Knot So Simple
Season 1
Episode 6
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
Kenny reuniting with his long-lost father is one of the best scenes in recent Bravo history.
Photo: Bravo
New Yorkers go out so much, work so much, socialize so much because their apartments suck. You’re basically paying $3,000 (if you’re lucky) for a glorified storage unit for all of your meager possessions so that you can sleep with them in proximity to all the cool places you need to go to in order to afford that rent in the first place and then convince yourself that paying that much for a locker with a doorman is worth it. Even when you get rich enough to afford a decent apartment where you don’t have to sit crooked on the toilet because the shower juts too far out of the wall, you then get rich enough to afford a house in the Hamptons or Hudson or Palm Beach so that you can not only escape your shitty apartment but you can escape the entire shitty city. Living in New York is like a Houdini escape routine, but even after you avoid drowning in chains, you still have to lug your 16 boxes of books up five flights of stairs when you inevitably have to move every two to three years due to rent hikes.
This theory of New York living has led me to a new theory about the dissolution of Kymanda. Did you see the state of Kyle’s apartment after Amanda moved out? There are still piles of clothes on every flat surface, and bathrooms taken over by clutter like the reflecting pool has been taken over by (courageous, patriotic) algae. It’s such a mess that Kyle has to have professional organizers over after Amanda has left to try to make sense of the mess. We all made fun of Kyle for years, that he always wanted to party, that he was becoming a DJ, and that he would never grow up. Maybe it wasn’t that Kyle wanted to stay young forever; maybe he just wanted to stay out forever. Maybe he just didn’t want to go home because he was afraid of a tower of boyfriend jeans stacked up like a denim Jenga tower would collapse and crush him in his sleep. Maybe the reason Kyle was out so much was that his apartment sucked even more than most.
Shitty apartments are a bit of a theme this episode. Danielle has her mother over to go through only her clothes made of white fabric to make more room for Eoin in their apartment. He’s great and all, but not great enough for her to get rid of anything with even a speck of color. Amanda has her father over to her new temporary apartment, which doesn’t have any furniture whatsoever. She’s most excited about having a balcony and, I’m sorry, but balconies are a scam. It’s just a way for the landlord to charge you more for something you’re never going to use, except for possibly bike storage, and to have 10 minutes of existential dread feeling the pull of hurling yourself into oblivion when you show off the balcony to visitors. Amanda is also using hers for an astro-turf pee pad for Reese, the dog that she got in the divorce. (I’m going to need to have Kyle and/or Amanda go deep on the Sophie’s Choice of who got which dog.) Knowing how clean Amanda keeps things, can you just imagine how gross that little plastic square is going to be in about two weeks?
When Kyle comes to check out the new place, Amanda jokes that Kyle is going to talk about how messy it is, and the editors do Amanda so dirty (even dirtier than her apartment) and show that the bathtub is already full of boxes, clothes, and trash like it’s some kind of raccoon sanctuary. The conversation that they have is maddening. Kyle says he was surprised she didn’t take more of her things because he was most excited about getting “his home” back. Amanda is upset that his idea of home doesn’t have her or her things in it. Well, she is the one who packed up and left. She is the one who went and signed a one-year lease to get away from him. And now she’s saying that it’s temporary when she bought a new bed, a giant TV, and, presumably, furniture that will arrive in four to six weeks, and she’s still upset at Kyle because she couldn’t take the clothes off the bed that she put there three years ago? Come on!
And I’m not even a clean person. I love a mess. I love clutter. I love to have my things around me. I love to have the closet doors open so that I can look at all of my things and make sure there aren’t succubae hiding among the shirts that I won’t throw away because I might one day fit in them again. But, yeah, I can’t imagine Kyle living like he did for so long.
Any New Yorker will tell you that their apartments suck so much, even when they’re clutter-free, that they had to have a conversation about fertility, ovulation, and the best sex positions for conception in the aisle of a Duane Reade while a pervert in a Jazzy scooter looked on and made creepy comments about free milk. This was my favorite scene of the episode because it was so dang relatable and seriously unavoidable. The only more New York scene is at the very top of the episode when Gavin walks right into a pizza place, does not wait in line, and leaves with a perfect-looking slice that he eats off a paper plate while walking down the sidewalk. None of this waiting in line for an hour like some TikTok-obsessed West Village Girlie, like Lindsay and Danielle did last episode.
As for the conversation Lindsay, Yvonne, and Lexi are having in the Duane Reade (where the deodorant was conspicuously not locked up) most of it hadsto do with getting pregnant but the more interesting part has to do with The Milk Man, Kelly Dodd’s sloppy seconds, that Lindsay went on a second date with but still hasn’t banged because he’s “taking it slow.” Lindsay thinks that Yvonne has some weird beef with this guy, but I totally agree with Yvonne. She says that Lindsay stated she doesn’t want a relationship, she just wants to have fun and sleep around, but Lindsay is always on the lookout for a partner rather than a fuck buddy. That she hasn’t banged The Milk Man shows that she should set him free. This is not the guy for knocking boots; this is a guy for running errands and farmer’s markets, and color-coded Google chore calendars. And that is fine! But Lindsay either needs to find a guy to meet what her expectations are, which are not this guy, or she needs to just admit that maybe she wants a new boyfriend rather than a slampig. (Someone ask Real Housewives of Rhode Island’s Rosie if slampig is gender neutral.)
One of the best scenes we’ve seen on Bravo in a long time is Kenny reuniting with his father, Larry. They have a brief, tearful conversation on the phone after Kenny and Whitney tracked down Larry’s wife on Facebook, and Kenny invites Larry to come up to New York to reconnect. Where do they meet? A lovely West Village brunch spot. Why? Because as nice as Kenny’s apartment is, it still sucks. All New York apartments suck. Kenny’s dad walks in, and he looks way too young to have a son of Kenny’s age. He looks really good. Good for Larry and good for Kenny with those genes.
They have so much to catch up on, 25 years’ worth of things. Kenny says that he never hated his father and didn’t have any resentment. It was just that his father was in London, he was in the U.S., and things were hard; their lives diverged. But things happen, things change. Kenny lost his mother and is probably feeling a bit unmoored in the world. He wants to see if he can repair this, if that will ease his feelings of abandonment, of his not being good enough, of his always searching for a magic bullet that will make him stand out enough that his father will finally see him.
That’s a lot to ask for over one brunch. They had two decades to go over, Kenny needs to tell him about college and starting his career, Larry needs to tell him about meeting Debbie and retirement, and they both need to hear the gossip about their siblings and their parents. They need to share silly stories about embarrassments that happened on bachelor parties, they need to talk about how the Knicks will never win a championship, they need to compare notes on recent TV shows, and Larry will ask if Kenny is still really into Star Wars, and he’ll say no, but he’s watched Andor… and The Mandalorian… and that terrible Boba Fett thing. Okay. Yes. He’s still into Star Wars. They both laugh, letting their notions of each other — no, letting their notions of themselves fall away as another basket of croissants comes to the table, and they eat more and laugh more and don’t want to get up even though the check has been sitting there for 20 minutes. Where else can they go? Not to Kenny’s shitty apartment. No, they want to stay right there. This table feels like home.
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