It was not a good season for Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of New York City.” But then again, the show hasn’t had a good season since before the pandemic — virtually an eternity ago by both real-life and “Housewives” standards. The series was once the franchise’s most consistently entertaining entry, unconcerned with manufacturing explosive drama to keep viewers hooked and instead relying on its cast’s outrageous personalities to do the heavy lifting.
For years, core “RHONY” Housewives like Luann de Lesseps, Bethenny Frankel, Sonja Morgan, Ramona Singer and Carole Radziwill, along with a few string players rotating between seasons, kept the show running like a well-oiled machine. They were bawdy broads who could fight and make up like sisters, a group of women who were successful not just because of their desire to be on reality TV, but because of the innate hustle instilled in them by their home city. Finagle your way into New York’s elite and you’ll meet a dozen older women exactly like them: rich and powerful, but aware that the keys to the gilded gates could be snatched from their hands at any moment. Watching them was like dining with the ladies who lunch and being immediately let in on all the loosely kept secrets of New York society, traded like currency to keep climbing a ladder that never ends. But this wasn’t solely a show about status; it was also about what women must do to hold onto their status as they age. The series chronicled its cast as they settled into middle age and later life, contending with divorce, death and drooping. It was a character study unlike anything else Bravo has done to date, and it was brilliant.
