Lately, watching The Real Joy Suckers of Restoration Hardware is a bit like watching The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Why are the spirits of the dead wandering around, and what are they so mad about? Why won’t that blond witch just get on a boat, travel off into the distance, and leave us alone for good? Why is that hobbit wearing jorts? The biggest question about this season and the final part of LOTR is How is this thing still not over yet? We’re on episode 15, and we still haven’t even gone on the trip yet. What do I have to do for this interminable season to be over? And if the reunion is any more than two parts, I swear to Gollum, just like that ring, I am going to throw myself into the nearest volcano.
Luckily for us, it seems like the season is going to end on the trip, like it has for the past several seasons on both The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. That means while the ladies are still in the O.C., they need to tie up all of their personal storylines. Josh Flagg and Josh Altman still haven’t sold Heather Dubrow’s house, but don’t worry, they offloaded it in August for $16.5 million. Emily’s son Luke now has a diagnosis, so she has a treatment plan and feels a lot better about her parenting. Tamra’s daughter has a boyfriend, which is essentially the only personal story she’s had all season. Gina sits down with Cowboy Travis to discuss how good a father he is and how awful his ex is. They are perhaps the only real people on all of Bravo, and I feel like they (and Archie Beador) need to be protected at all costs.
Rounding out their storyline, Jenn and Ryan are still not married, but neither are Gretchen and Slade, so see how that’s working out for them. Shannon throws a bridal shower that is not a bridal shower for Jenn and the most exciting thing to happen at the whole party is that Shannon got the wrong wine glasses and cutlery and it ruined her whole tablescape. I am shocked that she didn’t go full “It’s a family van!!!” on the nice customer service rep who picked up Shannon’s call.
There is a cute moment where the ladies go around the table and give Jenn their best advice for a good marriage. It’s pretty standard stuff, but Tamra says she and her ex, Simon, used to get into heated fights, and she learned from Eddie not to say crazy things to him because you can’t take your words back. Isn’t this a lesson she should learn from the ladies? If she hadn’t called Shannon a “drunk” last season, they might still be amiga-ing. When Tamra has dinner with Eddie, he tells her that she gets drunk and still says crazy things, so Tamra might not even be taking her own advice.
Also at lunch, Emily tells the ladies that they’re going on a JetBlue-sponsored trip on a JetBlue airplane and will fly 13 hours on JetBlue to Amsterdam. Shannon says that her daughter Stella, who is living in Paris, loves Amsterdam and asks about some of her favorite places to go. I’m sorry, but Shannon and Stella Beador are not staying in the same places. There is no way that Shannon is only eating at €2 pizza and getting bed bugs in the cheapest hostel that doesn’t have “Rasta” in the name. Heather Dubrow tells us that after she and her sister went to college, her parents moved to Amsterdam, and she’s been a million times. It’s always nice to get a little peek into the sort of pressure that forged the diamond that is Heather Dubrow. Turns out it’s a controlling mother and an absentee father, the same combination Freud thought created homosexual men. No wonder Heather’s kids are every color of the LGBTQIA+ rainbow (complimentary).
The first thing the ladies do when they get there is dress like sluts. Don’t get me wrong, I love sluts and the way they dress, but there was something about the time and place that they were hobbling around Amsterdam in some of the most ridiculous outfits we’ve ever seen. It’s the middle of the afternoon, and Tamra is in leather booty shorts and a black top covered in bows. Jenn is wearing a sheer bodystocking that looks like it was advertised in a Vishara Video in Times Square, paired with a thong underneath. Gretchen is in a leather skirt which, for her, means she’s going to hell. Heather and Shannon look like they bought their outfits in the slutty section of Talbots, because that is as racy as they get.
