Will this be Shannon’s worst season yet? Let’s hope so.
Sometimes, a Housewife tells us a story, and her whole life — nay, her entire existence — is summed up in that one interlude. Take the story Shannon Storms Beador tells us about her DUI, which she got ten days after the last RHOC reunion, where she told everyone she doesn’t have a drinking problem. “On the night of the DUI, I drove to John’s house stupidly,” Shannon tells us in confessional. “We got into a big argument, and he said, ‘You’re a drunken idiot. Don’t get in your car.’ But I got into an accident seconds later because I revved up the engine so that he could know how mad I was. And I lost control of the car. Immediately.”
This is it. This is Shannon. She got into a drunken fight with someone, she refused to listen to reason, she wanted to display just how angry she was, she lost control of both the car and the situation, and she ruined herself as a result of it. This is the pattern. This is what we’ve seen repeatedly, season after season, year after year, of Shannon having absolutely no clue what is best for her, not listening to anyone, and causing her own problems because she can’t control her anger.
God bless Shannon Beador. She has never had a good season on this show. Not even once. She’s either getting thrown out of Heather Dubrow’s house, getting cheated on, seeing a trainer who says “Wow,” when he weighs her, having David break up with her again, alienating and realienating everyone around her. Yet she comes back. Although all common decency tells her not to, she returns, like the swallows at Capistrano or a herpes infection. Shannon always comes back. We thank her for her service and hope she never smartens up.
This seems like it’s going to be her worst season yet. She tells her three daughters (all gorgeous; where’s their reality show?) that this is all part of God’s plan. Yeah, I think it is too, but I think God’s plan was for Shannon to get her ass into rehab, which she clearly did not do. After the DUI, she went to a “wellness retreat.” What is this? Goop? Is she actually Gwyneth Paltrow’s friend that diarrhea-ed all over the sheets? Sounds like our Shan! She also hasn’t stopped drinking. She tells Emily that she now has a two-drink maximum. When Tamra hears this she says, “What? An hour?” Snap, but also facts, no cap, gyat. (I talk like a Gen Z now.)
I think the saddest revelation of the entire episode is about why Tamra and Shannon fell out and stopped doing their Tres Amigas touring live show. Tamra says that Shannon was telling the press she wasn’t drinking, but at one of their gigs, Shannon was pouring vodka into her Diet Coke when no one was looking. There are drunks, and then there are sneaking vodka into your Diet Coke after your DUI drunks, and, wow, that is just incredibly sad.
While I understand why Tamra would want to distance herself from Shannon after this, it shows my least favorite quality of her. She’s your friend until she isn’t, but she can’t just be quiet about Shannon. She can’t just let Shannon figure herself out and be friends with her again. No, our Tammy Sue needs to make Shannon into an enemy. Yes, Shannon needs help and tough love, but I don’t know that she needs Tamra making fun of her to the other women and on television. That is not going to age well.
Shannon definitely has a whole lot of bad shit going on in her life, but she doesn’t seem to be alone in that. Let’s go around the horn and look at the rest of the ladies before we come back to Shannon and her new sisterwife Alexis J.J. Bellino. Gina is really going through it because things are great with her ex, Matt, and her boyfriend, Travis, but Travis’s ex-wife is driving them all nuts. We don’t get any details, but if my husband ever divorced me, I would dedicate myself to making every day of his life hell, so it is both understandable and relatable but objectively shitty.
The way Gina deals with this is not understandable or relatable. She says her casita is too small for both of their families now that the kids (who got a vital lesson in food safety!) are older. Since they can’t afford a bigger house, Gina’s solution is — wait for it — to get two separate houses. I’m sorry, but that’s a demotion or getting passed over for a promotion. As soon as that happens, you will be hitting Monster dot com or circling jobs in the want ads. (That’s how people still do it, right?) This makes no sense, and when she explains it to Travis, it seems just the right level of understanding, which is not understanding at all. Travis and everyone watching this knows as soon as he moves out, he’s Dunzo the Clown.
Gina is also in the middle of the drama that is going on with Jen. The yoga teacher sits down to dinner with her boyfriend Ryan, the worst dresser on the West Coast, and they both order Malibu rum and Diet Pepsis. Ew. What would you even call that drink? A “Douchebag” probably (which is also what Emily Simpson calls John Janssen). Jen tells us that the owner of her old house sold it, so they had to move into a new house, which Gina, who is now a Realtor, helped her procure. Her ex, Will, was paying most of the rent, but he stopped working for Jen’s family’s company so he can’t pay anymore and is $24,000 behind and now she’s getting evicted. Oh, poor Gina, to be CCed on all of those emails which she will probably print out and bring to the reunion in a binder.
The solution that Ryan proposes is for Jen and her umpteen children and a small menagerie of rescue animals to move in with him. She worries that they’ll split up and she’ll have to find yet another home. He tells her that she should be more positive and think things will go as planned. “What could go wrong?” he essentially says. I don’t know; how about being involved in a huge Major League Baseball fraud scandal? That could do it.
