in my book<\/a>!) 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\u2019s fingerprints are still all over this initial episode.<\/p>\nThe 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\u2019re telling Kyle to go over Amanda Frances\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019t been invented yet \u2014 and wouldn\u2019t really be solidified until Tamra Barney joined in season three \u2014 the women can\u2019t act like Housewives. What we\u2019re left with are these vignettes that feel more staged than the houses on Selling Sunset and, honestly, all of Selling Sunset.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s also the now-famous ending of the episode, where Jo De La Rosa, 24, is waiting at home for her fianc\u00e9, the not-yet-demonic Slade Smiley, and tries on a variety of sexy outfits before seducing him on the couch in a French maid\u2019s costume. Yeah, that\u2019s faker than all the boobs in the OC (which themselves get a callout in Lauri Peterson n\u00e9e Waring\u2019s opening tagline).<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s get to the Housewives, shall we? The first one we meet is Dunlop\u2019s longtime friend Jeana Keough, a real-estate agent and former Playboy bunny whom we meet as she\u2019s selling a $10 million house with a wine cellar smaller than Heather Dubrow\u2019s luggage room. She married her husband, Matt, a former Oakland A\u2019s 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, \u201cHe and his mother picked me out of several of his girlfriends because they thought I had the right build for their genetics,\u201d 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 \u201cgirls\u2019 car,\u201d so Kara inherited that BMW and Shane got a new car. Now Kara says that if her mother buys her a new car, it\u2019ll prove that she loves her. Who fed her that line?<\/p>\n
That introduction aside, the Keoughs\u2019 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\u2019t keep his grades up and didn\u2019t even get to play on that team.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cmodeling\u201d photos. He says he is \u201ckeeping her\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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. \u201cI know it\u2019s two in the morning \u2026\u201d she says. \u201cOh, it\u2019s three in the morning. Oops.\u201d We don\u2019t hear Slade on the phone, which makes me think this entire \u201ccall\u201d was also staged.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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 \u201cmiddle-school prom.\u201d Is this a thing? Isn\u2019t it just a dance? I mean, they can\u2019t even bring dates. What kind of prom is it if you can\u2019t 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\u2019s the excitement? Where\u2019s the luxury lifestyle? Where\u2019s the drama?<\/p>\n
What\u2019s strange about all these Housewives introductions is that they don\u2019t really do anything. It\u2019s 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, \u201cExcuse me. Are you from Coto de Caza?\u201d And they\u2019re like, \u201cYes we are!,\u201d and she sits down to talk because all episode she\u2019s been lamenting how she\u2019s so lonely and has no friends, but then the biggest obstacle in her and Slade\u2019s 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\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 whose name miraculously does not end in an \u201ci\u201d \u2014 returns home from L.A. with a new dog because she\u2019s sick of living on her own and paying her own bills. \u201cWell, I guess you can sleep with Sophia until we can figure something out,\u201d Lauri tells Ashley.<\/p>\n
\u201cEw,\u201d Ashley replies. \u201cI\u2019m not living with a 7-year-old.\u201d Ashley is by far the most contemptible person in the show, and not just because she\u2019s sporting chunky highlights, a brown satin babydoll top with green jewels along the neckline, and a pair of boot-cut jeans. \u201cI don\u2019t want to have a job,\u201d she drones to the camera in a put-on Paris Hilton whine. I would eviscerate her if I didn\u2019t know that one of Dunlop\u2019s 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\u2019s Italian Grille before going to Tentacion, a nightclub in the third-nicest strip mall in Newport Beach, to dance with sweaty-faced divorc\u00e9es. (Lauri\u2019s 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\u2019s story line for much of her tenure on the show, which she eventually left to focus on Josh.)<\/p>\n
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\u2019t be bothered.<\/p>\n
Later, we see her take her daughter to the salon to get her hair done for prom (a real occasion, unlike Kimberly\u2019s made-up middle-school prom). Before the health difficulties, a husband who yelled at Lydia McLaughlin\u2019s 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\u2019ve seen her future and \u2026 well, I hope she has a nice prom. At the salon, Vicki bugs the stylist about whether she\u2019s curling Briana\u2019s 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\u2019s because Vicki can\u2019t 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
The episode caps off with the one-two punch of Briana\u2019s graduation celebration and Shane\u2019s graduation celebration next door, because Vicki and Jeana are neighbors. Vicki has flown in her mother, her brother, and her children\u2019s 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\u2019t care about school or getting a piece of paper that\u2019s not even a real diploma. His mother tells the camera she set a charity event in the calendar a year ago, so she couldn\u2019t even attend Shane\u2019s graduation if she wanted to. Matt is nowhere to be found. We see a picture of Briana\u2019s graduation party, labeled as such at the bottom of the screen; then we see a picture of \u201cShane\u2019s Graduation Party,\u201d and it\u2019s just him sitting alone on a floaty in their pool, soaking in the California sunshine and dreaming about a far-off future. He doesn\u2019t know where he\u2019ll go or where he\u2019ll 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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Dame Brian Moylan breaks down all the gossip and drama, on- and off-screen, for dedicated students of the Reality Television Arts and Sciences.<\/p>\n
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