How Late Stage Capitalism Changed the Real Housewives Shtick
When Erika Jayne Girardi joined Real Housewives of Beverly Hills in 2016, she was infamous for a few things: her pulsating sexuality, her 80-year-old lawyer husband Tom Girardi, and, of course, her bazillionaire status. While Erika was in good financial company – Bethenny Frankel of NYC was the queen of her Skinny Girl empire and fellow RHOBH cast member Lisa Vanderpump had swans floating around Villa Rosa, her estate – Erika’s money was different. It was straight out of Wolf of Wall Street, in all its provocative, sexy, dirty, new money glory. Armed with a six-person glam squad and “a couple of houses [she] doesn’t visit,” Erika had the kind of money Jesus Christ named as a sin in The Bible.
This was all part of the Erika Jayne charm. Her gaudy style paid homage to dominatrixes and she moonlighted as a gay icon popstar. “My kitty’s like a python, // tick-ticking like a time bomb,” she chanted to a sweaty crowd in Ibiza. No one thought Erika Jayne was a good person, but she was captivating TV.
When the 2020 lockdowns brought the world to a screeching halt, our guilty pleasures became slightly too guilty. Something about the Housewives bragging about Bentleys and Benzos while the rest of the country watched that sweet, sweet stimulus check run dry felt more morbid than mindless. As grocery store employees were labeled “essential workers” while earning pennies, attitudes nationwide about consumption took a turn. Of course, the ruling class wasn’t ready to cede the throne, so a few figureheads had to fall.
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The Real Housewives franchise is case in point. The pandemic seasons were overcast by allegations of racism and bad (read: deplorable) behavior from many cast members. Bravo desperately needed something to shoot them back into the cultural zeitgeist. Coincidently or not, Real House-husband Tom Girardi’s time had just run out. For 55 years, Girardi had been known as a lawyer for the people––taking on monstrous opponents from Lockheed Martin to Boeing and winning millions for his clients. His case against Pacific Gas and Electric even inspired the film Erin Brockovich. As a respected lawyer, most accepted Girardi’s flashy lifestyle as a perk of the job. Until it was revealed that many of his clients – including accident victims and orphans – never saw a dime of their settlement money.
This scandal, which unfolded on season 11 of the Beverly Hills offshoot unraveled the entire Housewives franchise. At its core, the Bravo universe explores the idea that all the American public wants to watch is boozy old ladies brag about their boozy old money. With conflict as frivolous as your psychic was a bitch to me, the undertone is that we’re all gawking at the sparkly chandelier in the background. Even in their darkest moments, we can’t help but imagine ‘what if I was screaming at my acquaintance in a 9.2 million dollar mansion’?
But as the upper class gets richer and the rest of us stay broke, it’s not enough to bask in their excess. So we make excuses. Erika’s arc in season 11 is a stripped-down journey of a woman come undone. She’s at the mercy of the Bravo Gods––so she pivots. We’ve known Erika Jayne as the boisterous woman who tells it like it is, but now she reveals herself as a young girl entrapped by a tyrannical older man. So what if her rental house is worth a whopping $2 million or that she still employs her multi person glam squad? The money tells a tale of womanhood, of independence, it’s clean now.
Of course, this isn’t solely the work of Erika Jayne, Bravo adapted to a wealth-conscious society by allowing the money to tell a story across all of its renditions.
“This hyper-individualised subversion of the American dream allows audiences to comfortably consume media that ultimately favors the ultra-wealthy. These women, you see, made their millions the right way.”
We see this clearly in the new cast of Real Housewives of New York (RHONY). In the past, housewives have been deviant, depraved, and sometimes literal prisoners, but season 14 takes a new approach. From Sai De Silva who climbed out of poverty and into the influencer scene, to Jenna Lyons who accepted her queer identity and “stopped dressing for men” in the boardroom, Bravo insists that these women are deserving of their millions. There’s even a plotline where several castmates claim that housewife Jessel Taank is too privileged to understand them.
This hyper-individualised subversion of the American dream allows audiences to comfortably consume media that ultimately favors the ultra-wealthy. These women, you see, made their millions the right way. They pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and into their Brooklyn brownstones and now rightfully enjoy a nicer life than 99% of the American populace. As we pretend to listen to the women argue about “vulnerability,” we’re free to ogle at Sai’s matching Versace sets or Erin’s perfectly toned pilates body guilt-free.
Bravo has executed a genius sleight of hand: It serves up docile and individualistic criticisms of wealth, allowing us to soothe our moral compasses while pulling back from conversations about structural power. Real Housewives doesn’t ask us to interrogate why these women – who spend all day planning Hamptons trips – have access to wealth that most of us won’t see in a lifetime. Instead, it goes for the identity route, allowing its castmates to explain away their grotesque fortunes with personal hardships and choice feminism.
We see the payoff in the numbers. The premiere of season 13 of RHOBH received the highest viewership of any Real Housewives show since the pandemic. The two-season Erika Jayne arc has largely attracted viewers back to the once-struggling show. While RHONY was on the decline, it’s clear Bravo hopes the new cast of self-made ladies (including former creative director of J. Crew, Jenna Lyons) will win the hearts of the viewers back in seasons to come.
We could dismiss Housewives as bottom-of-the-barrel TV, but the franchise works covertly as part of a movement to rehabilitate the image of upper-class society. As labor movements gain traction nationally, studios and networks are eager to capitalise on anti-capitalist sentiments while quelling possible resistance. We see it in Greta Gerwig’s (excellent) collaboration with Mattell that lauded feminism and even lightly torched consumerism but still sold us Barbies. We feel it every time a biting satire about the rich casts an A-list actor who rakes in millions for the role. It’s all part of a system that begs us not to ask too many questions.
Words: Emi Grant
