The Real Housewives of New York City is a Modern Tragic Masterpiece

PART I: “I Never Feel Guilty About Being Privileged” 

Over the last few years, there’s been a growing interest in “Dead Malls.” These abandoned shopping centers have become immensely popular in some corners of the internet. There’s something about the photos and videos of these places – something slightly off-putting, but also evocative and nostalgic. But a Dead Mall is more than just some empty stores; it’s a physical manifestation of a past way of life, a past way of thinking, past hopes, dreams, and aspirations.

Dead Malls require us to confront a change in perspective – our change of perspective. In a Dead Mall, the glitzy, exciting, “anything is possible” attitude of the 80s seems a lifetime away. These places hold no promise now. The building may be mostly the same. But something has changed. We have changed.

I get a similar feeling when going to some of the palatial cineplexes that were built and opened in the last 90s and early 2000s. They started building my local movie theatre in 1999, and it opened some years later. The grand structure – part of a shopping center itself – was in a way awe-inspiring, with vaulted ceilings, a two-story escalator, and row after row of concession stands. But today (and by today I mean, like, 2019, when you could actually be in a movie theatre), this basilica of film has also taken on the tragic tinge of a Dead Mall. Built during the boomtime of real estate development and film, it too now stands as memorials to the hubris of the before times – Ozymandias with butter dispensers.

Walking through these over-inflated theatres, not much has changed in their twenty odd years of operation. Instead, everything else has changed. We have changed. And the juxtaposition is unsettling, and a little upsetting. 

The Real Housewives of New York City is also a little upsetting. It too is a relic of the before times. You see, way back in 2006, Bravo executives saw the booming success of the dramedy Desperate Housewives and wanted to cash in on the action. So, they slapped together a knock-off version of their own “housewife” show – this time a “rEaLiTy” show – to get aboard the ratings gravy train.  

The spinoff, The Real Housewives of Orange County, sought to situate itself in the long history of ogling at the inner-lives of the rich on television. Like MTV Cribs and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous beforehand, Real Housewives pitched itself as “exploring the complicated daily lives of five privileged women and their families,” giving viewers an inside look into “one of the wealthiest planned communities in the country.”

Of course, the show was a hit. People loved the petty drama, the clunky and “unscripted” action, and the opportunity to live vicariously through these women. The gaudy mansions, the bulky cars, the botox – these were the things we all wanted. And now, through the show, we could have them.

High on their own supply, Bravo pushed out a number of spin-offs to the knock-off, notably, The Real Housewives of New York City. A show already in production, Manhattan Moms, was rebranded to fit into the burgeoning Real Housewives franchise. RHONY, the network said, would be “giving a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to make it in the privileged world of Manhattan society.”

The transition to NYC made a fair bit of sense. New York City is the financial capital of the country, which is helpful when you’re looking for rich housewives. But, more importantly, the city has a long history of worshipping the privileged elite. In the 1890s, the rich – acting like the popular kids in high school – even made a list delineating who was “fashionable” enough to make the cut of the city’s high society. The names on the list were those of the venerable, old-money families of New York – the Astors, the Livingstons, the Van Rensselaers – not the new money Swells like the Vanderbilts. 

RHONY proved their blue-blood bonafides by adding actual royalty to the first season’s cast. Enter Luann de Lesseps. In 2008, when the first season takes place, Luann functions as almost the ideal housewife. Married to French businessman and literal aristocrat Count Alexandre de Lesseps, Luann, a former model, more-or-less flaunts her status and privilege for the first few episodes. She’s a competent mother of two. She speaks fluent French. She’s got a firm grasp on the intricacies of social etiquette. Her tagline for the first season was literally “I never feel guilty about being privileged.”

But as the first season wrapped, 2008 came crashing down. We were all required to confront a change in perspective – our perspective.

PART II: “If being Sonja is so wrong, why does it feel so right?”

So, I’m not gonna bore you. You know what happened. In 2008, a bunch of rich idiots made the money sad and sent the country and most of the world into a financial tailspin. 

From 2007 to 2009, Americans lost about $16 trillion in net worth, with younger adults bearing a disproportionate financial burden. To this day, people born in the 1980s or later have amassed nearly 35% less wealth than previous generations did at the same age. Millions of people lost their homes, their jobs, and their entire life savings.

And while the material impact of the crash will have an incalculable impact on people across our country, the crash also pushed a change of perspective. Banker became a pejorative. Talking heads started using the term “the one percent.” It started to look like maybe, just maybe, the people responsible for the largest recession in almost 100 years may not know what they are doing. Have you entertained the idea that the King has no clothes?

Enter Sonja Morgan. Sonja joined RHONY starting in season three, the second new Housewife to join the show since the first season. A former model and self-described “party girl,” Sonja is the ex-wife of John Adams Morgan, whose father co-founded Morgan Stanley. Her 2006 divorce left Sonja in financial ruin, and throughout the series she is clearly struggling with the emotional and fiscal fallout years later. Season after season, Sonja tries – and fails – to launch fashion lines, alcohol brands, movie projects, even toasters. To cover her debts, she tries for years to sell her NYC townhouse, seemingly to no avail. If Luann was the poster-woman for what Bravo wanted the series to look like in 2008 – refined, classy, prestigious – Sonja was the face of the new direction of RHONY. 

Since Sonja’s arrival in 2010, the show has followed a well worn pattern, with the women contriving new ways to get drunk in fancy bars and start fights. New women are occasionally added to the mix. We sometimes see some of the women doing charity work or something vaguely business, but the main entertainment of the show hinges on the women getting drunk and yelling at each other. They regularly do this while on vacation. 

And while Sonja may have heralded a new era for the show, the original housewives have not been spared. Take Luann, for example. Over the course of 13 seasons, she’s been divorced, remarried, and divorced again; arrested for disorderly intoxication in Florida; sent to rehab; and taken up a career as a cabaret performer. The women of the show have bared their innermost struggles to the world, living through divorce, death, and failure in front of a captive audience.

Although there are only about 12 minutes of actual stuff happening in each episode, the series is like watching a trainwreck in slow motion. The drunken fights, the petty arguments, the clueless attempts to stay relevant hit every level of cringeworthy – from seeing your mother try to dab to the feeling your stomach you get while watching Scott’s Tots.

PART III: “I’m not a Housewife, but I am real.”

But what changed? How did we go from countess to cabaret? From haute couture to hot mess?

I think something we’ve all learned over the last few years is that our image of success can be pretty flimsy at times. Depending who you are, you can con your way to running a music festival, being the President, or at least free room and board at a bougie NYC hotel.

RHONY invited us to all take an exclusive look behind the curtain of the lives of the rich elite. Unfortunately, there’s really not that much to look at. Thirteen seasons of what we would expect from high society: boring charity events, snobby name-dropping, and an unsurprising lack of people of color.

Maybe at the end of the day, the housewives really are just the thin veneer of respectability and class that they are trying so hard to project. I think that may be why watching the show can be so upsetting, or at times even unsettling. We are bombarded with these signifiers of status, and importance – second homes in the Hamptons and the Berkshires, luxurious vacations to white sand beaches, exclusive events full of hob-knobbing socialites. But juxtaposed with the glitz and glamour is just a bunch of women struggling to keep it all together, getting drunk, and fighting. There’s no secret sauce here – nothing that imbues these rich and powerful people with an unattainable virtue. The housewives aren’t better than us; they just have more money. 

Watching RHONY makes us confront our change of perspective. The refined, glitzy, “status is everything” attitude of season one seems a lifetime away. The housewives, for the most part, are the same people they always were. But something has changed. We have changed.