While Sutton’s future seems shaky without Garcelle around, Rachel Zoe wastes no time getting into the mix with the Beverly Hills Housewives.
Photo: Trae Patton/Bravo
I’m so glad to have my girls back! I know that we bitch every season about how RHOBH is boring — especially since it kicks up right as The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, our most high-octane franchise, is winding down — but no one does it like these California girls. The episode begins with some slo-mo B-roll footage. Here’s Sutton riding her horse like it’s the opening to Knots Landing. Erika Jayne is either washing her car in her driveway or filming an unreleased Whitesnake video. Boz is at a photo shoot, giving her best smile and her throatiest laugh. Dorit is spending someone else’s money at Hermès and crossing Rodeo Drive with “big mistake, huge” energy. Kyle Richards is, I don’t know, walking to her car with an open Birkin and continuing not to train her menagerie of poorly behaved dogs.
Everything about this seems rich, it seems familiar, it seems, I don’t know, right. It’s like no time has passed, even though most of the episode is spent giving us updates on where all the ladies are since the end of last season. Let’s start with Dorit. Just as cameras picked up, her soon-to-be-ex-husband, PK, a garden gnome made out of used urinal cakes, was papped making out with a woman on the street like he’s a Temu Mauricio. (At least when Mo does it, the women are hot and it gives everyone, apart from Kyle, a little tingle downstairs.) Dorit is struggling with the divorce and says that her ex is asking for joint custody even though he travels a lot and does not have a lifestyle that will allow him to raise their children half of the time.
We learn later in the episode that her oldest, Jagger, is making remarks about the two of them not being together, and she says both kids know what is up with their relationship. When Kyle asks her flat out if she’s told them they’re getting a divorce, she says “no.” Okay, so that means that they still don’t know, right? I guess. I don’t know. What’s crazy about Dorit is that she will leave 17-minute voice notes, but she can’t sit down and have a straightforward conversation with her children. Their sensing something is wrong, and Dorit not telling them, has to be worse than whatever the truth will do to them, right?
Dorit gave her girl Boz a $2,000 blanket for her birthday and, well, there aren’t enough eye rolls left in my eye-roll container for this one. Boz doesn’t have much of an update. She and Keely are still together, her daughter is looking amazing, and she turned out a bunch of looks. She seems to have taken up Garcelle’s mantle of getting the girlies to answer the questions they would rather not talk about, and she’s doing a great job with it. She trash-talks PK, a rabid raccoon passed out in a liquor-store bathroom, with Dorit, which was much needed, though the gold star of saying shit about that man goes to Sutton’s mother, Reba, who unleashes a torrent of hate against him that is only equaled by my eloquent descriptions of him.
Then we see Boz out to dinner with Erika, and she peppers her with all the right questions, too. Erika talks about her gig at Mighty Hoopla in London this summer, which she says was the best show of her career. I have seen several Erika Jayne shows, including this one, and I will say that it was spectacular. Maybe that’s because I was watching it backstage with Jessie Ware, Florence Pugh, Kesha, Jake Shears, and various and sun-dried other celebrity well-wishers. She says that right before going onstage, she got the news that Tom was sentenced to prison and saw a video of him being led away, where he didn’t look at all like the man she married.
Then Boz asks the question we all really want the answer to. She says she’s “heard the rumors,” and she must be referring to when Erika supposedly shacked up with Summer House star Jesse Solomon. Boz asks her what happened, and Erika says, “Nothing worth reporting,” which could go in so many different directions, none of which are flattering to our boy Jesse Solomon. (She should have held out for West.) It was a little funny that they didn’t mention him by name or get more into it, considering Bravo loves to tout an inter-show romance, but in her confessional, Erika made it clear that she shut it down, and in her convo with Boz, she made it clear that she’s getting laid on the regular and is quite happy.
Speaking of getting laid on the regular, Kyle and Mauricio’s daughters are sick of their dad having his picture taken making out with people on the sidewalk. Kyle has a meeting with her brood to start planning for Alexia’s wedding to her childhood friend. There’s not much of a Kyle update. She’s still single; she’s not dating anyone; there are two daughters left at home; and not a single person has said a word that starts with a capital M and rhymes with “organ” around her in the past six months. Faye Resnick asked for Captain Morgan rum to go with her Diet Coke, and she’s been banned from the house until the summer solstice party.
