It was not a good season for Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of New York City.” But then again, the show hasn’t had a good season since before the pandemic — virtually an eternity ago by both real-life and “Housewives” standards. The series was once the franchise’s most consistently entertaining entry, unconcerned with manufacturing explosive drama to keep viewers hooked and instead relying on its cast’s outrageous personalities to do the heavy lifting.
It was difficult to watch the show stumble week after week, but far worse to watch what it became in its final episodes.
For years, core “RHONY” Housewives like Luann de Lesseps, Bethenny Frankel, Sonja Morgan, Ramona Singer and Carole Radziwill, along with a few string players rotating between seasons, kept the show running like a well-oiled machine. They were bawdy broads who could fight and make up like sisters, a group of women who were successful not just because of their desire to be on reality TV, but because of the innate hustle instilled in them by their home city. Finagle your way into New York’s elite and you’ll meet a dozen older women exactly like them: rich and powerful, but aware that the keys to the gilded gates could be snatched from their hands at any moment. Watching them was like dining with the ladies who lunch and being immediately let in on all the loosely kept secrets of New York society, traded like currency to keep climbing a ladder that never ends. But this wasn’t solely a show about status; it was also about what women must do to hold onto their status as they age. The series chronicled its cast as they settled into middle age and later life, contending with divorce, death and drooping. It was a character study unlike anything else Bravo has done to date, and it was brilliant.
Well, until it wasn’t. When Frankel departed the show shortly before Season 12 was scheduled to begin filming, “RHONY” lost its stabilizing force. Frankel was known as the show’s Greek chorus, a voice of reason who could cut through the bullsh*t to get to the heart of the matter. Without her, the rest of the cast floundered, lost without Frankel’s proprietary tell-it-like-it-is recipe that kept “New York” feeling fresh while other franchise cities struggled to maintain the same consistency. Things got darker and drunker, and when the show tried to diversify the historically all-white cast with the show’s first Black Housewife, Eboni K. Williams, in Season 13, the show spun out in ways those familiar with the core cast were likely not surprised by . . . but still.
After Season 13 concluded, Bravo announced that there would be no reunion — a first in the franchise’s history — and that they’d be rebooting “RHONY” with an all-new cast. It was a shocking decision that divided viewers, but at the end of the day, there was no reason not to be optimistic. The following two retooled seasons, however, repeatedly dashed those hopes, culminating in a finale so dark that it has left viewers, and longtime fans like myself, wondering if the show can survive.
Season 14 of “Real Housewives of New York” premiered in July 2023, boasting a sea of fresh faces. These new Housewives skewed younger and were markedly more diverse than the original iteration’s cast ever was. The crew included Jessel Taank, Brynn Whitfield, Sai De Silva, Ubah Hassan, Erin Lichy and perhaps the most notable new Housewife, former head of J.Crew, Jenna Lyons, with Racquel Chevremont joining the following season. This was the new “New York”; not just as far as the series was concerned, but in terms of the figures who wheel and deal within the city itself. These women reflected modern ideas of power in New York society, challenging the status quo that was upheld by the previous cast. All that remained to be seen was if that dynamic translated into genuine entertainment.
While Season 14 had its fair share of bright spots, it was encumbered by fan expectations and production growing pains. By the time Season 15 rolled around last fall, distance from the reboot had only made viewers more skeptical. As it turns out, the apprehension was well-founded: This season was the worst “RHONY” has ever been. Its drama was manufactured — often while the cameras were rolling — and its emotional beats lacked authenticity, feeling like they had been plopped into the show to give it some resonant thrust. It was difficult to watch the show stumble week after week, but far worse to watch what it became in its final episodes.
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Season 15 opened with a montage of the cast preparing to film the show’s opening credits and their individual taglines. The shoot happened just five days after the season wrapped in June 2024, following a cast trip to Puerto Rico that was, according to soundbites from the cast, shocking and irreparable. Given how paltry most of the drama was in the previous season, it seemed like whatever happened on the trip was being blown out of proportion to convince viewers to stay tuned throughout the season, a frequently used move in the “Housewives” playbook. But as someone who holds classic “RHONY” in their heart as their favorite and most frequently rewatched series in the franchise, I remained curious about what could possibly have caused this rift between the cast. I’ve seen the ladies of “New York” find out their fiancé is cheating on them in real time and grieve the sudden loss of a partner due to a tragic overdose. Surely, whatever happened in Season 15 would be a picnic in comparison.
But nothing could prepare viewers for how grim things became in the finale. A few hours before the final episode of Season 15 aired on Jan. 21, Chris Schretzenmayer, a manager of unscripted productions at Bravo’s parent company NBCUniversal, hyped the finale on X. “Tonight’s ‘RHONY’ is must-watch, jaw-dropping television,” Schretzenmayer said. “It will leave you speechless in ways you didn’t think reality TV could.” While that’s a correct statement, given how things played out, it fails to reflect the sheer severity of what happened in the episode, and just how quickly its events revealed what’s wrong with the current “Housewives” model.
Brynn Whitfield, Andy Cohen and Ubah Hassan in the Reunion episode of "The Real Housewives of New York City" (Clifton Prescod/Bravo)At the top of the episode, Whitfield and Hassan were still in the middle of a fight that began at dinner the night before. Whitfield poked Hassan about something trivial, and Hassan poked right back, ultimately suggesting that Whitfield “slept with someone to get [on the show].” Things spiraled from there, and the cast became progressively more inebriated and irate as the night went on. Eventually, Hassan went to another room, leaving Whitfield, Lyons, Taank, and Chevremont together to decompress. Whitfield began to cry, saying that Hassan’s digs were low because she’s in support groups for sexual assault. “I don’t suck d**k [to get a job], I’m in support groups trying to deal with s**t that happened to me,” Whitfield said. “And Ubah knows this. Before BravoCon, I called Ubah and I was like, ‘You know, I was f**cking raped.’ … Ubah knows this s**t.”
