Denise Richards is no stranger to reality TV. Having starred in Denise Richards: It’s Complicated back in 2008 and briefly joining the ensemble of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, her new Bravo series Denise Richards and Her Wild Things serves as more of a platform for her two oldest daughters, Sami and Lola Sheen, to introduce them to the world. So far though, there’s nothing wild at all about Richards’ new series, and the appearance of old RHOBH pals and famous friends doesn’t even help.
DENISE RICHARDS AND HER WILD THINGS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Denise Richards, driven by her daughter Lola Sheen, meets her youngest daughter Eloise and husband Aaron Phypers to pick up their three (!) new golden retriever puppies.
The Gist: Meeting Richards’ dogs is the first introduction into her often chaotic life. The puppies jump all over her and she welcomes it, but the dogs serve another purpose: Eloise, Richards’s youngest daughter, has a chromosomal deletion that has resulted in developmental delays, and Denise hopes one of their puppies can be trained as a service dog for her.
Richards has a husband, three daughters, three dogs, and four homes, sort of. For reasons yet unexplained, her husband Aaron’s parents and brother have been living at her primary residence, so Richards is currently renting three adjacent townhouses in Los Angeles, one that’s an office, and another that’s a studio, and one where she lives with Aaron and daughters Lola and Eloise. Her oldest daughter, 20-year-old Sami, has moved out, something Richards seems bummed out about, explaining that she offered up her townhouses to her two oldest daughter so that ‘We could be like Melrose Place,’ and they were like ‘What’s that?’” The show is peppered with funny one-liners like that one, which helps normalize Richards, though at other times, she seems to exist on her own planet.
Sami and Lola are the daughters Richards shares with Charlie Sheen and despite their parents’ tumultuous relationship and behavior in general, they both seem relatively well-adjusted. Lola in particular seems incredibly chill and has found community at church, while Sami’s pursuit of becoming an actress has led her down a path toward selling nude photos on Only Fans, something Denise supported by creating an Only Fans account herself in solidarity. (“At first I was pissed that you made one, that’s like, really annoying and weird,” Sami tells Denise, because I guess this is what the world wants us to believe mother-daughter relationships in Hollywood are like.)
Much of the first episode deals with the fact that Sami and Lola haven’t been getting along, on account of Lola remaining friends with one of Sami’s exes. (Lola claims she was friends with him before they dated and doesn’t plan to let the friendship go just because her sister is no longer with him, but Sami finds this to be a violation of girl code.) To remedy this, Denise plans a family picnic to reunite the sisters and get them to talk.
While Richards worries in her confessionals that she doubts her parent skills – relatable!– she also spends most of the time at the picnic using a plastic knife to dig the chain of her purse out from between two slats of a picnic table. Her daughters continue to argue, unfazed by the distraction next to them. The scene is a deranged metaphor for her whole life, it seems… On the one hand, she’s there as a parent, doing her best to broker peace between her children, and on the other hand, she spends half of this mediation session entirely focused on wrestling with this purse strap. What’s that they say about impact vs. intent?
While there could be a truly fascinating show about Richards raising three girls, including one that’s found Jesus and another with a disability, the show instead seems to want to mine the drama tree for the most low-hanging fruit and avoiding the most interesting things about the family.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Denise Richards and Her Wild Things is an unfortunately pretty lackluster version of a celebrity-doing-reality series. Despite the fact that I knew little about her or her children (aside from the major headlines), the show feels so familiar, probably because it’s just a replica of a dozen similar shows we’ve seen before like The Family Stallone, The D’Amelio Show or even The Osbournes.
Our Take: With just a couple of episodes available for viewing so far, it’s safe to say that the focus of this show is split evenly between Denise Richards and her two oldest “wild things,” Sami and Lola. Richards is the established star, and I was hopeful that this show might be an extension of what felt like it might be a reputation-altering redemption tour of sorts, which began with her appearance on Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test. On that show, Richards was especially vulnerable an honest about several major traumatic experiences in her life, and I was curious if this series would lean into that to paint a fuller picture of a woman whose life has often been scrutinized and sexualized. Unfortunately, so far, it does not.
The show feels more like a glossy, Hills-like attempt to promote what her kids have going on (or at least daughter Sami, the one who has the most to gain from this kind of exposure, being an aspiring actress and all). The drama between the sisters is much less interesting than their individual personalities and just how different they are. To have born witness to Charlie Sheen’s whole, uncomfortable “winning” phase and been so close to it, you have to wonder how that might have affected these kids. For Lola, she appears to have rejected Hollywood in favor of church, an unexpected turn for sure, while Sami feels at home in the spotlight. Their differences, at this point in their lives, appears to developing into a rift that gives the show its only major conflict.
Richards herself, who divorced Sheen when she was still pregnant with Lola, seems to have adjusted well to post-Charlie life, even maintaining a close bond with his third ex-wife, Brooke Mueller, the mother to his two sons Bob and Max. The rest of the show does feature plenty of Richards’ Hollywood friends, including Tori Spelling and Camille Grammer (and nemesis Erika Jayne), and depicts her life as an L.A. mom, and while that’s all fine, unless it probes deeper under the surface, there’s simply not enough here to make the show interesting.
Sex and Skin: Just some references to and tasteful photos of Richards and her daughter’s Only Fans account.
Parting Shot: After the picnic is over, Richards gathers her things and simply sighs, “Augghhhh, shit.”
Performance Worth Watching: Richards is obviously the star, but the most fascinating character has got to be Lola. While Sami appears to be a classic L.A. party girl, her sister Lola is a self-proclaimed “woman of God,” an outlier in her family and she’s all the more interesting for that reason.
Memorable Dialogue: “The way you speak to me is so rude,” Lola says to her sister Sami, who replies, “I only speak to you like this ’cause you’re such a bitch, dude.” Denise then hilariously interjects, “Don’t call her dude, she’s your sister.”
Our Call: SKIP IT. Rather than offering any real insight into Richards’ life, the show feels more like a platform for her to stay in the spotlight.
Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Denise Richards and Her Wild Things’ on Bravo, An Attempt To Shine The Spotlight on The Controversial Family’s Two Oldest Daughters, Sami and Lola Sheen appeared first on Decider.
