The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City season five finale ends in a twisted game. The women are having an already tense dinner in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, when cast member Heather Gay suggests that they pull out their phones and share the meanest things they’ve written about each other as a “healing” exercise.
This moment is clearly designed to set up next season’s feuds, but Gay, the crafty ringleader of the bunch — practically a producer on the show — frames it as a necessary release for the paranoid group of friends. Naturally, the scene ends with Gay’s castmate and cousin Whitney Rose tricking frenemy Lisa Barlow into reading a sexually graphic rumor about her and her husband, John, which leads to Barlow reactively blurting out a sexually graphic rumor about on-and-off friend Angie Katsanevas’s husband, Shawn. Any rebuilt trust among the group quickly unravels, and the women are, rest assured, back at square one.
With a less outrageous and colorful cast, this clearly produced moment may have landed with a thud rather than a bang. But the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City cast has discovered an effective and refreshingly simple way to approach conflict as the 10th installment in the Real Housewives universe: Give the audience what they want, no matter how pre-meditated or contrived.
Meanwhile, the women of the Real Housewives of New York City reboot have struggled to create fresh, compelling storylines as the newest show in the 20-year-old franchise. Their second season also recently concluded with a jaw-dropping finale, although it was ultimately more shocking than satisfying. After a season of failed pranks and boring arguments, the finale took a sharp and disturbing turn, focusing on a cast member’s sexual assault and bringing out some troubling racial dynamics in the group.
Both RHOSLC and the RHONY reboot have demonstrated the tricky business of joining a reality franchise so late in the game. However, after a few unbalanced seasons, RHOSLC has managed to carve out its own identity while leaning into the most classic Real Housewives tropes. Meanwhile, the level of self-awareness of the cast of RHONY is one of the reasons for its downfall.
Salt Lake City proves that reality TV can be theater
Since The Real Housewives of Orange County premiered on Bravo in 2006, there have been 11 different shows, almost 200 Housewives, and numerous tell-all books, all forming an exhaustive manual on how to succeed (and fail) on the popular franchises.
RHOSLC, which premiered in 2020, is an example of a show that has clearly taken notes, sometimes feeling more contrived than earlier shows like RHOC and Real Housewives of New Jersey. The group of mostly practicing or excommunicated Mormons arrive each season with trivial beefs, fresh gossip, and even gimmicks (i.e., Angie K’s literal scroll of grievances against Meredith Marks this season) ready to argue with anyone at any moment. But five years in, this setup has proven to create reality TV magic, producing instantly repeatedly one-liners, like “high body count hair,” and indelible images, like Mary M. Cosby accidentally lurking in the background of a middle-aged woman’s bat mitzvah. Finally, a coterie of ladies who are always ready to play the proverbial game.
Even previously difficult cast members have come a long way in serving the show’s funniest moments and biggest fights. Cosby has gone from ditching group outings for the McDonald’s drive-through to being a primary player in this season. Additionally, Marks dropped her “disengaging” act; now she is fully lunging at castmates from the back of vans. It’s fair to say that the series has all but replaced the original RHONY as the campy, theatrical franchise, proving that a level of staging and blatant engineering can work on a reality show when everyone is equally committed.
This more staged approach didn’t always work. The show’s first three seasons were heavily dominated by the series’ overpowering antagonist, now-felon Jen Shah. Every time the dubious marketing maven entered a scene or spoke in a confessional, it seemed like she was reading directly out of a Housewives handbook, while also lacking a much-needed sense of humor. She also weaponized “receipts” — a classic trope — until it became exhausting; to the point where the women were walking on eggshells around her when they should’ve been confronting her. Her closest friend in the cast, Gay, was particularly held back by her allegiance to Shah.
It’s no coincidence that the show has finally been allowed to breathe with Shah no longer present. (In 2023, Shah was sentenced to six and a half years in federal prison, though it’s since been reduced.) Notably, Gay has emerged in a more dominant role, as the voluntary guardian of the group. She seemed to assign herself this position after she uncovered the shocking revelation in season four that new cast member Monica Garcia secretly ran a gossip account that exposed dirt on several of the Housewives. Now, it’s become her job to side-eye the newbies and deliver a monologue about friendship at any given moment.
