From left: Brooks, Chloe, Seth, and Meredith Marks on day one of BravoCon 2025.
Photo: Griffin Nagel/Bravo via Getty Images
Of course they got Meredith Marks to open BravoCon with a DJ set. At 9:30 a.m, under the bleaching Las Vegas sun, fans gather at a stage set up on the plaza outside the convention center, their phones aloft to take pictures of the catchphrase factory of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City playing remixes of gay bar hits — Lindsay Lohan’s “Rumors,” Tinashe’s “Nasty Girl,” Dua Lipa’s “Houdini” — spliced with those catchphrases — “Rumors and nastiness about the husband,” “I’m disengaging,” “You! Can! Leave!”
Fans are eating it up as she fiddles with knobs, holds headphones to her impeccably blown-out hair (body count: low), and throws roses and rubber duckies into the crowd. She’s wearing a sparkly maroon sleeveless dress reminiscent of her season-five reunion gown, only this time shorter than a one-season Housewife’s tenure. “I don’t care if she’s doing nothing,” one visitor who paid between $620 and $1,460 to attend the weekend says. “It’s a great selection of tracks.”
Meredith wasn’t selected as BravoCon’s opening ceremonies mascot for her turntable skills. RHOSLC, the tenth of its kind, had runaway success when it debuted in 2020, introducing the world to Lisa Barlow’s Mormonism and a not yet incarcerated Jen Shah. While Heather Gay arrived with a $20 million medspa chain, Meredith arrived with Brooks, her then-21-year-old son who inherited his mother’s ability to unleash droll one-liners and apply skin care. Brooks didn’t so much overshadow his mother as he bolstered her appeal. The series is now nearing the end of a mind-meltingly good sixth season, and it’s never been more clear: Meredith Marks is a family business.
Shortly into Marks’s DJ set in Vegas, her husband Seth, 53, emerges to enormous applause. On RHOSLC, Seth is a self-described “rodeo clown” — “When the real cowboys and cowgirls are battling and they get bucked off the bronco, if I’m in town and the cameras are on, I feel like it’s my job to diffuse it,” he explains. Onstage, he’s a corporate suit with ample enthusiasm for his wife’s art. “This is the best day of PTO ever!” he shouts into the mic, just as the lyrics of a remix settle into repetition of the word slut. He holds the mic up to an audience member and asks her to sing along. “How do you know all the words?” he jokes.
After Seth exits, the stage is clear for the other members of the Marks clan, Brooks, 26, and Chloe, 24. They come out together and subtly sway to their mother’s beats, whispering and laughing conspiratorially. They’re both on Next Gen NYC, which follows the children of Housewives (Kim Zolciak-Biermann, Kandi Burruss, Teresa Giudice, Meredith) as they attempt to survive in the Big Apple with nothing but family money, connections, and nascent track-suit empires to fall back on. When the trailer dropped, Bravo fans derided the exercise in nepo babies. But, like Meredith’s DJ set, Next Gen NYC turned out the fanbase. Its 2025 series premiere was the most-watched Bravo debut of all time.
If Next Gen NYC was built on a premise that reality-television stardom is congenital, the Markses are indeed genetically blessed. They have stiff competition: The Giudice-Gorga family, whose internal feuds are so intense that The Real Housewives of New Jersey has been sidelined for years as Bravo tries to figure out new casting. The Hilton-Richards-Umansky clan has plenty of reality bona fides in previous generations, but Buying Beverly Hills failed to launch Kyle and Mauricio’s daughters and was cut loose after two seasons. The Zolciak-Biermanns’s Don’t Be Tardy lasted for eight seasons, but Kim and Kroy canceled their marriage after 12 years, and now their acrimonious divorce is playing out on TMZ. None can quite match the Markses’ stats: two current shows, four beloved members, one seemingly thriving marriage, and scads of entrepreneurial adventures to keep them on Las Vegas stages and inside West Village apartments.
“Sometimes I have a fantasy of running away to Croatia and living my own life,” Brooks, in an outfit that screams quiet luxury and a full face of barely there makeup, admits. “But no, at the end of the day, I think I would last for 24 hours when I’d come crawling right back. God has truly blessed us with such an incredible family, and I literally could not imagine my life without my parents being so close.”