The revelation took the whole cast by surprise, not only because Whitfield confessed something so tragic, but because Hassan was seemingly weaponizing Whitfield’s sexual assault as fodder in a petty fight. The two women tried to hash it out shortly after, but Hassan refused to directly apologize, and Whitfield never mentioned the assault in their one-on-one conversation. The flames ultimately fizzled and the cast began to get ready to go to sleep. But after the cameras went down, Taank went to Hassan’s room to tell her that the group had learned of Whitfield’s assault, and asked Hassan why she’d accuse Whitfield of using sex to get a job when she knew about the attack.
“I didn’t get much further than that, because you could just see on Ubah’s face that she was completely blindsided,” Taank said in a confessional. De Silva added that soon after, she found Hassan “in a ball in the corner, shaking and sobbing.” A single production camera and cameras placed throughout the house caught Hassan breaking down in the aftermath, weeping and vomiting, swearing that she did not know about Whitfield’s attack. Then, as Lichy recounts in a confessional, Whitfield pulled them all aside to retell the story, saying that she had called Hassan in a low moment and recounted several different traumas affecting her at the time. “That’s when Brynn says, ‘Come to think of it, maybe [Ubah] didn’t clock [the mention of the assault],” Lichy recalled.
From that moment, it was a house divided. None of the cast doubted that Whitfield was assaulted, but none of them believed that Hassan knew of the assault when she made the lewd comments about Whitfield using sex to get on the show. The problem was that Whitfield initially asserted that Hassan had full knowledge of the attack, and that if she hadn’t retracted that statement, it could ruin Hassan’s character not just among the group of friends, but among millions of viewers as well.
I’m just as invested in the Bravoverse theatrics as anyone else, but the sound of fans banging their fists on the table to demand more scandals has drowned out their better judgment.
The events left a bitter taste in the mouths of Whitfield’s fellow cast members and audiences watching from home. Some attributed it to a larger plan of attack, accusing Whitfield of colorism toward Hassan earlier in the episode. Whitfield, who is biracial, claimed that Hassan’s comments about how she got the job on the show besmirched her merits, something that Black women often have to deal with in the workforce. But while on the cast trip, Whitfield poked fun at Hassan’s modeling career, noting that Hassan, a Somalian-American model, has done commercial work for brands like Dressbarn and Talbots. Wrap Whitfield’s hypocrisy into a package with her scattered claims that Hassan knew of her assault — as well as cameras catching Whitfield’s attempt to get friend-of Rebecca Minkoff to generate drama in an earlier episode — and things don’t look all that great for Whitfield’s place on the show, especially after @shedcasting created an Instagram post announcing that they were looking for newbies.
Brynn Whitfield, Andy Cohen and Ubah Hassan in the Reunion episode of "The Real Housewives of New York City" (Clifton Prescod/Bravo )But is Whitfield the sole source of the problems here? I’d argue that, while it would be justified, yanking her from the cast would not solve the show’s systemic issues. “Real Housewives” has become such a massively popular reality television institution that viewers now demand equally colossal drama to match. They revel in the arrests, the drunken messes, the physical assaults and the dissolving marriages. I spotted no fewer than 10 tees with Housewife mugshots printed on them at BravoCon. For God’s sake, “Real Housewives of Potomac” viewers were turning dashcam footage of Karen Huger’s DUI arrest into meme fodder over the Christmas holiday. Does the fact that she could’ve killed herself or someone else not make fans think twice about turning drunk driving into a joke? Maybe we’re too far past that point to look back.
Believe me, I’m just as invested in the Bravoverse theatrics as anyone else, but the sound of fans banging their fists on the table to demand more scandals has drowned out their better judgment. Occasionally, some good can come out of this; the just-finished fifth season of “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” included a moving intervention between mother and son that could legitimately save lives. But the “Housewives” franchise has become so steeped in these significant moments that viewers’ pleasure centers are rotting. The original version of “RHONY” was so wonderful because a lot of the drama was pure fluff with the occasional oh-my-god moment; the cast once spent an entire season in comical arguments about getting someone’s hair wet before a prosthetic leg flew across a restaurant in the finale. That’s shocking!
When fans want “Housewives” to be outrageous all the time, can we really be surprised that trickles up to the cast themselves? Whitfield’s maneuvering this season was heinous, no doubt. But in those Dressbarn digs and leveraging her assault against a friend who was there at her lowest moment, I can clearly see a reality TV star who is trying to give viewers what they want. Of course, Whitfield would want to play her part in catering to fans’ absurd standards of entertainment. The first season of the “RHONY” reboot was touch-and-go, so successfully dialing up the spectacle of it all could mean that Whitfield gets to keep her job. It’s just that, in this instance, that scheme backfired. Being a Housewife is a life-changing opportunity, but it’s also a life-ruining one. We’ve seen so many Housewives crash out in their quest to become iconic, and Whitfield is just the latest casualty of her own ego. There will no doubt be more women who try to play the game and have it blow up in their faces, and the only way to put a stop to it is to allow “Housewives” to pivot away from insanity and back to mere absurdity. The world is wicked enough as it is, we could stand to settle for drunk and dramatic over downright evil.
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