Things are much better for Emily Simpson, who got herself on Vitamin O and looks absolutely amazing. Things are also great for Heather Dubrow, who now has a whole passel of properties to look over and a whole bunch of middle-aged white dudes to help her spend about $20 million dollars renovating her Beverly Hills home. We get a tour of the mansion, which is on almost nine acres, and she says that Lana Turner used to live there. “What if these walls could talk?” Heather asks us and then tells us they’re tearing the house down to the studs. I hope someone recorded the conversation between the walls because they are now silent. Only Oprah Winfrey knows which.
There’s also a new Housewife, Katie, who is a friend of RHOBH’s Sutton Stracke, who Sutton hooked up with Gina when Katie was shopping for a house in the OC. When Katie goes with Gina to Heather Dubrow’s party, she says, “This is not the first time I have met Heather but it’s the first time she’s said hello to me.” Due to the rules of the Eileen Davidson Accords, we can’t judge her until the fifth episode, but I like what I’m seeing.
Luckily, the EDA does not apply to returning Housewives, so we can hate on Alexis Bellino as much as we want. It’s funny to see Heather talking about her as a friend after she told her at a reunion, “When everyone says you’re dead, it’s time to lie down.” Also, she and Tamra hate each other more than Joe Biden hates live debates. I’m glad they showed at least a little bit of everyone yelling at her because her time on the show was contentious at best.
I will say this for Alexis: she sure knows how to pick ‘em. Her ex-husband, Jim Bellino, who sued Tamra and Shannon for defamation after they talked shit about his businesses, is one of the worst creatures to ever darken a Housewife’s doorstep, and we have our fair share of humdingers to choose from. If anything that Shannon and the rest of the ladies have to say about John Janssen is true, he’s just as horrible. Alexis says that she met him at The Quiet Woman, which I believe now qualifies it for national landmark status. One Housewife incident, no biggie. But two famous ones? You get the Rails Steakhouse Award for Contributions to the Reality Television Arts and Sciences.
Alexis has dinner with Heather, who is not really her friend, and Emily Simpson who seems to actually be her friend. I believe they met on QAnon message boards. (I’m kidding, but just barely.) She says, “When you get to know him like I do, you’re going to love him. He’s my Johnny J.” Um, Alexis, they already do! They’ve probably spent more time with him than she has. Shannon also tells us that Johnny J called her up ten days after their breakup to tell her that she ruined his and his families’ lives because she’s a public figure. Then he rebounds with Jesus Juggs herself? Make it make sense. Just retreat into obscurity where you belong, John Janssen.
Heather throws the opening party, and everyone shows up, just waiting for Shannon and Alexis to be in the same room. After Shannon does an outdoor 360 selfie, goes to the tarot card reading station, makes some wishes for people she doesn’t even know on the wishing wall, has an espresso martini with a big loogie in it, and rides the mini pony, she pulls Alexis for a chat. They go outside, and Shannon wants both some shade and a table, so she drags a metal table across the entirety of the patio, doing tens of thousands of dollars of damage.
The rest of the women are inside trying to see what they can of the fight or if they can just read their lips. “I speak English, Spanish, and lips,” Emily says. (I love her. I’m sorry, I can’t help it.) But I think it’s Gina’s read on the situation that is most revelatory. “That man worked them both and now they’re out there and they have to scrap?” Exactly! Don’t let a man get you down.
Shannon starts speaking and tells Alexis that she sent the first “cyst and deceased letter” as Tamra calls them and kicked off the lawsuit that cost Shannon $300,000. She says she can be in a room with Alexis, but she doesn’t want to be friends with her because of the lawsuit. Now, I want to see Shannon pull out that letter because I don’t believe Alexis is as terrible as her husband and wouldn’t sue them. This I believe. I also believe that Shan is more upset about John than the lawsuit, just as Alexis claims. I also agree with Alexis, the lawsuit is over and settled, and while she lost a lot of money, there is no reason to relitigate it, especially if Alexis had nothing to do with it.
Where Alexis lost me, though, is in the way she fights. First, when she’s speaking and Shannon tries to say something, she says, “I’m talking now. I let you talk.” I’m sorry, you never win an argument on procedural grounds, and this makes me hate her. Then Alexis says if Shannon wants to keep talking about the lawsuit, “There’s the door, Shannon Beador,” a line that she has been workshopping for the better part of six months when she first cooked up this plan to get back on the show. What makes it even worse is that Alexis is the one who storms off. You can’t show her the door and then leave yourself. If you show someone the door you have to stand your ground and kick them out. Ask Heather Dubrow. She’s thrown Shannon out plenty.
The fight is a non-event, but we get a To Be Continued, which I hope means there will be even more fighting next week. I’m just so glad — for the first time in a very long time — that the ladies of the OC are back. I think we’re going to have a fantastic season, especially if it’s horrible for Shannon.