I have saved the last description for Emily Simpson, Queen of the One Piece. Emily is a gorgeous woman, and normally I love the way she wears clothes, but ooooooof. She is wearing a form-fitting black maxi dress with a constellation of cutouts that goes up both sides of the skirt but only one side of the top. It looks like a banana leaf was somehow carved out of her dress, and the way it hangs makes it look like it could fall apart at any second or like it’s going to make her trip and fall and she’s going to end up drowning in the canal like one of the 15,000 bicycles they pry out of the canals every year.
These outfits all make sense when the ladies end the night in one of the windows of the red-light district. I don’t know why they are there, considering none of them are prostitutes. Is this a stunt for TV? Is this something that women can just choose to do? I am confused by the whole enterprise. For three seconds, they looked appropriate in that window, but they paid for it by spending the whole day on a boat tour, doing activities, and going to dinner wearing outfits that would get them banned from Bama Rush TikTok for the rest of their lives.
So, yes, they go on a boat tour and have a tense moment I don’t entirely understand. It’s something where Emily brings up Tamra mentioning Shannon’s father’s drinking on the cast trip to (teehee) Temecula. They get mad about it, they fight a little, Tamra calls Shannon a cunt, and it’s over before it began. The ladies then separate into two groups. Tamra takes Emily and Jenn to decorate dildos, which is silly. Why are you going to ruin a good dildo by putting googly eyes and glitter all over it? You can’t put that in any holes. It’s basically now just a Beanie Baby that is also too obscene to be shown on cable television or whatever we call Peacock.
Heather and Gina, our resident stoners, take Shannon and Gretchen to the “coffee shop” to get stoned. This got me thinking: what is your Bravo Dream Blunt Rotation? I’m going with Gina Kirschenheiter, Andy Cohen, Katie Maloney Schwartz Maloney, Whitney Rose, and West Wilson. They have a good convo about the Tamra and Gretchen of it all, and Gretchen, of course, ends up being wronger than Shane Simpson’s first bar exam. She says that she and Slade approached Tamra at Emily’s western party last episode in a friendly way. They just wanted to say hi. Bullshit. They went over there with an agenda; they went over there to start shit. It’s like walking into a store with a gun drawn and saying you’re just there to buy some Devil Dogs and then being pissed when the woman behind the counter calls the police. If you just want Devil Dogs, why did you get your gun out?
In this conversation, Gretchen says that the only language Tamra respects is strength, and that is true. Good observation, Gretch. However, she says that is why, when it comes to Tamra, she has to fight fire with fire. Both Heather Dubrow and I shook our heads so forcefully that it dislodged the blunt from our lips. This is what has brought us to where we are today. Gretchen wants us to think that Tamra is an awful person who says and does awful things to people. Yes, that is true, but when Gretchen says and does awful things to Tamra, it looks like Tamra is just getting retribution. If Gretchen wants Tamra to look bad, for people to make her stop (because she will never stop herself) she has to knock it off. She has let Tamra look insane for coming at Gretchen repeatedly unprovoked. Currently, they both feel justified in their treatment of each other, as Gretchen claims to be fighting fire with fire. By doing so, she is making the whole situation worse. As Heather says, she’s fighting fire with lighter fluid.
As that wraps up, they meet at a restaurant called Siren that has two of my least favorite things in a restaurant: sharing plates and an enormous wooden statue of a naked woman hanging in the middle of it. The only reason this dinner is tolerable is because Shannon Beador took a whiff of a space cake at the coffee shop and is now so stoned that she is trying to look through the bottom of her wine glass like it’s a microscope. Shannon is so stoned that she forgot that she’s in a fight with Tamra. When Shannon loses her barrette under the table, Tamra offers to help her find it, and for a minute, they’re having fun and frolicking, they’re sliding down the booth, they’re grabbing each other’s bodies, they’re laughing like they just started the new Naked Gun movie. This is what we love, this is what we miss, this is what we get JetBlue to fly our ladies to Amsterdam for. Let them get wasted, let them walk around like sluts, let them think about the positive things about each other for a change as the beer from a million partiers trickles into the canals and the surface ripples under the moonlight and, just for a second, everything looks like the gilded shores of a far-off fantasy land.
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