As Potomac wraps its milestone tenth season, the women are still struggling to “deal in reality.”
Photo: Clifton Prescod/Bravo
After hours of theatrics, antics, and failed screenshots, we have finally arrived at the final week of the season ten reunion. It’s hard to overstate what a milestone it is for any city to successfully make it to season 10, hiccups and all. As Dallas, D.C., and the rebooted New York franchises have shown us, a Bravo stamp is not a guarantee of a successful run. All criticisms aside, it is a testament to the cast that they have been able to hold down the ship this long, as they have all contributed to the highs and lows of the show. Most importantly, Andy recognizes this quite well, and seemingly uses this dynamic to center the last part of the reunion around a pivotal question: in a room full of liars, which ones do you believe the most?
On this show, if you hear the word liar, Stacey’s name is not far away, but for all of the cast’s insistence that Stacey is the most blatant liar on the show, the receipts they bring up to prove it seem to consistently offer confusion more than clarity. Monique starts the episode by whipping out a video on her phone, which shows … well, we don’t know what, exactly, which is the main problem with this whole confrontation. In my best estimation, it’s either Chris or someone associated with him claiming that Stacey spoke to Chris about Monique filming with her kids, which somehow violates Chris’s cease and desist. But without accurate context, we are forced to use the other housewives’ reactions as an indicator of how severe this anvil actually is, which I trust about as much as I believe the number I read on my scale the other day. It seems that this is what Monique really means by Stacey prompting the cease and desist, which Stacey reacts to with confusion and denial, while Keiarna tries to smugly interject with some nonsense about Cookie, only to be continuously dismissed like a child speaking out of turn. I’m sorry, but Gizelle’s shocked face is not enough proof for me that Stacey committed some unforgivable sin. I do believe that she and Chris flirted, but if this is truly coming from him, I have no reason to believe he is any more of a truth-teller than anyone else who signs up for reality television. I fear that this collapses into yet another swing and a miss against Supernova Stacey, much to the cast’s chagrin, but as Wendy pointed out, I wouldn’t be surprised if the headwinds changed next season and Stacey ended up ensnared in her growing web of lies of omission.
We pivot to discussing Angel’s group trip from hell for what is thankfully the last time. Angel deserves every bit of criticism leveled towards her, and her canned cadence and prepared talking points make her sound like a wannabe Kamala Harris on the campaign trail instead of someone expressing sincere remorse for her trip going wrong. For once, Keiarna stands up for her friend, but that’s about as useful as a cellphone while underground: she didn’t stay with the rest of the women and can really only speak to the failed flyfishing lunch, which Gizelle reminds her of immediately. Ultimately, there’s nothing Angel can say that would redeem that trip, but we do find out key details that offer some clarifying insights as to why so much was lost in translation; namely that Angel was excluded from the group chat of the trip she was hosting, and really only had direct contact with Jassi during the fiasco, opting to try to resolve it before reaching back out. It was still a failure in execution on all levels, but Gizelle’s insistence on beating a dead horse reveals her glaring hypocrisies. Angel was wrong for placing her and Ashley in a shared room, but Gizelle was justified in singling out Stacey all week in Nevis? Between that and her insisting that Angel never apologized for the fiasco despite us seeing her do that on camera, it astonishes me that Gizelle never knows how to simply claim a victory without adding on unnecessary digs that simply make her look vindictive and petty.
Once Jassi was sent back to the shadowlands from whence she came, we finally have Karen’s return to the reunion stage and return to form. Naturally, Andy starts by doubling back on the controversial conversation around Karen’s sobriety, which continues to be unnecessarily opaque. The cynic in me feels compelled to point out that someone on a “sobriety journey” could arguably claim that any moment where she is caught outside with alcohol in the future as a “stumble” rather than completely falling off the wagon; the more empathetic part of me is willing to entertain the idea that she is less willing to publicly admit that her problem is not exclusively alcohol, but prescriped benzos, which is why she keeps diverting to “complete sobriety.” Whatever the case is, for her sake and her neighbors, I hope she sticks to the program and becomes serious about facing her demons. Her only chance at redemption with the fans who have turned on her is by being willing to show herself truly rebuilding, and if there’s any lifelong journey she needs to commit to, it’s honesty.
