I’m often attracted New York-based shows like Gossip Girl, MTV’s The City and now I’m obsessing over Bravo TV’s The Real Housewives of New York City.
I first stumbled upon this show during a six-hour flight from SFO to JFK aboard Virgin America. The in-flight entertainment channels featured the Bravo TV Channel, and though I was expecting the usual reality staples of Top Chef or Project Runway, what I got instead was a marathon of the first season of the NYC Housewives.
Trashy yet oddly addictive, The Real Housewives of New York City, like its West Coast sibling, The Real Housewives Of Orange County, follows the lives of five wealthy ladies as they juggle careers, families, relationships and social schedules across the state’s five boroughs and the Hamptons.
Modern Day Emily Post Countess LuAnn De Lesseps is the fourth wife of Count Alexander De Lesseps. She lives in a beautiful white Upper East Side townhouse with her two kids, Victoria and Noel. They also have a Filipina housekeeper, Rosanna, who not only keeps the household together, but is surprisingly the most sensible person in the house.
Always fiery and brash, successful entrepreneur Ramona Singer owns and runs RMS fashions and a jewelry line called True Faith, and is a doting mother to Avery, a feisty 13-year old.
Williamsburg career mom Alex McCord is a visual merchandising executive who balances being a devoted mother to her boys and keeping an active social life with her soul mate and fashion adviser, hotelier hubby Simon van Kempen.
Always on the look out for the next big society event, the van Kempens are the epitome of a thriving New York couple trying to understand the politics of the New York City Private school system while keeping up with the social Joneses of the City.
Charity circuit queen Jill Zarin is the most well-connected of the housewives, with a jam-packed social calendar filled with charity events and galas along with helping her 17-year-old daughter apply to top colleges and running the successful Zarin Fabrics, a business she established with her husband Bobby.
Last, but definitely not least, is our favorite character, Bethenny Frankel. The very outspoken Bethenny manages a burgeoning personal chef business and thriving baked goods line called Bethenny Bakes. Hilarious, helpful and a fiercely loyal friend, what is most endearing about her is her frankness — she tells it like it is.
The show appeals to the voyeur in all of us but the strange addictive quality of it is that the housewives appear reasonable, even savvy at times. And yet they have the same blind spots and logic gaps in assessing their issues and surroundings. Each housewife straddles the thin line of sensibility and hypocrisy in a matter of seconds.
In the world of proper etiquette and class wars that Edith Wharton has chronicled since the early 1900s, 21st century New York society women continue to be controlling and class-obsessed only to behave like temperamental, trashy hos.
The popularity of the show can also be rooted to Bravo TV’s innate ability to know exactly where to place the camera to get the maximum exposure of mayhem. The show’s editors have a penchant for pitting unrealistic aspirations and personas up against cold, hard reality.
Here lies the magic of “reality” television and that’s why we are completely hooked.