SUNDAY, AUGUST 1, 2010
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STEPHEN BOITANO/BRAVO
KEVIN WOLF/BRAVO
LOOK AWAY! LOOK AWAY!You’ve heard it coming for a long time. On Thursday, you can witness the “Real Housewives of D.C.” train wreck for yourself. At left, Michaele and Tareq Salahi. At top, Mary Schmidt Amons, Catherine Ommanney and Lynda Erkiletian. Above, Amons and Stacie Scott Turner with Erika Martin Hughes.
STEPHEN BOITANO/BRAVO D.C. ‘Housewives’: Overcapitalized franchise tv previewfrom E1
Bravo’s five permutations of “The Real Housewives” true-life soap opera. “The Real Housewives of D.C.” will premiere Thursday night at 9, which you would know if you weren’t hiding under a rock. And, oh, look at how many of you are trying to hide under that rock. We lift the rock and you hiss, Please, no more “Real House- wives”!! Your cries are heard and tactfully ignored, and I sympa- thize that “D.C.” can, in this case, stand for “don’t care.” So, higher minds, I beg you not to watch. I invite you to come over so we can drink forlornly and not watch it together — or at least so we can trick ourselves into watching it “intellectually,” trying once again to answer the question: Who the [bleep] are these people? What woman in her right mind would submit to this charade? Bravo, a network that has re- cently deteriorated from making harmless fun to making trans- gressive trash, has answers: These people would and did submit to it, because they are starved for at- tention, saturated in narcissism. Aren’t they just horrible? the net- work seems to ask, with the zeal of the guy who runs the back- alley dogfight. Later, on his post- mortem cocktail talk show, “Watch What Happens Live,” the network’s vice president, Andy Cohen, will try to make it all bet- ter.
Or make it all worse? The net- work seems content only when its Housewives are at one another’s throats, which makes more peo- ple watch. Not long into the first hour of “Real Housewives of D.C.,” some initial battle lines are drawn. A fashionable androgyne, Paul Wharton, acts quickly to gin up some ill will between two of the women, betraying confidenc- es with the sassy snap of a finger. Underneath it all is this strange vibe: We cannot have a TV show that women will watch unless it involves women devaluing other women. That seems to be the gold mine now. I used to think Bravo had purer intent — a mission to develop mo- rality plays that covertly teach people (women and men, young and old) how not to behave. Could “Real Housewives” be less a soap opera and more a Miss Manners column come to life? Perhaps once, but not now. Now I think of the Housewives — all seasons — as hideous parts of the same monster.
In a just world, the first episode
of “The Real Housewives of D.C.” — the most awkwardly contrived of the franchise so far — would signal the inevitable sinking of the ship. The women in it are all trying too hard, and not just the margarine blonde who became infamous for trying the hardest. (More on her in a minute.) “The Real Housewives of D.C.”
features four others, who will never get as much attention: There is Mary Schmidt Amons, 43, of McLean, who prevents her drop-out/drop-in daughter from raiding her walk-in closet by se- curing it with a Langley-grade
biometric lock. There is Stacie Scott Turner, a 42-year-old real estate mogul attempting to em- body what she senses are the bourgie ideals of Obama-era elit- ism, instantly offended by one housewife’s inebriated declara- tion that it’s time for white and black women to go to the same hair salons, and offended by an- other’s tipsy impression of Tyra Banks. There is 52-year-old Lynda Er-
kiletian (and her boyfriend, Eb- ong), who reminds us one time too many that she runs the most important modeling agency in Washington, which is like metell- ing you I make the best lobster roll in Tulsa. There is Catherine “Cat” Ommanney, 40-ish, a recent arrival from Lun-dunn, blithely acquainting herself with Yank customs — gee, did she pick the wrong way to go about that. (Un- less the joke’s on us, and she’s from Oxford, extensively re- searching our cultural waste; or she’s an MI6 agent sent to reclaim the colonies.)
