Even this very early glimpse makes it obvious that Vicki is the star.
Photo: Bravo
This column originally appeared in Brian Moylan’s newsletter, The Housewives Institute Bulletin. Sign up here to be the first to read the next edition.
What do you get the Real Housewives for their 20th anniversary? Yes, Real Housewives of Orange County debuted on March 21, 2006, exactly 20 years ago today (if you are reading this on March 21; otherwise, it still debuted on the same day, it’s just not, you know, today). It was not a hit at first, with only 430,000 viewers tuning into the first episode. (The Project Runway season-three finale, which aired a couple weeks prior, had 5.4 million viewers.) And reviews weren’t kind either: “Like so much reality TV, it’s both educational and grimly fascinating, and leaves you feeling much better about your own life — if for no other reason than that you would never be so stupid as to appear on a show like this,” Charles McGrath wrote in the New York Times.
All of that would change. Thanks to a strategy of running round-the-clock marathons of the first season, it became a hit with many franchises to follow. Hundreds of women would not only be so stupid as to appear on a show like that, they would use it as a springboard to fame, fortune, and more memes than the internet knows what to do with. So to celebrate 20 years of Housewives, I went back to review that first episode based on everything we know now.
Have you ever been visiting your parents’ house and stumbled upon the VHS tape of your high-school production of Pippin and found the world’s last remaining VCR to play that tape? If you have, and I do not suggest doing this, you’ll be familiar with the feeling of rewatching the premiere episode of Real Housewives of Orange County. The opening shot of the women holding their oranges looks less like a time capsule than a really cheap parody version of Real Housewives, with one-season wonder Kimberly Bryant standing in the middle looking all MILF-y in her animal-print tank top.
While many fans today think Andy Cohen is the man behind the Housewives, the real genius behind this premiere, and by extension the entire franchise, is Scott Dunlop, an OC advertising executive. (You can read all about it in my book!) The original idea was to film the residents of his gated community, Coto de Caza, and have it be something like Curb Your Enthusiasm, with real people following scripted outlines like Larry David & Co. Bravo, of course, had different ideas, but Dunlop’s fingerprints are still all over this initial episode.
The question about these shows, particularly in the early days of the reality TV revolution, is always how real they are. Nowadays, I would say that the Housewives or anyone else on Bravo are being the realest they can be. Yes, they’re telling Kyle to go over Amanda Frances’s house to talk about Dorit, but what they say to each other is from their own mouths. If anything seems fake, it comes from the women internalizing what is expected of them and self-producing, like Stacey Rusch and her maybe-boyfriend TJ from her first season on Potomac. But when rewatching this, it’s clear what is fake, and all of it has to come from the producers. Since the idea of what a Housewife is and how she acts hasn’t been invented yet — and wouldn’t really be solidified until Tamra Barney joined in season three — the women can’t act like Housewives. What we’re left with are these vignettes that feel more staged than the houses on Selling Sunset and, honestly, all of Selling Sunset.
In one, Kara Keough, daughter of Jeana Keough, goes outside where her brothers are playing basketball with their friends. They make fun of her and her clothes, and she then takes the ball and sinks a shot, embarrassing them in front of their boys. This could be from an episode of The Brady Bunch and is just as scripted. There’s also the now-famous ending of the episode, where Jo De La Rosa, 24, is waiting at home for her fiancé, the not-yet-demonic Slade Smiley, and tries on a variety of sexy outfits before seducing him on the couch in a French maid’s costume. Yeah, that’s faker than all the boobs in the OC (which themselves get a callout in Lauri Peterson née Waring’s opening tagline).
Let’s get to the Housewives, shall we? The first one we meet is Dunlop’s longtime friend Jeana Keough, a real-estate agent and former Playboy bunny whom we meet as she’s selling a $10 million house with a wine cellar smaller than Heather Dubrow’s luggage room. She married her husband, Matt, a former Oakland A’s pitcher, at 18 (!!!). He saw her in a magazine and thought she was cute and told his sports attorney to ask her out. Jeana says, “He and his mother picked me out of several of his girlfriends because they thought I had the right build for their genetics,” framing their union as some kind of eugenics experiment. It seems to have worked, because their 18-year-old son, Shane, is essentially a Sean Cody model, and my unabiding lust for him back in 2006 is what got me addicted to this show. They also have the aforementioned daughter Kara, who is 16, and a younger son, Colton. We first see them going to buy a new Mercedes for Kara, which is when we learn that Shane got a BMW but one of his friends said it was a “girls’ car,” so Kara inherited that BMW and Shane got a new car. Now Kara says that if her mother buys her a new car, it’ll prove that she loves her. Who fed her that line?
