In May 2005, camera crews arrived at the gated community of Coto de Caza, California, to film a reality-TV show. Behind the Gates, as it was initially called, was envisioned as a satire of life in the Orange County town, where its wealthy residents would play exaggerated versions of themselves. But some neighbors didn’t take kindly to the idea. They criticized Scott Dunlop, the show’s producer and a Coto de Caza resident, for filming at the local tennis club; they berated him at the grocery store, compared him to Satan, placed menacing phone calls to his house, and circulated rumors that he was “shooting a porno.”
The protesting residents felt like they were part of an unwanted social experiment, at the front lines of the reality-TV revolution. “They thought, There are going to be helicopters, massive trucks, and we’re going to kind of blast through their doors and show up unannounced and ask them questions,” Dunlop told me recently. Even some potential cast members got cold feet. Terry Corwin, the president of the local PTA and a newspaper columnist, backed out when she realized it might jeopardize her close relationships. “A lot of my friends were like, ‘Well, I won’t shoot with you,’” Corwin told me. “And then my husband, who’s very laid-back, said, ‘I don’t want to. I won’t shoot. I won’t be on it.’”
By the time the show debuted on Bravo, on March 21, 2006, Dunlop had, at the network’s request, scrapped the satire from the original pitch, upped the show’s soapier elements, and embraced a new, flashier moniker: The Real Housewives of Orange County. The changes didn’t satisfy many locals, some of whom stopped telling people they were from Coto de Caza once the show premiered. But with time, Housewives won some of them over: Debra Douglass, a real-estate agent in Coto who called the show’s depiction of women “very superficial” in 2006, recently told me she still keeps up with new seasons of Housewives of OC.
Douglass is hardly alone in her fandom. Two decades and nearly 200 cast members later, counting just the U.S.-based shows, Real Housewives is one of the most recognizable franchises on television. It didn’t popularize the modern docudrama—that honor likely goes to MTV’s The Real World—but it is now singular in the genre. No other noncompetition reality show has minted so many spin-offs, or become synonymous with a particular flavor of on-screen drama. Real Housewives is a shorthand for wealthy women who quip, spill drinks, and flip tables in order to claim on-screen clout and become famous off-camera. The show’s appeal isn’t only in the petty infighting; it frequently gives way to vulnerable discussions about religion, body image, queerness, marriage, and other topics that the housewives, like many of their viewers, are navigating in real time.
In its sheer scale, Housewives more closely resembles the extended Law & Order universe than it does any other reality-TV show. Audiences have so thoroughly ingested the Real Housewives brand that other networks have finally learned how to replicate it. Rival shows such as Hulu’s The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives have created veritable stars of their own, like Whitney Leavitt (who is now starring in Chicago on Broadway). Some former Housewives stars are leaving Bravo: This January, several ex–cast members of the Real Housewives of New York announced that they were decamping for E! to create a rival show of their own.
Just as the Housewives formula has become part of pop culture’s texture, its fuzzy relationship to “reality” has coincided with the ascension of a powerful idea in entertainment: that people’s private lives are inextricable from their public success. That notion has now spread beyond the confines of TV. In a world of fractured attention spans, many public figures are accustomed to mining their personal dramas to stay at the top of their audience’s feeds. No matter that ratings are down across cable; what matters today, as in 2006, is holding on to whoever’s still tuned in.
The Real Housewives of Orange County didn’t find its voice right away. Compared with later installments of the franchise, that first season was surprisingly low on drama. Each woman spent most of her screen time with her family or friends, almost documentary-style, rather than on big dinners or trips with her fellow cast members. During production, some peculiar ways of drumming up viewer attention were discussed: Dunlop told me that he asked his friend Paul Reubens to “play a round of golf with the ladies” in character as Pee-wee Herman. (It never happened.)
But when Season 2 arrived without one of the show’s original five leads, Kimberly Bryant, the series’ fundamental innovation started to materialize. Viewers began to realize that cast members weren’t guaranteed their position—and though the shake-up translated into only slightly more drama in that second season (including the inaugural physical fight, albeit not directly between housewives), the show would embrace a ruthless elimination system over the next few years, more reminiscent of Survivor than The Real World. Instead of facing tribal councils, though, cast members were jettisoned quietly, when producers behind the scenes decided not to ask them back.
