The Housewives promises us–”the veneer of wealth, explosive revelations, ever-shifting interpersonal relationships, and just a little bit of violence,” he posits. “We believe all of them and none of them. We love them all and hate them all and we love them all for making us hate them.”
By now, it’s clear that viewers are long desensitized to trivial television fodder found in earlier seasons, like hair pulling or sex work allegations. Housewives throw drinks at each other after verbal spats in restaurants across the world; they sleep with each other’s husbands and boyfriends; they accuse each other of things like date-rape and sexual assault; they run cults; they assault police officers; they get arrested and go to jail for tax fraud. In an interview with Vox, Gibson Johns, host and producer of the pop culture interview podcast We Should Talk explained that these are the types of things fans want to see their Housewives do. “Fans love melodrama, catchphrases, and fights. And, granted, cast members on the show are aware that it’s in their best interest to calibrate their reactions to deliver the best television.”1 However, he capitulates, these reactions are oftentimes spurred by “elements of the show that aren’t ‘real’.”
I talked to Moylan, who wrote the NYTimes bestselling book “The Housewives”, described by Vox as “a book that treats The Real Housewives as an academic text,” over a Zoom call from his apartment in London earlier this month. Moylan’s book serves as an unofficial, behind-the-scenes tell-all (Bravo barred any Housewives from being interviewed on record,) and he keyed me in previous conversations he’d had with actual Housewives producers while doing his research. “One of them told me, ‘each season Bravo makes them make this bible of like, what the seasons should look like, and what storylines they're going to pursue, and how the women will feel about each other, and where they think that will go over the course of the season. And they always tear it up after the first few weeks.”
Each housewife is assigned a story producer, whose main job is to further her storyline. This comes in the form of the creation of various scenarios and situations (vacations, coffees, parties, dinners, etc.) for the women to interact. “We as viewers are a lot savvier to how these things get made, what is being manipulated, how it's being manipulated. We're constantly trying to triangulate for that, so I don't think that the meddling or intervention of producers—to a certain extent—is as problematic as some people would make it out to be.” When then, does he believe that the “reality” moniker is a misnomer?
“Unless they're saying, like, ‘You go say this! You go do this, you're gonna say that the sky is purple, you're gonna say the sky is green, and you're gonna say it’s yellow. At that point, why not just have a scripted show?” The “reality” television paradox is more of an elephant in the room in 2021; anyone with a kernel of knowledge about reality television shows and the way they’re made knows that everything they see on screen should be taken with a grain of salt. “Believing” the women or not—as Moylan pointed out—is up to the audience. In an essay for The Brown Daily Herald, Cecilia Barron wrote that “what makes the shows so enjoyable is not that the viewer believes in the show’s reality, but that the Housewives do. Perhaps more than any member of their audience, these women seem to believe that The Real Housewives is reality.” Before the pandemic, Giudice’s table flip set the precedent for most of the bad behavior and drama chronicled on Housewives: petty arguments and fights with relatively low-stakes. If anyone was being harmed by these shows, it was the women and those around them.
Moylan sees the exploitation of drama in the women’s lives as a pseudo-unfair, however necessary contractual agreement between cast members and producers. “I feel like, in general, the bargain the housewives have with the network is kind of a shitty bargain,” he tells me. “It’s like any gig economy work, really, where they’re not getting paid nearly what they’re worth. They’re completely disposable. They’re at every whim of their employers, and I think that you see that the network is willing to embarrass these women, or capitalize on the worst parts of their lives, and then as soon as you don’t need them, it’s like, ‘okay, thanks!’”
Moylan references former Beverly Hills Housewife Taylor Armstrong, whose physically and emotionally abusive husband hanged himself soon after the second season of the show’s finale aired. “Then, a season later, she’s gone. Because they’re like, ‘oh, you’re boring now.’ I think that they always get the shit end of the stick.” Being “boring” is one of the worst things a Housewife can be, in fans’ eyes. “I think the thing about Housewives and reality TV in general is that you always need it to be ratcheted up,” Moylan says. In 2013, for example, Giudice and her husband were charged for conspiracy to commit mail fraud, wire fraud, and other financial crimes. The crime was a large plotline of the season, but wasn’t overwhelming.
It wasn't until recently that The Housewives hit a drama zenith. For years, the shows were about all that glitters. Now, the ugly side of reality is showing: the fact that immense wealth is, more often than not, begotten at the expense of others. What unfolded on the shows in 2021 became more nefarious, and somehow, more real, as evidenced by major plotlines and scandals on two installments of the franchise. Crime is no longer just a storyline, but another character. Perhaps worst of all, the “victims” of the Housewives’ bad behavior extend further than just their families or the other women.