That introduction aside, the Keoughs’ story in this episode is more focused on Shane getting picked for the Major League Baseball draft. There is significant pressure on him to be the third generation of Keoughs to make it to the big leagues. They even went so far as to buy a $780,000 house in neighboring Irvine for Matt and Shane to live in so Shane could play on a better high-school team. I can smell the stench of farts and bologna wafting from that nearly million-dollar structure from 20 years in the future. To make it worse, Shane couldn’t keep his grades up and didn’t even get to play on that team.
The next couple we meet is Jo and once and future Househusband Slade, who I am still embarrassed for finding hot in the day, particularly his nude, black-and-white “modeling” photos. He says he is “keeping her” and wants Jo to be the kind of stay-at-home stepmother to his two children (from two different mothers) he thinks he deserves. But Jo would prefer to sit on the kitchen counter and talk on the portable phone, which was like a cell phone that you can’t take out of your house, while a life-size statue of Chef Boyardee hovers in the corner of her kitchen like a bomb about to explode. She talks about how bored she is and doesn’t know what to do about it. Later, she goes out to an Asian-themed nightclub in the second-nicest strip mall in Newport Beach, which is called Ten for some reason. Slade wants her home with him, taking care of the kids, but she wants to be with her friends. We see her calling Slade on her flip phone and telling him how much she loves him. “I know it’s two in the morning …” she says. “Oh, it’s three in the morning. Oops.” We don’t hear Slade on the phone, which makes me think this entire “call” was also staged.
Next, we meet Kimberly Bryant, who moved to Orange County a few years ago from Baltimore, and the first thing she did was get breast implants for her husband. She’s the original Pilates girlie and goes every day, where her kinda-cute instructor bends and folds her limbs while hanging over her like a drooling pinata. Kimberly spends most of the episode taking her 13-year-old daughter to get her makeup done for the “middle-school prom.” Is this a thing? Isn’t it just a dance? I mean, they can’t even bring dates. What kind of prom is it if you can’t smoke pot in the parking lot and then attempt to finger someone in a bathroom stall? Kimberly would never fit in now. She seems totally cut off from everyone else, not interested in drama, and spends most of her time talking about her breast augmentation. Where’s the excitement? Where’s the luxury lifestyle? Where’s the drama?
What’s strange about all these Housewives introductions is that they don’t really do anything. It’s just mugging and consumption, and we barely see the women interact with each other, other than one scene where Jo is drinking alone at the bar and runs into Kimberly and her friends. Jo walks up to them and is like, “Excuse me. Are you from Coto de Caza?” And they’re like, “Yes we are!,” and she sits down to talk because all episode she’s been lamenting how she’s so lonely and has no friends, but then the biggest obstacle in her and Slade’s relationship is that she wants to hang out with her friends all the time. Okay, so which is it? Modern Housewives would never make such a rookie storytelling mistake. Anyway, this whole scene is more staged than the animatronic band at a Chuck E. Cheese. Even worse, all of the women are wearing the famous Sky Tops, which are the ruched and adorned blouses that were so popular at the time, matched perfectly with pre-breakdown Britney Spears low-rise jeans.
The other notable interaction we get is between the last Housewives we meet, Lauri Waring and the goddess that is Victoria Denise Gunvalson Jr., who employs Lauri at the insurance brokerage she runs out of her home. We find out that Lauri used to live in Coto, but since her ex took everything in the divorce, she now lives in a sad townhouse with her teenage son and young daughter. Pretty soon, her older daughter Ashley — whose name miraculously does not end in an “i” — returns home from L.A. with a new dog because she’s sick of living on her own and paying her own bills. “Well, I guess you can sleep with Sophia until we can figure something out,” Lauri tells Ashley.