“My therapist said, ‘Do not sign that fucking waiver or go on that show,’” says Seth.
Photo: Griffin Nagel/Bravo via Getty Images
Offstage at BravoCon, it’s hard to get the Markses in the same place at the same time. Between Meredith’s appearance at the RHOSLC panel (the best attended of the weekend), Brooks’s and Chloe’s red-carpet obligations, and Seth’s desire to take pictures at Meredith’s Bravo Bazaar booth, we find a moment for discussion. But before we settle into a spare couch at the Caesars Forum, a fan spots the quartet and asks for a photo. Lisa Barlow once derisively called them the family that poses, and here they do, Meredith in her short, high-collared black dress, Brooks in his lux knit and espresso trousers, Seth in jeans and a black button-down (done enough you can see he’s wearing one of Bravo’s signature “Mazel” T-shirts underneath), and Chloe in full Gen-Z uniform: barrel-legged jeans and a black tank.
To this day, the Markses squabble about their RHOSLC origins. Meredith was an obvious choice from a casting perspective: smart, attractive, connected in business, located in the Salt Lake City vicinity (she lives in Park City) and, crucially, willing to use her law-school education to argue anyone under the table. “I don’t know if it was a single sit-down altogether, but there were a lot of conversations about the show,” Meredith starts.
“Mom, it was absolutely a single sit-down conversation,” Brooks interjects. “You threw a contract down on the table for all of us, and you said, ‘We’re doing it.’”
“I don’t think that’s what she said,” Chloe says, shooting eyes back at Brooks. Here, they play out their archetypal roles: Brooks is the magician, brimming with opinions and strategy. Chloe is the caregiver, the one who does the hard work to reach their goals and keeps all the warring factions in line.
“I don’t think that’s exactly how it transpired,” Seth shouts, sounding a bit like Frank the Tank, the Will Ferrell character from Old School. “I think there were multiple conversations.”
“Dad, you don’t have to yell to be heard,” Brooks chides in his trademark monotone. (“Sometimes he needs to shut his mouth and open his ears,” Brooks adds later. “Sometimes he gets a little preachy,” Chloe agrees.)
“My therapist said, ‘Do not sign that fucking waiver or go on that show,’” Seth continues.
“We don’t need the F-words,” Meredith jumps in.
“But that was a fact,” Seth says, finally able to finish his train of thought, this time F-bomb free. “We were trying to repair our relationship and my therapist said, ‘If you want to make your marriage work, do not go on that show.’”
This is part of the Marks family lore. Meredith and Seth — who were introduced by a friend when Meredith was studying business and law at Northwestern — were on the verge of divorce when RHOSLC started shooting in late 2019. Seth was traveling a lot for work, but Brooks was at home, spending a semester off between his two years at New York University and his intended two years at University of Southern California. (He never quite made it and returned to NYU instead.)
“In my mind, I was being there to support my mom through her separation and having an opportunity to work on my brand full time in the interim of my semester off from college,” Brooks says. Some fans incorrectly assumed he quit school to be on the show, initially giving him something of a too-try-hard reputation. (He famously launched his Brooks Marks track suit that first season.) But after being on the receiving end of Jen Shah’s online wrath, audiences grew sympathetic and came around to his deadpan charms.
“I don’t know how I would have survived without Brooks,” Meredith said about that season. “I needed support and help. I didn’t have any clue what I was getting involved in. I hadn’t even watched Housewives or seen a full season of it.”
Fans came around to Meredith, too. At first the joke was that she and her onscreen bestie, Lisa Barlow, were interchangeable with their long, straight brunette hair and soupçon of vocal fry. Sentiments started to shift after she exited a fight with Shah with the words, “I’m disengaging,” a line that became a catchphrase and also defined her strategy on the show. It’s a gameplay choice that hadn’t been seen on Bravo — getting involved in intra-cast tussles is often a Housewife’s most pressing duty. The reason she could skirt this responsibility was because she was so good at showcasing her familial interactions. She talked openly about how she and Seth had been separated, how she’d seen other people during that time. Bravoholics know this tale well: A first-season Housewife in a bad marriage enters her second season with a divorce story line. But then Meredith and Seth did the most shocking thing of all — they actually made up.
“We’re the only couple on earth who can say that Real Housewives coupled with COVID saved our marriage,” Meredith says.
