The Real Housewives’s Bumpiest Year Yet
For Bravo fans, the year officially began on the second day of January on a windswept beach in Bermuda. It was there that Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Heather Gay revealed that the show’s newest cast member, Monica Garcia, was behind an anonymous Instagram account that had been trolling the cast for years. Later, Gay and her fellow ’wives confronted Garcia over — what else? — a Bermuda Triangle–shaped dinner table, where Gay yelled a phrase so iconic that it has since been used in White House comms: “Receipts! Timeline! Screenshots! Proof!” It was Shakespearean.
“We began the year with one of the best season finales of all time,” says Ben Mandelker, host of the podcast Watch What Crappens. “Even outside of the Real Housewives, it was probably one of the best episodes in the history of unscripted TV.” The moment set the bar for yet another wild, irresistibly watchable year in the Bravo-verse, one that followed 2023, where the shows were so unmissable that ex-Housewife Bethenny Frankel’s so-called “reality reckoning” couldn’t possibly compete. At this point, Andy Cohen’s kingdom seemed invincible, but this year, well, there have been some hiccups in the Housewives franchise, with some shows derailed by unresolvable conflicts and questionable casting decisions. At times, the last 12 months — and 134 episodes of Real Housewives — have tested viewers’ patience, with some even questioning its long-term future. And yet! The franchise ended the year by delivering some of its best-ever episodes. Moments like Meredith Marks’s chaotic bat mitzvah on the latest season of RHOSLC are a reminder of what we love about these shows — and that we shouldn’t count these ladies (or Bravo) out just yet.
After the dust settled on RHOSLC in January, the focus turned to The Real Housewives of Potomac’s eighth season. Among fans, this cast had been renowned for their ability to be (un)reasonably shady while still maintaining their friendships — necessary for a show that is, at least in theory, about a group of girlfriends. But this time, something was off: The cast was divided, and some ’wives were now icing each other out, refusing to interact on-camera. At the reunion, even Cohen admitted that the season was difficult to watch, and when they couldn’t reconcile, three of the cast — feuding duo Robyn Dixon and Candiace Dillard Bassett, plus newbie Nneka Ihim — were fired.
On Real Housewives of New Jersey’s 14th season, the divisions were even more intense. Sisters-in-law Teresa Giudice and Melissa Gorga, plus their crimson-faced husbands, were still at war. Amid lawsuits and physical altercations, the cast became split on each side of this intractable conflict. And now, the show is headed for a major cast shake-up of its own.
The main problem here is that, while the fans know these women are work colleagues, for us to watch, it still needs to be feasible that they would hang out. When co-stars are going to extreme lengths to dig up life-ruining dirt on each other or are only communicating through lawyers, it changes the premise of the show from conflict-driven to conflict-dominated. And the latter is simply too exhausting to watch, because Real Housewifery is about making us laugh just as much as arguing. Against this backdrop, fans could feel the absence of Real Housewives of Miami and Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip — two shows that have tended to be a little lighter and which both took a longer than usual break between seasons this year.
It wasn’t all bad, though. The Real Housewives of Orange County — the show that started it all back in 2006 — had its best season in years. Season 18 revolved around Shannon Storms Beador, who crashed her car and was subsequently arrested for a DUI in September 2023. For most of the season, Beador and her ex-boyfriend, John Janssen, were in a legal dispute over $75,000 he claimed to have loaned her while they were together. Then, Alexis Bellino — a former RHOC Housewife who is now engaged to “Johnny J” — rejoined the cast and began alluding to compromising videos of Beador, which allegedly showed her behaving like a “monster” while intoxicated. It was disturbing and, yes, captivating.
Elsewhere, RHOSLC followed up season four with one of the best-ever seasons of Housewives, featuring refreshingly low-stakes controversies about supposedly “high body-count hair,” diva meltdowns about flying coach for 47 minutes, and an impactful story line about addiction. And Real Housewives of Beverly Hills has already shown signs of delivering a strong season, with a newly separated Dorit Kemsley scorching the earth, cigarette in hand, stubbing out friendships like the rent is due. (And, reportedly, it actually is.)
Kate Casey, host of the Reality Life With Kate Casey podcast, tells me that 2024 has been a “transitional” year. “There was a period of time where Housewives had become like a true-crime series,” she explains, citing the fraud conviction of RHOSLC’s Jen Shah and the embezzlement scandal involving disgraced attorney Tom Girardi, estranged husband of RHOBH star Erika Jayne. It didn’t help that, over time, Housewives also morphed into “Survivor at a dinner table,” Casey says — like in RHONJ’s August finale, where Dolores Catania cut a biblical figure as the last woman standing at Rails Steakhouse, surrounded by broken glass. Scenes like this have always featured in the franchise, but they’ve never been its main draw. “What makes Housewives special is that it showcases complicated relationships between complicated women,” Casey says. “The franchise is trying to find its way back to that, but it hasn’t necessarily been smooth for every show.”