And then there’s the problem
of 44-year-old Michaele Salahi. After the evasive talk-show ap- pearances, after pleading the Fifth during Hill testimony, now, at last, after so much foreplay, here she is on the long-awaited “Real Housewives.” Viewers may be struck by the voice more than anything else. You expect Michaele to sound “blonde” and singsongy, and in- stead you get the voice of 10,000 nights in a smoky bar — some- thing sultry and Bukowski, but something barky, too; a malnour- ished lap dog shut off in the laun- dry room, yapping itself hoarse. “There is a whole lot of substance here,” Michaele says about her- self, with a manic glint in her eyes. I watch her and think of an old fembot factory, and the ones that went haywire in beta. This one disguised her defects,
on
washingtonpost.com
VIDEO ON THE WEBWatch a clip from Bravo’s “Real Housewives of D.C.” at
washingtonpost.com/style.
embedded herself in Virginia horse country, married rich (or rich-ish) and got on “Real House- wives.” It’s been seven months since Michaele and her husband, Tareq, brazenly crashed a White House state dinner and thus en- sured their inclusion on this TV show. (Bizarrely and metaphori- cally, that act signaled for me the close of 9/11-era seriousness; it was the final sacrilege, the end of Washington, of grown-ups, of manners, of the capital ideal.)
The actual episodes of “The
Real Housewives of D.C.” are ren- dered irrelevant, as if they arrived too late. The show is an after- thought nobody needs to actually watch; the White House debacle is clearly reserved for the season’s climax, weeks from now. The pro- ducers, who claim innocence, could not have made a luckier choice than Michaele. From the first episode, the show builds its case, providing her all the rope she needs. We get just a hint of the Salahis’ debts and business squabbles — which have been ex- haustively reported by The Wash- ington Post. Local viewers will al- ready know of the iffy finances of the championship polo match the Salahis stage each summer. “A goat rodeo,” sniffs Lynda. It’s the best line in the first episode, which is mostly just sad. Why is it sad? It’s sad because of everything
that got us to this point. It’s sad because of how little we ever see of “real” women on television; it’s easy to look around at our culture and feel that the scales have tipped, and more people are pre- tending to star in their own real- ity shows, supplying their own cameras. You can find a goat ro- deo anywhere there’s a little afflu- ence. It’s also sad because Real
Underneath it all is this strange vibe: We cannot have a TV show that women will watch unless it involves women devaluing other women. That seems to be the gold mine now.
Housewives don’t just harmlessly remain on the back end of cable. Like animals in a zoo cage, they fling their latest products at us: their dumb Housewife memoirs and self-help books; their cheap Housewife “fashion” lines fresh off the Chinese freighter; their Auto-Tuned Housewife pop songs, which only denigrate the form. The amount of energy spent talking about “Real House- wives” in no way lines up with Bravo’s relatively meager ratings. Finally, it’s sad because these
Housewives are women, not teen- age girls — though their actions often obscure that fact. Blind- folded by their own opportunism, they willingly jump into this vol- cano, and some of us are watch- ing too giddily at the human sac- rifice. We’ve watched the Orange County women devolve and bick- er about emotional boo-boos. (Then adulthood intrudes: One got evicted from her condo in a Great Recession mise-en-scene.) We watched the New York women sneer at one another so much that they lost track of whom to hate. We watched the Atlanta women lower themselves to ugly stereo-
Coming up at Wolf Trap
types the culture has shoved on them. We watched the New Jer- sey women overturn tables and brawl. The weak among us clicked on fabulously layered epi- sode recaps on innumerable blogs; clicked on gossip items promising details of Housewife divorces, bankruptcies, foreclo- sures.
I want to believe that there can be more to these women — that what we see is simply based on re- ality, and when there are not cam- eras around, their lives are not only more bland but more coher- ent and meaningful. It’s a mush of unsatisfied emotions: feeling sor- ry for them and yet falling into the trap of judging them and de- lighting in their miseries. But the thrill has waned. The
overall effect is one of mutual contempt — the Housewives hate one another, and the women who watch decide which woman they
hate the most and which woman they hate the least. Men who like to watch women fight tune in, too, and the circle is thus com- plete: “The Real Housewives” im- parts a sinking feeling that it’s made by and for people who can’t stand women.
stueverh@washpost.com
The Real Housewives of D.C.
(one hour) premieres at 9 p.m. Thursday on Bravo.
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The best Bond songs from Liveand Let Die, Casino Royale, and more! THURS., AUGUST 5; 8:15 PM
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THE IRISH
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