Gay has also shown that she’s eager to be the producer’s puppet, doing whatever it takes to keep the momentum of the show going, including leading the group into a therapy session where they spew vile things at one another. It’s fascinating to watch Gay essentially replace Shah as the authoritative figure for the cast, even if the fans don’t agree with it. Instead of blackmailing the cast into submission, though, she’s pulling their best performances out of them.
It doesn’t hurt that this particular cast, even out of all the shows on Bravo, are clearly yearning to be famous.
There’s pot-stirring, and then there’s plot manipulation
On RHONY, the women are guided by the same awareness of what it means to be an iconic Real Housewife. But while the cast of RHOSLC is eager to be Bravo’s show ponies, the New York Housewives have been much more hesitant to play the game. This replacement cast took over for a group of iconic but thoroughly exhausted housewives, including Ramona Singer, Sonja Morgan, and Countess Luann de Lesseps, but after its first season, fans and Bravo pundits diagnosed the new RHONY with having a PR problem, aside from the women not exactly being the funniest bunch. The show’s group of women, including fashion executive Jenna Lyons, were more professional and more renowned, and weren’t willing to scream across tables at restaurants and get excessively drunk on TV, like their endlessly amusing predecessors.
The second season was a bit different. Some of the cast, mainly Brynn Whitfield and Erin Lichy, were more eager to get down and dirty, spreading rumors and causing (admittedly not that compelling) rifts among the group. However, Lichy and Whitfield struggled to recognize the difference between embracing drama and completely manipulating the plot. Whitfield, the season’s main menace, seemed to assume that the editors wouldn’t reveal flashbacks of her being told one thing by her castmates and twisting it into another, or that she wouldn’t get caught telling blatant lies.
This all caught up to Whitfield in last week’s season finale, where her tensions with castmate Ubah Hassan come to a disturbing head. After spending most of their cast trip in Puerto Rico provoking Hassan, Whitfield gets wound up over a hypothetical Hassan throws out about Whitfield “maybe sleeping with someone” to get cast on the show. However, Whitfield continues to add on to the remark, claiming that Hassan used more graphic language and called her a “whore.”
Whitfield tells the group that Hassan’s comment is particularly triggering because she had been raped, and that Hassan knows that. By the time this gets back to Hassan, it’s clear she had no idea about Whitfield’s assault and appears devastated by the news. At the end of the night, Whitfield eventually tells the group that Hassan “may not have clocked” this anecdote within a larger conversation they had.
With a group of more alert Housewives, Whitfield would’ve immediately been called out for egging on Hassan and blowing up the entire exchange. (Fans online also recirculated a scene from a previous episode where Whitfield tells her brother that he’s the “only person she’s told” about the assault.) Instead, the women rush to Whitfield’s defense and take her word over Hassan’s before later admitting that they’ve probably been taken advantage of by Whitfield.
While producer Andy Cohen excitedly teased the season’s “dark” finale, it didn’t suddenly make the reboot any more compelling than it had been in its short time on the air. In fact, it felt like a desperate move for an already floundering show. The lack of content warnings demonstrated a careless attitude toward the episode’s subject matter. It was also frustrating that Whitfield, a white-passing biracial woman, was effectively able to weaponize her real trauma against Hassan, a dark-skinned Somali woman, and briefly turn the entire cast against her, despite Whitfield’s well-documented history of fabricating stories to the rest of the women. The entire encounter made Whitfield unwatchable from now on and revealed a colorist dynamic among the rest of the group.
Oppositely, on RHOSLC, the women are surprisingly delicate when discussing dark subject matter, including family trauma and their scars from the Mormon church. The women, mainly Katsanevas, were especially respectful in honoring the privacy of Mary Cosby and her son, Robert Jr., when he confessed during the season that he had a drug problem and, later, went to rehab.
All in all, the rules of being a good Real Housewife have never been more accessible, but the disparity between RHOSLC and RHONY proves that there’s a delicate art to making a mess. Everyone has to be game and have a sense of humor. Most importantly, everyone has to know where to draw a line in the sand.