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To justify their place on the show, cast members had to constantly stir up conflict. “No one goes on Housewives and wants to be done after one season,” Martina Baldwin, a TV scholar at California State University at Fullerton who wrote her dissertation on the Bravo universe, told me. Besides fame, there’s a clear reason this is the case: For many cast members, especially those whose wealth is tied to their partner, the show is a great opportunity for building more financial independence. “They go on knowing that if they do well, if they perform to the network’s liking and to the production’s liking, they will have an opportunity to continue this job, much like a working actor.”
A kind of corporate hierarchy soon clicked into place. If a cast member performed poorly on a given season, Bravo might demote them to “friends of” status, which usually meant they would be paid differently: Per-season or per-episode rates might be replaced by per-scene rates, depending on the contract. Season-ending reunion episodes, where cast members gather to litigate the main drama of each season, became more like an annual job review. The network even seems to give booted cast members a chance to claw their way back; auxiliary spin-offs such as Ultimate Girls Trip have functioned as a kind of audition for ex-housewives to rehabilitate their fame.
Over the years, the savviest cast members learned to preemptively identify which parts of their life made for good TV. D’Andra Simmons, from The Real Housewives of Dallas, told me that before every season, she made lists of dramatic events in her life for the producers. There was an art to planning out one’s season-to-season arc: Simmons said her storylines were all drawn from genuine emotional ruptures, but “you can’t just stick a camera up and hope something happens. The season has to have a beginning, middle, and end.” One example: While filming the show, a box of photos arrived from Simmons’s estranged stepmother. “I opened it, and I was like, Oh my God, this is a great story.’” Simmons decided to talk more publicly about that relationship on air—and late in the season, off-camera, she met up with her stepmother for the first time in years.
The gigantic ecosystem that Bravo has built around the franchise helps amplify such suspenseful moments and skirmishes for on-screen status. Housewives, which debuted on the same day as the first-ever tweet, used social media from the beginning to build up its stars; early cast members wrote blogs for Bravo reacting to the show. Other Bravo-owned platforms gave them a way to keep the turmoil going: Watch What Happens Live, the 2009 talk show started by Andy Cohen, offered cast members a second chance at winning whatever argument might have consumed a recent Housewives episode. The corporate platform became a blueprint for the rest of the TV-entertainment landscape, inspiring other branded aftershows such as Talking Dead.
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In 2019, the arrival of BravoCon—a massive, multiday event featuring cast-member meet-and-greets and new-show announcements—only underscored the network’s power. Few other channels have managed to turn their brand into a recurring offline event at this scale, and Housewives cast members seem to have no choice but to cater to this fandom. If they gain traction, they can parlay that audience into a successful business, as Bethenny Frankel most famously did with her Skinnygirl margarita blend. (According to the writer Brian Moylan, housewives are not highly paid in their first season; though successful cast members can later negotiate their rates up, many also derive supplementary income from their own businesses.)
“It’s an entire publicity program, from the show, to the products you can sell, to BravoCon, to the talk shows about the housewives,” Jessica Millward, a professor at UC Irvine and a co-host of the Historians on Housewives podcast, told me. But that publicity program has a downside: Without Bravo, some cast members have found themselves suddenly out in the cold. A number of housewives who left their shows have returned to Bravo in some way, either as guests or as full cast members. It’s a dilemma faced by many modern influencers: Once you insert your life into the machine, it’s hard to extricate yourself.
Television has come a long way from Coto de Caza. Since the premiere of Housewives, audiences have become inoculated to the show’s blurring of personal drama with brand building. Outside of Bravo, mid-list celebrities everywhere maintain some awareness of their own figurative season-to-season leaderboard, and how a well-choreographed feud or a breakup can be leveraged into marketing. Even regular people on YouTube and TikTok have mastered a similar art of curating a version of yourself for public consumption. Consider an influencer like Nara Smith, who is known for making dinners, sunscreens, and toothpastes from scratch in elaborate outfits. Is she totally serious? Is she playing herself up for attention? Is it all one big joke? That’s for the audience to decide.
Keeping up with self-promotion both seamless and relentless can feel dizzying, or just plain exhausting. And even as other networks have managed to mimic the Housewives formula, these new efforts lack the same draw as the original. Bravo can’t always make it work, either: Offshoots in Washington, D.C., and Dallas have been canceled. But as long as cast members feel the existential pressure to keep their on-screen storylines lively, Housewives insulates itself from going totally stale. There’s always another episode of Watch What Happens Live, and another chance to pitch oneself to America.
The post How Real Housewives Rewrote the American Dream appeared first on The Atlantic.