Take, for example, Real Housewife and real ex-wife Erika Jayne, a self-proclaimed singer and entertainer. “How many fucks do I give? Zero, zero, zero, none!” she sings in her 2016 music video for “How Many F**cks?”, donned in a dollar bill patterned bodysuit while lounging next to a matte grey Lamborghini. In the next shot, Jayne perches on a McLaren, proudly performing her signature dance move—“pat the puss,” as she named it on the show. “Diamonds and chardonnay, see you next Tuesday. Everyone can suck on my dick!” In another music video for her song “XXPEN$IVE”, a diamond encrusted Jayne sits in a golden bathtub before engaging in a half-naked pillow fight with two backup dancers. As the women gyrate on the bed, $100 bills rain from the ceiling. Erika sings into the camera, “It’s expensive to be me. Looking this good don’t come for free! And I still don’t give a fuck!”
“Erika Jayne” as a moniker is itself fake, a stage name that she adopted soon after marrying disgraced Los Angeles attorney Tom Girardi. On the show, the pair portrayed themselves as a passionate, loving couple, up until their divorce in late 2020. Tom Girardi was what LA Magazine called “about as famous as a lawyer can get in post-O. J. America,” leading an impressive career as one of the nation’s highest-powered trial attorneys. In fact, Girardi was a pivotal figure in the successful $333 million settlement in the 1993 Erin Brockovich case, setting a record for class-action suits at the time and inspiring the movie of the same name. Then, last winter, as the same article notes, “dozens of lawyers, litigation lenders, and clients—victims of corporate malfeasance and negligence, to whom Girardi had once appeared as a savior—said that Girardi stole their money, lied to their faces (or into their telephones), over and over and over again. It is, perhaps, the biggest legal scandal in the state of California.”2
Girardi–and by extension, Jayne’s–spectacular, almost unbelievable fall from grace seemed to be a plotline gifted to the producers of Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills from the entertainment gods themselves. The ever-scandalous and hyper-salacious story of Tom Girardi (and his reality television star younger wife) is one as old as time, that could’ve been adapted from Greek tablets or a Shakespeare play, by all accounts: an honorable protagonist, respected by the his colleagues and the community, slowly devolving into the behind-the-scenes villain. By early 2020, the network had promptly and readily exploited Girardi and Jayne’s “legal drama” and the ensuing fallout in advertisements for the upcoming season of Beverly Hills. “WHAT IS TRUE? WHAT IS THE LIE?” flashes on the screen, before the audience hears Housewife Dorit Kemsley ask Erika, “Orphans and widows? It makes you feel sick,” referencing the latter’s husband’s victims. In another scene, fellow ‘Wife Sutton Stracke presses Jayne about a $20 million payment made from Girardi to Jayne’s own LLC; in another, Lisa Rinna asks her fellow castmate , “where did $80 million go?”8
Although Jayne is a well-documented liar, she wasn’t lying when she sang that it was expensive to be her. If her previous statements are to be believed, the misappropriated money went to keeping up the lavish lifestyle she was known for proudly flaunting on the show. “I think it costs $40,000 a month to ‘do’ Erika Jayne. So that’s hair and makeup, costumes and wardrobe, the whole production,” she admitted in a 2017 interview with InTouch.4 Recent legal documents show that between 2008 and 2020, Erika splurged on over $14 million worth of purchases on an American Express card and spent about $11 million more on her glam squad, PR firms, a dance agency, and “other items.”2 The plot of the season revolved around Erika, with scene after scene of her performatively denying any allegation of knowledge that the lifestyle she’d shown to her castmates and the viewers was funded by victims of her husband’s legal improprieties—just some of whom were comprised of grieving relatives of the Indonesian Lion Air plane crash.
700 miles away in snow-capped Salt Lake City, yet another franchise found itself at the epicenter of a legal scandal when one of the RHOSLC housewives, Jen Shah, was arrested during filming and charged with running a nationwide telemarketing fraud scheme. So, we can now add “Housewives get charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and scam the eldery” to the aforementioned list of running Wife scandals. According to an article in The Daily Beast, “the alleged telemarketing scam ran from 2012 through March of this year and defrauded hundreds of victims—many of whom were over the age of 55.”3 Shah, and her on-screen “assistant” Stuart Smith “allegedly profited by generating leads for their co-conspirators in a telemarketing ring that allegedly sold its victims bogus business opportunities and services.” As if that wasn’t juicy enough, the FBI, NYPD, and Homeland Security showed up to a party bus during filming looking to arrest Shah, who, on camera, five minutes previously, had received a phone call tipping her off; she fled the scene.
Unlike in the fabled case of Erika Jayne, Miss Shah is the (alleged) criminal, not her husband. Luckily for producers and the network, it turns out that while Shah’s legal woes play out on the second season—airing now—RHOSLC already have their own Jaynesque legal drama for season 3 brewing in the form of cast member Whitney Rose. Rose’s husband, Justin Rose, is currently being sued for running an alleged pyramid scheme; one can only assume that the Rose household already has a Bravo camera crew parked outside.6 Who could blame them?
