To be a Real Housewives obsessive is to wade into the murky darkness of the death-laden and designer label-strewn realities of being an affluent older woman. There isn’t a single Housewives loyalist who isn’t intimately familiar with how dismal this franchise can become in mere minutes—that constant emotional ricochet keeps fans hooked!
Take, for instance, a scene from Real Housewives of New York Season 5, where Ramona Singer and Luann de Lesseps chat on a park bench after a micro-spat. In one moment, Singer accuses de Lesseps of being an absent mother, before peering back at herself in the ornate, invisible mirror sitting in front of her face, blocking her view of anyone but herself. “Somebody has to be very evil to want to ‘get’ somebody,” Singer says. “I don’t even have time to do my nails! Actually, I do this new thing, it lasts three weeks, it’s like a shellac, it’s pretty good…which is wonderful.”
Having devoted a hefty chunk of my adult life to studying these women like they’re injured gazelles in the Serengeti, I know that it’s harder to parody a Housewives show than one might think. There’s nothing quite so damning and delicious as the real thing (although fellow buffs Casey Wilson and Danielle Schneider came close with their short-lived Hulu spoof series). For so long, I’ve believed that satirists have been unable to duplicate the twisted magic of Housewives because they don’t understand why these shows are so funny: They’re not braindead bitchfests, they’re champagne-soaked studies of the human condition! I held firm to that conviction until, to my shock and delight, the season finale of Julio Torres’ brilliant HBO series Fantasmas introduced me to The True Women of New York.