“Ew,” Ashley replies. “I’m not living with a 7-year-old.” Ashley is by far the most contemptible person in the show, and not just because she’s sporting chunky highlights, a brown satin babydoll top with green jewels along the neckline, and a pair of boot-cut jeans. “I don’t want to have a job,” she drones to the camera in a put-on Paris Hilton whine. I would eviscerate her if I didn’t know that one of Dunlop’s earliest ideas for a scene involved a teenager returning to Coto with unrealistic expectations of what the world is like. This thing is a setup. But still, Lauri meets a friend of hers and whines about it on the patio of what appears to be a Maggiano’s Italian Grille before going to Tentacion, a nightclub in the third-nicest strip mall in Newport Beach, to dance with sweaty-faced divorcées. (Lauri’s son Josh gets only a passing reference for being the one who took her divorce the hardest and started smoking pot at a young age; his ongoing troubles with addiction and the law would end up being Lauri’s story line for much of her tenure on the show, which she eventually left to focus on Josh.)
Vicki, God love her, is exactly the same as she is today, but with her original nose and, well, every other original body part north of the belt. We see her and Lauri working hard at home, Vicki wearing a canary-yellow print top with a jeweled pattern all over her boobs and Lauri in a wine-colored tunic-style top with even bigger jewels around the cuffs and the necklines. These two are more bedazzled than every collectible cover of the Life of a Showgirl LP put together. Even back then, Vicki was absolutely herself, and no matter how hard Dunlop must have tried to get her to be a fake Larry David, she couldn’t be bothered.
Later, we see her take her daughter to the salon to get her hair done for prom (a real occasion, unlike Kimberly’s made-up middle-school prom). Before the health difficulties, a husband who yelled at Lydia McLaughlin’s mom, Brooks faking cancer, leaving TV forever, and becoming a keto influencer, Briana is introduced to us as a fresh-faced, optimistic 18-year-old. I just want to give her a hug that never ends and tell her that I’ve seen her future and … well, I hope she has a nice prom. At the salon, Vicki bugs the stylist about whether she’s curling Briana’s hair correctly (classic Vicki) and also grills her daughter, telling her that there will be no sex or drugs at her prom. Even this very early glimpse makes it obvious that Vicki is the star, as extreme as she is attractive and motivated. That’s because Vicki can’t fake it, at least who she is and her life. While her face and body will change as the show embraces flashier aesthetics, she always remains at her core a fascinating mixture of determination and need. With someone as fascinatingly complicated as Vicki, you don’t need silly vignettes to create comedy, drama, or the best type of Real Housewives narrative, which careens between the two like a horde of drunk monkeys let loose on the bumper cars.
The episode caps off with the one-two punch of Briana’s graduation celebration and Shane’s graduation celebration next door, because Vicki and Jeana are neighbors. Vicki has flown in her mother, her brother, and her children’s father, a no-goodnik from back home in Chicago, for the shindig. There is catering, booze, and more Tommy Bahama shirts than a week-long Jimmy Buffet cruise. It looks fun. Meanwhile, Shane is next door telling us how he doesn’t care about school or getting a piece of paper that’s not even a real diploma. His mother tells the camera she set a charity event in the calendar a year ago, so she couldn’t even attend Shane’s graduation if she wanted to. Matt is nowhere to be found. We see a picture of Briana’s graduation party, labeled as such at the bottom of the screen; then we see a picture of “Shane’s Graduation Party,” and it’s just him sitting alone on a floaty in their pool, soaking in the California sunshine and dreaming about a far-off future. He doesn’t know where he’ll go or where he’ll end up. But he knows this is the start of something big, the seeds of something that will grow and mutate and spawn across the country — no, across the world, bringing its drama and snarky ethos everywhere. As he closes his eyes he sees a vision of women, hundreds of them, all of a certain age, behaving well and badly, making money and losing it, getting arrested and flaunting their freedom. He sees it all in one destabilizing flash, 20 years happening in an instant, this whole thing that will bring the world so much pleasure, and it all started with a snarky chyron flashing under him in his bathing suit.
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