This week on Deceptive Fibbers of Prevarication Gulch, all the lying liars lied, lied, and lied some more. In the last episode, I went along with the ladies and pretended that the polygraphs Emily sprung on everyone were the gospel truth. I know that’s not how they work. I know they can be manipulated and conquered. I know that they mean absolutely nothing. I also know that the women want to rely on them when they prove their points and decry them when they contradict them.
This is now just another game of “Who Do You Believe?” My answer is no one. That’s not true. We’ve never seen evidence that Gina, Emily, or Shannon has lied. Heather hasn’t lied about anything of substance other than that she called the paparazzi on herself. Jenn, who is sincere down to her yoga pants, does not seem like a liar. (Ryan, on the other hand … the vibes are off.) That leaves us with Tamra, Gretchen, and Katie. Tamra is not a liar, but she will spread a fake story if it serves her agenda, and twist or withhold the truth if it doesn’t. Okay, a kind of a liar. Gretchen and Katie, well, they’ve both been caught lying this season multiple times. We can’t trust anything they say.
The thing about Katie is that I don’t want her to be a liar. I really like Katie. I find her kind, sympathetic, and funny. (She’s also gorgeous and can wear the hell out of some clothes, which makes her pleasant to watch and should be beside the point, but is not. I’m shallow. Sorry.) However, Housewives can’t operate with liars, period. Production can’t trust them, women can’t trust them, and, most importantly, fans can’t trust them.
Part of the fun of watching these shows is deciding who we are with and who we are against. It’s part of the vicarious thrill: if these were our friends, whose side would you be on? Take, for instance, the eternal feud between Teresa Giudice and Melissa Gorga on The Real Housewives of New Jersey. I would say that the fandom is pretty evenly divided on whose side they’re on in the various arguments between the two. We can debate the merits of both arguments, and they can hold equal weight. Why? Because we believe that they truly believe their own interpretation of events. They agree on the facts — say, Teresa throwing Melissa’s sprinkle cookies in the trash — but disagree on what they mean. We can’t have these kinds of arguments when one of them is a known liar. Then the answer, for fans and castmates, is always, “Well, she lies so…”
It’s like at the beach party when Tamra tries to hold Gretchen accountable for saying she went to the hospital and then changed her story. She tells Gretchen that Slade called Matt and told him to lie. Gretchen can now use the fact that Katie’s a known liar as her cover, even though I’m pretty certain that Slade did call Matt, and he probably told him that. But, again, we can’t be sure because, well, Katie lies. And when she lies about little things, who knows what big things she’ll lie about.
Many fans are reacting to what they see as a pile-on toward Katie. I get it, and I think that Emily kicking her out of her house was terrible. They’ve all agreed to be on this show together; it’s up to them to stay in the room and find a way forward. However, I think their overreaction to Katie is two-fold. The first is that she has broken the rules of engagement. Yes, they all go to the press, but by befriending “bloggers” and other content creators and then telling them lies, she’s breaking the pact that the women have to protect each other. Housewives is warfare, but there are rules to it, and if Katie is breaking the rules that they’ve all agreed to, it makes sense that they would all turn against her. This is a work issue, not a friend issue. I’m not saying it’s fair, but it is understandable.
The second is that it’s just not nice to be lied to. Look at Katie’s meeting with Jenn after the lie detector event. Katie doesn’t try to take accountability for anything; she attacks the whole notion of the polygraphs. She says Gina and Emily set her up, even though we all saw the women write the questions themselves. She seems to think that if she can’t win on merits, she can win on procedure.
Jenn, the kindest among the women, hits Katie with the hard truth. “I’m sitting here lovingly telling you, it’s messy around you. At some point, there is an accountability factor,” she says. Jenn is now questioning everything about her friendship with Katie, which is what happens when there is no trust. Jenn doesn’t want to be the one who Katie draws into the argument every time the cast questions the truth. Jenn says that she doesn’t remember Gretchen saying that she had to go to the hospital and Tamra drugged her. I believe Jenn, primarily based on her reaction in this scene. I do think that Jenn would ally with Gretchen to take down Tamra. However, I don’t believe that Jenn would lie for Gretchen. That’s just my interpretation. Feel free to disagree. (Again, that’s part of what makes this fun.)
Katie makes some very good points in her conversation with Matt. She says that she thinks Gretchen and Jenn made a pact to eradicate Tamra, and I believe her. Matt says that Slade calls him all the time to talk about the show. (Victoria Denise Gunvalson Jr. just said on her podcast that he’s been calling production to help Gretchen for years.) He even shows his phone logs and points to a 43-minute call between them. We’ve known Slade a long time, and this sounds exactly like something he would do. I do not doubt that what these two are saying about Gretchen and Slade is true, that every time they see them, they want to bring up the same old stories about how awful Tamra is.
