Have “The Real Housewives” Peaked? From left: Cynthia Bailey, Kenya Moore, Kandi Burruss, Andy Cohen, Phaedra Parks, Porsha Williams, and Sheree Whitfield.
The supertease for season 12 of The Real Housewives of Orange County has just arrived and we could not be more thrilled for this a new season!
In the first episode of Bravo's 'The Real Housewives of Orange County' Jeana's son Shane faces the stress of high school graduation and the baseball draft, Kimberly. Now, I guess we need to talk about Tamra’s Fatty Boombalatty party. First of all, I have never wanted to go to a Real Housewives party more than I have wanted to go. The Real Housewives of Orange county officially getting boring as can be. Tamra cant keep her mouth shut, Heathers snootiness just pisses me of; Shannon honesty. The Real Housewives of Orange County Anywhere. Watch your favorite full episodes of The Real Housewives of Orange County on any device.
Since its debut — with The Real Housewives of Orange County in 2. Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise has become the kind of cultural phenomenon that is familiar even to those who don’t watch any of its many iterations. The shows’ theater of absurdity — mixing kitsch and melodrama with catfights and self- branding — now has a global reach, from Potomac to Bangkok. It’s gone from an avant- garde form of television to the lingua franca of cable, as myriad competitors with their own versions of the feuding- women framework have appeared, including Basketball Wives, Love & Hip- Hop, Mob Wives, and R& B Divas. Watch A Trip To The Moon Online Metacritic here. It has even turned into fodder for entire news websites, successfulpodcasts, and multiseason parody series — like the Real Husbands of Hollywood and The Hotwives of Orlando — that have developed their own followings. Watch Ice Age: The Meltdown HD 1080P.
As its influence expanded, the franchise has come to represent a kind of Mean Girls sensibility; to say that something is “like Housewives” means to reduce that thing — including major political issues — into supposedly frivolous feminine terms and calculated camp outrageousness. Even Housewives executive producer Andy Cohen noted that last year’s Trump- dominated presidential debates had turned into a Real Housewives reunion, implying that they had devolved into petty accusations and a reality TV spectacle. It’s telling that Cohen invoked the reunion, specifically — in which the castmates sit down in a talk- show setting after the final episode to revisit the season’s major storylines — to draw the comparison. In some ways, that aspect of the format has become most representative of the franchise’s sensationalism as well as its self- referentiality.
But the Housewives franchise wasn’t always defined by catfights and reunions. As it became, collectively, a major ratings success over the course of the last decade, the focus of each incarnation of the show shifted from telling stories about the cast members’ family dynamics and separate lives to center, instead, on the conflicts they have with one another. And the effect of the show itself on the cast’s lives and relationships started becoming a more central — and more evident — aspect of the drama. By tracing the evolution and expansion of the program over time, a clearer picture emerges of how it developed into its captivating combination of fakeness and authenticity, calculation and improvisation, self- promotion and (self- )imposed vulnerability. It also explains how Housewives’ very success — as the franchise’s conventions became evident to both viewers and castmates — threatens that delicately choreographed balancing act.
But the show as we now know it — a m. He was a branding expert and entrepreneur, not a professional reality television producer, and his version, titled Behind the Gates — described by a Bravo executive as Curb Your Enthusiasm–esque — wasn’t framed from the women’s perspective. It mostly focused on the family of Jeana Keough, a former Playboy Playmate who was now an Orange County realtor married to a pitcher for the Oakland A’s, and her interactions with her neighbor, insurance salesperson Vicki Gunvalson. But the pitch didn’t totally work for Cohen, who was then part of the network’s programming team. With input from the network — and Cohen — the series started moving closer to its current iteration as a reality version of the So.
Cal soap opera Knots Landing. Other families were added and a Bravo executive came up with the kitschy “Real Housewives” title as an allusion to ABC’s then- popular scripted dramedy Desperate Housewives. Still, that first season of Orange County, which aired in 2. Housewives format.
The opening credits featured men’s and women’s voices talking about living “behind the gates” while “7 million families live in gated communities” flashed onscreen, suggesting that viewers were about to watch an edifying documentary. In the show’s introductory vignettes, the women look like casual moms in jeans and blouses. They're introduced through random phrases that they uttered throughout the season, which, unlike the current catchphrases, weren’t necessarily about the women themselves, but rather attempted to convey something about the community’s values (“I don’t wanna get old”; “He’s pretty much keeping me”; “8. In the first season, for instance, Gunvalson attempts to balance her insurance business and her controlling instincts as a mother and wife to second husband Donn. Keough appears trapped in a loveless marriage.
The show was full of scenes that captured the relationship between these white suburban mothers and their sons, who came off as infantilized and overly powerful. Most of the drama, in the beginning, was intra- family, not inter- Housewife. And the reunions, originally titled Real Housewives Confess: A Watch What Happens Special, weren’t the spectacle of cross- talking and counteraccusations that have become a trademark of the show. They were a low- key affair — initially without a host — in which the women came together to reflect on funny or embarrassing moments from the season. This emphasis on suburban women’s relationships with their husbands and children was soon sidelined in favor of the feud- centric reality television drama and campy glamour that would come to define the show.
That initial season of Orange County had an average of 6. Project Runway. But its demographic skewed younger, and, seeking to exploit that potential, the network brought in veteran reality producer Doug Ross (Fear Factor, Big Brother, and Bravo’s own Boy Meets Boy) to take over the second season of Orange County. Watch Justice For Natalee Holloway Online Full Movie. Initially, the show’s main aesthetic changed only slightly: The “Housewives Confess” segment moved to a talk- show setting, with Andy Cohen onscreen as the human face of a Bravo producer, quizzing the women about the season. By Season 4 — which aired in 2. Gretchen Rossi, a 3. Housewives Gunvalson and Tamra Barney (now Tamra Judge) questioned the authenticity of their relationship.
We think he's paying her to take care of him,” Barney says during one confessional. During a party at Barney’s house, she gets caught telling Gunvalson that they’re going to get Rossi “naked wasted,” presumably to embarrass her. This “dinner party from hell” — as Cohen called it— and Rossi’s relationship became fodder for the reunion special at the end of the season. Cohen adroitly shifts from shady showman to earnest sentimentalist as he teases out the accusations against Rossi — including information about an ex- boyfriend not revealed on the show itself — while also confronting them with hilariously moralistic exhortations and asking questions that viewers emailed to Bravo.“Some of our viewers called you BFFs — and some of them called you mean girls!” Cohen intones. When Rossi claims Barney set her up, Barney snaps back, “You’re such a fucking victim.”“Jesus Christ, Tamra,” Keough mutters, seemingly shocked by both the cursing and the ugly turn the reunion had taken. But that shock symbolized how anachronistic she was to the new format.
Unsurprisingly, Keough, whose major storyline was her relationship with her children and her separation from her husband, was on her way out that season — the first casualty of becoming “the boring one.” And by then the franchise — which had sprouted versions in New York, Atlanta, New Jersey, and Beverly Hills — was evolving into something different. The Gretchen Rossi storyline symbolized the beginning of a new culture of . The shows' story arcs became games of telephone about what each woman had said about the other, and that information was recontextualized and further stoked through confessionals and forced meetups, with all of the (mis)information culminating in an explosion at the reunion. That culture would also characterize the other franchise iterations that debuted from 2.