In the meantime, on Bravo and its sister streamer Peacock, many of the year’s most talked-about reality TV moments aired outside of the Housewives franchise. The Traitors briefly became the most-watched unscripted show in America, and The Valley — a Vanderpump Rules spinoff featuring chaos-prone villains Jax Taylor and Kristen Doute — was a surprise ratings hit. Meanwhile, the sixth season of Love Island, now presented by Bravo star Ariana Madix, doubled its viewership with its highest-rated season ever. What might trouble Bravo slightly more is shows on other networks — like Hulu’s Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which follows a group of Mormon momfluencers in Utah — drawing huge numbers and provoking cultural debate in a way that Housewives generally hasn’t this year.
How much of this is down to the ’wives themselves? Brian Moylan, Vulture recapper and author of The Housewives: The Real Story Behind the Real Housewives, tells me that “reality TV is a casting director’s medium, and finding the right chemistry can take time.” In 2024, Housewives had some excellent newbies, like RHOSLC’s Bronwyn Newport and Britani Bateman. In her second season, RHOC’s Jen Pedranti became a fan favorite by sharing her financial and parenting struggles, which channeled an old-school throwback like Lynne Curtin, who famously got served an eviction notice in the show’s fifth season. But these women are the exception that proves a rule: It is becoming more difficult to find women who are willing to authentically share their lives.
Casey calls this “information bias,” where newer Housewives are hyperaware that the show is a branding platform. Often, they “play into a character” rather than be themselves. (These are just some reasons why Real Housewives of Dubai, Bravo’s newest and first international Housewives show, was recently put on hiatus.) And for every successful newbie, there is someone like RHOBH’s Annemarie Wiley — an anesthetist (not anesthesiologist!) who seemed to think arriving on the show with premade drama would translate into longevity. (She was fired in March after spending most of her short time on the show beefing with Sutton Stracke’s narrow esophagus.) When you consider that the number of “OG” Housewives is dwindling — and that they often become more guarded over time because they have more boundaries or more to lose — then there are the makings of a demographic crisis here.
This is on full display in Bravo’s mostly millennial reboot of Real Housewives of New York City. For its 14th season, Bravo made the bold move to entirely recast the show, with a lineup including influencer Sai De Silva, fashion mogul Jenna Lyons, model Ubah Hassan, and British publicist Jessel Taank. But after a promising first season, fans have struggled to connect with the reboot, and ratings have been poor. “It feels like the cast aren’t as willing to be authentic on-camera,” says Danny Pellegrino, host of the podcast Everything Iconic. “As a viewer, you can sense when people don’t want to let you into certain parts of their lives — and there is some awkwardness that comes with that.”
In RHONY’s current season, the cast have resorted to various “pranks,” such as inventing a story that Rebecca Minkoff, a scientologist fashion designer and “friend-of” this season, had cheated on her husband and gotten pregnant. The prank enraged fans because, as Pellegrino puts it, “They wouldn’t be spending two episodes on a prank if they had a real, juicy story line.” The moment was also teased in the preseason trailer as a genuine bombshell, which made it feel like we, the viewers, were being punk’d.
Another story line, involving realtor Erin Lichy, demonstrates the faux sharing that defines the new RHONY. On the show, Lichy revealed that she had an abortion when she was 18 in a heartfelt conversation with Lyons, who herself shared that she had been in a similar situation. Lichy said she wanted to talk about her abortion because of “where the country is at right now,” but what she has never addressed on the show is her part in that — mainly her past donations to Donald Trump, the president behind the gutting of Roe v. Wade. Instead, we saw her posing for a photo shoot and interview with Glamour magazine, which obscured the context that could have made the story — and the show — much more interesting. In the end, it felt more like a carefully controlled (re)branding opportunity than a moment of genuine sharing.
A widespread dislike of RHONY has given the usually divided Bravo fandom a common enemy this year. Mandelker thinks the show is a learning lesson: for fans, to be “careful what they wish for” when it comes to firing longtime talent, and for Bravo, to be more cautious because “no one wants to end up like RHONY.” Still, Pellegrino is more hopeful: “Maybe they’ll talk about it next season? Maybe we’ll get a ‘fourth-wall’ break? Maybe the backlash will finally force the cast to form deeper bonds?”
For its part, Bravo seems to have taken the note. RHONJ is on a long pause before any casting decisions are to be made. And after RHOP’s disappointing eighth season, they resumed filming quickly with comparatively modest cast changes. The current season, which premiered just six months later, has been a return to the show’s sweet spot of lighthearted shade and love-hate relationships. Moylan thinks these fluctuations are a reminder of how quickly things can change. “We’ve been talking for years about how to fix RHOC, but suddenly it’s better than ever,” he says. “So this year, we’re seeing that patience pays off.”
Looking ahead to 2025, Casey thinks that Housewives will always exist if it “authentically tells the real stories of women who are, frankly, overlooked in other areas of media.” And Bravo’s fickle fans are getting slightly better at accepting that telling these stories comes with inevitable highs and lows. Pellegrino predicts the franchise is moving into a new, realer space — one similar to soap operas and sports, where the audience understands that waiting can actually make the payoff even sweeter. “That’s why, whenever I’m critical of Bravo, I still never count them out,” he says. “It’s a roller coaster.”
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