This fits in perfectly with the conversation that Tamra and Gretchen have on the beach at the Bring Your Wannabe Housewife Friend to Work Day. (Seriously. Who are Amber and Shanel, and why do I have to learn their names?) When they get to the heart of the problem, Gretchen wants to know if Tamra has any regrets about saying Gretchen cheated on her fiancé or calling Slade a deadbeat dad. In that moment, I had an image of Gretchen like Miss Havisham, sitting around her Newport Beach condo in her last reunion dress, refusing to leave until Andy Cohen calls her once more to give her back her spot on the show, the one she is convinced that Tamra stole from her.
Tamra was awful to Gretchen back then, culminating in the Naked Wasted Party, which was one of the cruelest things to ever happen on Housewives. But she reminds Gretchen that she apologized to Slade for what she said way back in 2012. She also enumerates the terrible things they did to her, including insinuating that her husband is gay and Slade calling her fat in his “stand-up routine.” (And those are just the examples we saw.) These are two women who were horrible to each other for years, and no matter why they did it, the damage is done. Gretchen’s problem isn’t what Tamra did, but that she won. She got to stay on the show, torturing new women every year, fresh meat that she could apologize to and then betray again. Gretchen got to sit in her condo waiting, waiting, waiting for a call that took 12 years to come. Now Gretchen (and Slade) are seizing their chance once again.
Tamra is right that Gretchen is obsessed with the past, and it’s ruining the one thing she seems to want the most: getting back on the show. Just as Alexis Bellino flubbed her second chance by aligning herself too closely with Johnny J, an Ed Hardy snapback that refuses to die, Gretchen is ruining hers by trying to relitigate things from the Obama Administration. Gretchen wants to settle scores from when we were wearing harem pants and watching Vines of “What Does the Fox Say?” Even the new drama, about Katie and the bloggers and who said what to whom, is based on the NWP. She needs something new. Tamra is right; let the past stay in the past and try to create some new friendships, new gripes, and new drama, or else she’ll be around just as long as Alexis.
As always, Tamra apologizes to Gretchen, and they go skipping back to the group, holding hands, saying that they’re optimistic they can move forward. But everyone knows that, like Labubus, butter yellow, and Benson Boone, this isn’t going to last.
They return to the table, and Heather Dubrow shares with everyone that her daughter, Kat, got into Yale. (I already knew this because I am so cool, I had dinner with a Yale student earlier this summer, and she told me. The kids love me … because I am friends with their moms.) She decides that it’s Good News Friday and everyone has to go around the table and share their good news, not all of which is good. Tamra says that her daughter Sophie has her first boyfriend. Gina tells us her daughter, Sienna, got the “character counts” award at school for being the kindest girl in the class. Returning champion Jo De La Rosa, whom Tamra brought as a friend, says that she and her husband have decided to try to have a baby.
This is what I want my Housewives to be. Not wondering who is a liar and who wants to bring someone else down. Not finding nefariousness in every motivation. I want silly triumphs. I want wins. Emily tells us that Shane’s father is home from the hospital, even as we see her struggle with the self-doubt and agony of parenting a child with special needs. Britt, who is married to Matt, Gina’s (still fine) ex, says her good news is that he had a heart attack. No, the good news is he survived, and Gina doesn’t have to have a devastating conversation with her children. Shannon tells us that her daughter Sophie was really into a boy who broke up with her, but that meant Sophie made a surprise trip home to see her mom and stops by this very party where the women support her with their own terrible breakup stories.
They laugh as Jenn talks about a boy she dated just because he drove a Bronco, and Heather shares about her middle school boyfriend who dumped her and is now gay. (Everything Heather Dubrow touches turns to LGBTQ+, and thank God for that.) Tamra talks about kniving the shit out of an ex-boyfriend’s leather jacket because, of course. But they all laugh, telling Sophie that one day she will laugh about this heartbreak, too. Just as heartburn always accompanies a chicken parmesan, and a hangover always follows a great night out. Pain and joy are inextricably linked. This is the best part of Housewives, when it’s like life, the good flowing with the bad, the two of them interchangeable and unmissable. When circumstances are like the tide on that very beach, flowing in and out, ceaselessly, changing the landscape with every lap of water, just as it stays exactly the same.
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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.
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