I left the last update with Sutton, who clearly has the most going on. Not only is her son James leaving for college and her mother, Reba (the show’s newest star), visiting for a bit more camera time, but she has also lost two very important people in her life. She says she has no idea what happened with her and Garcelle since the last reunion. She has texted her repeatedly and never heard back. Kyle says she also reached out and didn’t hear back. Erika says they unfollowed each other on social media, and I was shocked to find out they had been following each other in the first place.
This is a make-or-break season for Sutton because of this. Kyle says that Sutton was always different with her one-on-one and off-camera, but then totally different when Garcelle was in the picture, and she hopes that without Garcelle, Sutton can be more consistent. That seems to be the keyword all the women are using as a talking point. At dinner with Boz, Erika says they’ve both struggled with Sutton because she is so inconsistent and they’re never sure whether she’s going to be sweet or angry. Boz says that without Garcelle as her constant support, Sutton needs to reconsider her friendships with each of the women and whether she wants to keep them. I think what she really means is that Sutton needs to figure out whether she can fit in with anyone in the group to keep her job. (Speaking of which, it’s strange that we got no Jen Tilly this entire episode.)
While we’ll never know what happened with Garcelle and Sutton because Garcelle is not talking, I don’t think we’ll ever know what happened between Sutton and her former assistant, Avi, because Sutton isn’t talking about it. She alludes to not needing an assistant, to him not being able to communicate, and a host of other things, but it seems like there had to be an inciting incident that got him fired. The editors do her no favors when they rerun a montage of Sutton being extra demanding with her employee. Either Avi did something really shady and Sutton is protecting him by not saying it publicly, or she did something really shady and she’s protecting herself by keeping it mum and Avi got a big fat check and an NDA. Either way, there is definitely more to both of these stories, but I don’t think we’re ever going to get an explanation.
After all the updates from the ladies, we then get the mother of all updates from the new mother on this show, Rachel Zoe. I know we have the Eileen Davidson Accords and we can’t judge a new Housewife until after her fifth episode, but I feel like it’s a bit different for Rachel because we know her. It’s not like we know her the way we knew Lisa Rinna, Denise Richards, or Jen Tilly, because they were in Hollywood. We know her know her. We know her from a Bravo show very much like this one. As Rachel says by way of introduction, “My name is Rachel Zoe. You may or may not remember me from Bravo, because I’ve lived here before.” My major memory of The Rachel Zoe Project was her and Brad Goreski always screaming, “Where are the dresses?!” That was basically the entire show for five seasons. (Wait, does that mean Brad is coming back? Do they even talk? How do we get a Brad cameo? He’s kind of like a yassified Avi. Can he be Sutton’s new assistant?)
So, no, we can’t judge Rachel yet, but she’s just what I want for this show. She is rich, has a real career, lives in a giant house, and is at an interesting point in her life where she’s ditched her husband, Rodger (who never had a good haircut his entire life), and is raising two children with names so made up that it would be blasphemy to print them. (However, they both seem adorable and cool.) She also, importantly, has organic connections to the cast, is a longtime friend of Kathy Hilton’s, socializes with Kyle, and is buddies with Boz after having her on her podcast a year earlier.
When the cast finally congeals at Kyle’s summer solstice party, Rachel is right up in there in the mix. When talking about Kyle’s ex, she says that she saw him in Aspen and that three people tried to set her up with him, and she said “no” because he’s Kyle’s ex. That’s our girl! Sticking up for what’s right. When the talk turns to Dorit’s ex, she’s even harsher: “He sucks, you don’t want to be with a narcissist, and if it didn’t happen now, it was going to happen in five years. Sorry. I’m sorry!” But Dorit loves it. We all love it. It’s great having her back. It’s great having them all back. As the sun sets on Kyle’s backyard and the dogs bark inside, the rays start reflecting off their metallic dresses, off the flower crowns hastily assembled for the cameras, and off Rachel’s tiara that looks like it was once a belt for some czarina’s poodle. The dusk is slanting its light over all of them, like an Instagram filter covering up so many blemishes, so many things they want hidden, so much of the truth. But that’s what is great about our girls — the old ones, the new ones, the ones who are so old they’re new again — that the light won’t hit that way for long, and we’re all just at home waiting for the sun to finally set.
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