While I am mixed on Karen’s readiness to return to television, I am way more on her side when it comes to the friction between her and Wendy. Fair or not, Karen’s issue is quite clear: she expects dutiful loyalty from her friends on camera, and is peeved with both Wendy and Stacey for abandoning that program. Wendy, in response, is mad that … Karen mentioned the witch claim against her mom as a point in defending her? For someone who is skilled at playing games of semantics, the thread here seems quite thin from Wendy, and I think she just doesn’t want to admit that she was shocked by Karen’s video and didn’t expect it; otherwise, none of this really makes any sense. That said, I, along with the rest of the cast, found myself shocked that Karen chose to dig into the wound and remind Wendy that her mom cussed her out on camera. While I am personally of the opinion that Wendy brought part of that on herself due to her issues with her father, it is clear that any reminder of that incident deeply rattles her, and she reacted accordingly to Karen revisiting that. Even Gizelle was shocked by Karen going that low, and this woman has publicly accused someone’s husband of trying to sleep with her.
When it finally came time to get into Wendy’s charges, I was surprised by how gentle the cast chose to be after they all spent weeks gloating online. Everyone said the right things, but after all the social media shenanigans, none of the platitudes rang sincere. I respect Angel for being one of the few people to acknowledge that she felt that Wendy speculating on her finances was projection for the issues she was going through — it was a petty jab, but one that Wendy earned, given the way she made unfounded claims around Angel’s income.
For the most part, Wendy answered the questions fairly handily. No, she hasn’t used any aliases for financial purposes. Her family has rallied around her and Eddie, and her marriage is suffering for it, but they are trying to fight through it. Even her briefly breaking into tears felt like a genuinely human moment of Wendy realizing that the image that she has presented of herself has since been shattered. But for me, that’s where it ends. The story where her kids are the ones who discovered the burglary feels unwieldy to me and doesn’t address why many of the listed items in her claim were since found in her house on the day of the arrest. She intentionally chose not to address the allegation of severe debt when this is something that she came into the show freely admitting to. I’m personally aligned with Karen’s advice here: Wendy needs to stop talking and stick to consistent points. When she’s brief and lets her emotions show, she comes off way more sympathetic. When she starts to expound, it quickly becomes muddled and incoherent, and she is frankly lucky that none of the women were of the mind to really dig into her inconsistencies.
There’s a moment in this reunion that really brings the tension of Potomac into full focus: When Karen Huger claims that “it’s important to deal in reality, even on a television show.” Briefly putting aside that the person saying this has spent the better part of a decade shoddily trying to hide her substance abuse, I do believe the phrase itself is food for thought as this group of women begins to look towards the next decade. Currently, Potomac has been actively separating its onscreen narratives from the realities the women are going through, until it becomes too big to ignore. For the franchise to have another successful season, the women have to move past everyone “owning their own lies,” as Jassi said, and into something closer to living their true lives. It may not be as glamorous, but it will be more honest, and the fans will appreciate them all the more for it.
That’s all for the season, folks. Thanks as always for watching along, and see you next year.
• After years of fans expressing vocal frustration over Gizelle’s ghost producing, her lack of a package in this year’s reunion felt like the production team making plain what anyone with a pulse could see: we see all of Gizelle’s scheming and none of her actual life. In a bleak attempt to try to reclaim the narrative, Gizelle runs through a list of life events that seem about as appealing as a piece of raw cassava: she’s dating more men that we will never see, she loves her daughters that she can’t use to film anymore now that they’re in school, and she’s starting another tacky business that will inevitably bore us to tears. I have fully come to accept that Gizelle is a unique kind of Machiavellian evil that is perfect for the sparring that keeps Housewives going, but if even the series editors can’t cobble together a reasonable storyline for her this season, at some point, she must be forced to let us in more. I had to put up with Kyle Richards stonewalling us on her late-in-life queer bloom for three seasons straight; I refuse to let Gizelle continue to get away with this.
• I had a genuine jump scare at the sight of Mia in the footage from last season. She feels like a collective three-year-long fever dream that emerged from the COVID pandemic.
• Dare I say that Angel’s makeup had her kind of resembling the catfish photo she spent all season being dragged for? The face is there!
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