a defense of real housewives
to watch real housewives attentively is to practice a small but fairly rigorous branch of the humanities. this is not television so much as social opera. the arias are delivered at dinner. the leitmotifs are handbags, grudges, and seating arrangements. the orchestra is off camera and never stops playing.
think of it as a genre exercise. where austen had drawing rooms and chekhov had country estates, real housewives gives us vacation villas and open concept kitchens. the stakes remain the same. who belongs. who has fallen. who has been quietly usurped. status is not announced so much as staged, negotiated, and occasionally seized in something very like a coup.
the franchise is best understood as durational performance art. women return season after season to inhabit roles that are both self authored and externally imposed. friendships decay in real time. reputations are edited, defended, revised, and sometimes dramatically assassinated. if performance art permits endurance, spectacle, and collapse, then a meltdown in a sprinter van qualifies as a full body work.
the reunion episodes function as a public reckoning. grievances are tabled. memory is contested. the audience serves as chorus, already fluent in the subtext.
to call this low culture is to miss the point. real housewives is a living archive of desire, etiquette, and feminine ambition. it simply has better lighting and worse behavior than we are used to recognizing as art.
and for the sake of the historical record: meredith marks remains the queen.
