Photo: Clifton Prescod/Bravo
We live through history. One day, we will tell our children and our children’s children about the absolute magic and unprecedented spectacle that was The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. As Bravo fans, it’s easy to live in the past, feeling nostalgic for the golden ages of these shows that once were that often seem forever out of reach. Scary island. Stassi Schroeder slaps Kristen Doute. Nene asks Kim to close her legs to married men. They don’t make TV like that anymore. But wait…they did. It’s often difficult to realize how important something is while you’re at it, but we simply have to acknowledge it Salt Lake City He works on a plane that only the greats operate. She achieved the impossible feat of serving pure gold for five straight seasons, never slowing down to catch her breath.
Just look how this season ended. While other shows in the series sometimes feel like they’re struggling to get enough footage to reach their allotted episode quota, Rusk The cameras basically dropped in the middle of a fight between Whitney and Lisa. If they had waited for a lull to finish the season, they never would have stopped filming. For this reason, on Salt lakemore than any other show, the reunions feel like a continuation of unfinished business rather than a mere rehashing.
But as we watch them pray and take their seats, I have one observation. A request to the gods for bravo, if you will. As time went on, we got to see more of the behind-the-scenes action at the reunions, like watching them get ready and even take their lunch breaks, but what I’d most like to see is the moment where they’re each told where the couch they’re sitting on is. We catch a brief moment of joy when Angie takes her place next to Andy and says, “From warm bitch to first chair,” but I want all of their reactions, good and bad. Something else I would like to see? The moment Angie and Brittany realized they brought the same dress and how those negotiations ended. Sadly, we don’t get any Brit at all in this episode, but fingers crossed she’s backstage warming up her singing voice and preparing her announcements for next week.
Our first topic of conversation is whether or not Lisa started the rumor that Whitney got her jewelry line from Alibaba — a word we fortunately heard Meredith say again in a flashback. Whitney tries to offer an explanation, and even cites a tattoo of one of her designs as evidence, pointing out that no person in their right mind would have gotten a tattoo of Alibaba. Well, you never know – put Kyle Richards in front of Morgan Wade’s tattoo gun and anything can happen.
Quite frankly, I don’t really care where Whitney’s jewelry line comes from. What I care about is Lisa Barlow trying to launch an investigation after she was accused of starting the rumors, so the question on my mind is what came of that frantic phone call with Sean. Unfortunately, it appears that this connection may have been the extent of the matter, and Lisa instead places the burden of proof on Whitney, stating that she never presented any real evidence against her to investigate. I’m obsessed with repeatedly asking Lisa to “go the distance” and then proceeding to do nothing – no one has ever been more attached to me. I just hope they do another drag night next season so we can hear “Please welcome to the stage… Alibaba!”
As we begin to delve into Angie’s suspicious remark about Lisa’s parenting, they immediately start talking over each other so quickly that Andy immediately has to use their agreed-upon safe words to silence them. But what Andy didn’t realize was that I could listen to the beautiful cacophony of these two women talking in sync for hours on end. It brings me peace. It’s music to my ears. Not a single word penetrates, only emotion. White noise machines should offer it as a setting.
But haven’t we seen these two putting this beef to bed already? “We did it in an aquarium,” Angie says. I can’t quite explain why, but this sentence made me laugh out loud. It was realistic, and we actually saw them applying make-up in front of a huge aquarium, but if we take a few steps back, that perfectly sums up the wonderful absurdity of these shows. But this, like most aquarium truces, did not last – largely because of the wide-ranging fluctuations in which they found themselves on Twitter.
The origin of those angry tweets appears to be Meredith calling out Angie Jane Shah’s backup dancer — a reference to a video they shot of them dancing to “WAP” with Monica Garcia years ago. Funny enough, that sounds like the most insulting thing anyone could ever say to Angie, short of getting to the Greeks. “I’ve been solo since I was six years old, and I’ve never been anyone’s backup dancer,” she says, adding that she doesn’t even know how to dance. Well, let’s unpack this. If Angie went solo at the age of six, what girl group or group did she belong to from the ages of one to five? Moreover, I love that she is so determined to undermine Meredith’s claim that she completely rebukes the dancing.
Somehow, all of this leads to Angie tweeting that Lisa’s car has been recovered, which Heather (who sounds like Harvey Fierstein due to losing her voice) points out is information that came from Bronwyn. The thing that bothers me about Bronwyn is her insistence on moving the bowl from the high ground—it’s a Lisa Vanderpump-like quality. She will talk nonsense and spread rumors but immediately washes her hands of them the moment she confronts her. In this case, she said yes, technically, this information came from her – but she was simply telling Angie that she wished people would stop sending her rumors like that. Bullshit, Bronwyn, please just own it. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Being anarchist and being morally superior don’t go hand in hand, no matter how hard you try – choose one!
However, like Lisa Vanderpump, she’s good at crossing that fence. She’s painfully deliberate and calculated in everything she says – but as LVP learned, there’s only so long you can go before you’re discovered. When the conversation turns to the $4 million necklace that many doubted she actually bought, cracks begin to appear in her story. She says she almost wore it to the reunion to prove the naysayers wrong, but then admits she didn’t actually buy it, saying she bought a smaller version instead. Huh? Best of all, Lisa chimes in to say she knows the jeweler (Emma), and according to her, Bronwyn never bought anything. We can only hope that something in life will one day make us as happy as Lisa dropped this bomb.
Bronwyn is clearly destabilized by this. First, she says it’s very strange for a jeweler to tell someone else what she “bought or didn’t buy,” suggesting that Emma may be telling the truth. But my favorite line came after Lisa pulled out the receipts, when Bronwyn simply said: “That’s really dastardly.” Put Emma in front of the camera immediately. Bronwyn eventually doubled down, saying she’ll have to post the jewelry she bought to dispel Emma’s claim, so stay tuned for that. Maybe you’ll even wear it WWHL. However, the seriousness with which the entire cast takes this accusation is not only funny, it says a lot about the essence of this show.
What makes this crew successful is that no matter how much they hate each other, they are united by their distrust of outsiders, and this is the perfect example of that. Everyone is immediately horrified by the idea of Emma’s woman going after someone in a way they’re only supposed to do to each other.
Since this entire encounter appears to be Bronwyn’s show, the conversation then turns to the revelation that Lisa has identified Bronwyn’s daughter’s estranged paternal grandparents. But to my surprise, Bronwyn was upset with Lisa about this, despite the fact that Bronwyn was the one who brought it up on camera and Lisa’s handling of the delicate situation seemed above board. But as it turns out, what upset Bronwyn was that Lisa mentioned on the later program that the grandparents had told her they thought Bronwyn had had a miscarriage and therefore were unaware of having a grandchild at all. Lisa and Bronwyn talked about it together when they filmed, but Lisa was unaware that Bronwyn had asked production not to include that detail in the show.
Understandably, this is an incredibly fragile conversation, but blaming Lisa seems ridiculous. If anything, she was left stuck in the middle of this terrible situation that she wanted no part of. When the couples are taken out at the end of the episode, and Todd gets to deliver his piece on the subject (as well as half-heartedly explain his generally bad behavior throughout the season), John Barlow rightly points out that Lisa didn’t bring this story up on camera at all — Bronwyn did. Andy’s attempt to put a pin on this appears to have failed, since the husbands pick up where their wives left off as the episode ends.