Brooks with his co-stars Gia Giudice and Georgia McCann at the Next Gen NYC panel on BravoCon day three.
Photo: Trae Patton/Bravo via Getty Images
The only thing more delicious than a successful spinoff is a Bravo universe crossover, and the Markses got one of those this year, too. On RHOSLC season six, the Housewives go on an instantly iconic yacht trip with the cast of Below Deck Down Under (shockingly, the first time Bravo attempted such a collaboration). Meredith’s bête noire, Britani Bateman, brings up a TikTok accusing Seth of cheating. Meredith responds with a drawling, quote-riddled rant, calling Bateman “a liar and a despicable, malicious person,” each word landing with more vowels than it deserves. The proceeding episodes are consumed with the fallout of that trip. Meredith allegedly went on an hourslong tirade against Britani on the plane ride home. No footage exists (though some fans think it will be trotted out at the upcoming reunion), so it’s unclear what was actually said. But several members of the cast say Meredith harangued Britani while pushing the back of her seat repeatedly. Meredith and Barlow say that’s hyperbole; Meredith says she wouldn’t have had time to watch Crazy Rich Asians on the plane if she spent all that time yelling at Britani. “I get upset because no one likes to be lied about,” Meredith says. “But you look at the source and these women have been caught in lies over the years, and I’m not going to worry about it. It’s that simple. If you are going to believe people that get caught in lies, if you’re dumb enough to believe it, I don’t care what you think of me. I don’t care what stupid people think of me.”
What Meredith cares about is business, including a line of jewelry sold in a brick-and-mortar in Park City, Utah, which is getting transformed into a speakeasy and caviar bar, because she launched a brand of caviar, too. And a line of bath bombs inspired by her well-known love of soaking. And a new board game called Rumors and Nastiness. And those DJ gigs. She says she was dabbling on the ones and twos when her manager got her a gig at Pittsburgh Pride, then rolled her onstage in a bathtub. That translated to a much bigger gig at West Hollywood Pride this past summer followed by a tour around the country of sold out sets mostly at, you guessed it, gay bars — much to Brooks’s chagrin.
“I’m not trying to see my mom every time I go out,” he says.
Both Brooks and Chloe say that reality television hasn’t changed their mother, but their mother thinks reality television has been foundational for her children. “I think the show changes everyone,” she says. “I don’t think you can go on it and be in the public eye and under the microscope that we’re all under and the criticism and the praise and not have it change you.”
“I think the show changes everyone,” says Meredith. “I don’t think you can go on it and not have it change you.”
Photo: Charles Sykes/Bravo via Getty Images
Brooks admits he’s more confident and trusting his gut more in Next Gen season two. He’s pulling away from mom, too. The first-season finale featured a teary scene where Brooks told Meredith that he needed to distance himself from her businesses to focus a bit more on his fashion line, which launched its first resort collection this December. Brooks’s ascendency has pulled Chloe’s orbit closer to the family. “Chloe is doing a lot right now,” Meredith says, listing her duties: brand extensions, distributor relations, generally advancing the Marks family plans for global domination. “Losing her right now would be very hard for me.” Perhaps in gratitude, Meredith recently spun her daughter’s debut single.
And there’s Seth, who remains happy to be on both his wife’s and his children’s shows. At the RHOSLC panel, Seth is in a playful mood. He hypes up the crowd to sing “Happy Birthday” to John Barlow, Lisa’s husband, then prompts the fans to do it again when he realizes he didn’t adequately capture the moment for social media. At a Bravopalooza event involving 20 Bravolebs and the Bravocon VIPs who paid to be in their presence, Seth gets a fan to approach Meredith and deliver her signature line, “You’re a liar and a vicious, despicable person.”
This kind of eagerness can be a kiss of death for some husbands, but Seth seems undaunted by the idea. “I enjoy being a part of it, because we use it for a lot of positive,” he says. “Our son is becoming who he was born to be. That played out in front of the world on reality TV and it was one of the happiest moments of my life.” Seth appears slightly choked up, discussing Brooks’s coming out journey and how he’s handled the spotlight with the same cool detachment as his mother.
“My dad always jokes that I’m my mother’s son,” Brooks tells me, with a sly smile. “And she hates that.”