As summer turns to fall and Americans begin their annual migration back indoors, television once again offers one of civilization’s more dependable pleasures: Pinot Grigio poured as if it were water, air-kissed greetings with active litigation behind the eyes, cosmetic work ranging from the very good to the anthropologically significant, husbands demoted to supporting characters in their own homes and women who can turn an old text message into three episodes of really good television. The Real Housewives of New York City returns Tuesday night at 8 p.m. on Bravo, with Carole Radziwill rejoining the cast after leaving in 2018. The genius of the Housewives franchise is that beneath all the absurdity lies something ancient: the pleasures of loyalty, betrayal and banishment.
Our own president, a former reality TV star, understands those same appetites all too well. In Donald Trump’s Republican Party, the reunion couch is in Washington, D.C., and everyone is still fighting over who gets to sit closest to the center. This is the Real Housewives theory of Trump’s GOP.
Modern Republican politics has acquired some of Bravo’s most durable dramatic machinery. Loyalty here is intensely personal, but feuds happen in public. Social rank is constantly being renegotiated while evidence arrives as “receipts.” Cast members can be banished, rehabilitated and banished again.
Yesterday’s mortal enemy may be seated beside you at the reunion. The comparison is imperfect, admittedly. After all, government has consequences that reality television, mercifully, usually does not—though social media’s enthusiasm for cancellation has narrowed the gap.
Still, for understanding the personnel dramas of Trump’s Washington, Bravo may offer a more practical education than The Federalist Papers. Housewives has always understood that friendship is partly a jurisdictional dispute. Who gets the better room?
Who has sufficient status to deliver an insult without becoming the evening’s target? RHONY perfected the form early. Bethenny Frankel and Jill Zarin went from close friends to a breakup so consuming that Bravo still lists it as one of the show’s defining moments.
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