Throughout its 18-year-long run, The Real Housewives has achieved remarkable currency as a popular culture product. In her 2012 dissertation, “Femme Dysfunction is Pure Gold: A Feminist Political Economic Analysis of Bravo’s The Real Housewives,” Nicole B. Cox examined the cultural significance of the franchise as a pop-culture powerhouse. “Media serves as a source of cultural pedagogy that informs our values, ideas, attitudes, and beliefs about the world with which we engage, and it is with this in mind that The Real Housewives is viewed as a media production that deserves close, critical examination.”5 Reality television shows are an ever evolving form of media, and it’s a widely-addressed fact that media fulfill a very unique role in society by informing and shaping our understandings of society and culture.
This begs the question: where’s the line? Or is there one? Has The Real Housewives jumped the ship? Will there be any viewers left if the network doesn’t keep casting criminals? “I would counter and say, is it a question if there’s a line, or is it a question if it’s their [Bravo’s] responsibility. They’re not ultimately prosecutors, and Erika hasn’t been charged with anything,” Sarah Galli, host of the Housewives-centric podcast Andy’s Girls: A Real Housewives Breakdown tells me over the phone from her N.Y.C. apartment. “There is an almost, like, kind-of, bloodlust—a lot of people want Erika to be held accountable—but is that a responsibility for the network? Either way, we’ll keep watching.”
Moylan—who, full disclosure, ghost wrote Erika Jayne’s 2017 N.Y. Times bestseller Pretty Mess—shares a similar perspective on the matter, but ultimately has a positive outlook on the future of the franchise. “When they announced [upcoming Peacock franchise] The Real Housewives: Ultimate Girls Trip, I was really nervous because Andy Cohen always said, ‘when the ratings get really bad, our last gaff would be to shove a bunch of them on an island and see what happens,’” he tells me. “If they didn't think there was more juice in this particular orange, I don't know that they would be squeezing it so hard. I don't know what the answer is, and that's why I'm just a critic, and not a maker of this show. But as Sarah Galli says, I don't believe in God, but I have faith in Bravo. You know, that it's lasted this long, I think is amazing. And I think that even though it looks like viewership is lessening, anecdotally, I've heard of more and more people picking it up on streaming services, watching it during lockdown, things like that. So I think the viewership is there. And I think that there's a group of people that are very devoted to it that aren't going to go anywhere. But yeah, how long is it going to last? I don’t know.”
I don’t know either. However, I do suspect that Galli was on to something when she said that no matter what, it seems that the audience will still tune in just to see how long it will last. If anything was clear in my conversations with the Bravo geniuses, it’s that the fascination with these women and the franchise as a whole is warranted.
And most importantly (and perhaps best of all), we as the audience don’t need to feel ashamed for our craven enjoyment. “I wish people would stop saying that it’s a guilty pleasure and admit that it’s a passion pursuit,” Galli told me. After all, as Moylan wrote in The Housewives: “It’s not a crime to talk about the Real Housewives all the time.”
sources
Abad-Santos, Alex. “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Has Become a True Crime Doc.” Vox, Vox, 12 Aug. 2021, https://www.vox.com/2021/8/12/22620854/rhobh-erika-jayne-lawsuit-true-crime.
Aron, Hillel. “Barely Legal: The Surreal Saga of Tom Girardi and Erika Jayne.” Los Angeles Magazine, 30 Nov. 2021, https://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/the-surreal-saga-of-tom-girardi-and-erika-jayne/.
Bradley, Laura. “'Real Housewives' Star Jen Shah Scammed the Elderly with Nine-Year Telemarketing Fraud: Feds.” The Daily Beast, The Daily Beast Company, 30 Mar. 2021, https://www.thedailybeast.com/real-housewives-star-jen-shah-ran-telemarketing-scheme-that-scammed-the-elderly-feds-say.
Cox, Nicole B. “‘Femme Dysfunction Is Pure Gold’: A Feminist Political Economic Analysis of Bravo's the Real Housewives.” Florida State University, 2012, https://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/islandora/object/fsu:182816/datastream/PDF/view.
“Erika Jayne Dishes on $40,000 Monthly Beauty Bill.” YouTube, E! News, 29 Mar. 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0tr3OQve98. Accessed 20 Dec. 2021.
Karra, Sushma. “Who Is Justin Rose? 'Rhoslc' Star Whitney Rose's Husband Sued for Running Pyramid Scheme.” MEAWW, 13 Dec. 2021, https://meaww.com/why-whitney-rose-husband-justin-rose-sued-pyramid-scheme-rhoslc-real-housewive-bravo.
Moylan, Brian J. Housewives: The Real Story behind the Real Housewives. FLATIRON BOOKS, 2022.
Moylan, Brian. “No One Was Prepared for the Unrestrained Chaos of the 'Rhonj' ‘Prostitution Whore’ Table Flip Scene.” The Dipp, The Dipp, 24 Aug. 2021, https://thedipp.com/real-housewives-of-new-jersey/rhonj-recap-table-flip-teresa-giudice.
VideoByBravo, director. Your First Look at The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Season 11. YouTube, Bravo, 12 Apr. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq-ZMq5Er6E. Accessed 20 Dec. 2021.