Aftershocks
It's official: Only Houston could save Real Housewives from itsfranchise-killing Miami mess
Don’t look for flipped tables or yanked extensions in Miami.
You know you’re in Real Housewives trouble if your franchise is replaced by a show called Pregnant in Heels. That’s right. After a surprisingly short season, the five saucy spitfires of Florida find themselves displaced by a nanny concierge.
We can’t really tell you what a nanny concierge is, but here are six reasons why it’s twilight of The Real Housewives, at least in Miami.
Your most exciting character is a woman who describes herself as “nearly 99 ½ .” Marysol’s mystifying mom did it again for us. As she looks over Marysol’s gorgeous wedding photos, she can’t get enough of her daughter, who looks like “royalty” while her new son-in-law looks like “a bodyguard protecting your mink.” We suspect she’ll warm to Philippe and she certainly held court at Marysol’s misguided cooking lesson party. This brings us to our next reason.
Your brand new French husband, the one with a sexy Rugby player’s build, is hawking frozen fish at your “elegant” dinner party. When it’s her turn to impress the gals at yet another cooking ‘n’ cocktails soirée, the best Marysol can do is invite Philippe to introduce his new line of healthy pre-packaged foods. At least Marysol has gone to the trouble of providing each guest with a monogrammed chef jacket.
“You can dress like a chef and it will taste like a chef [sic]” chimes Philippe as he cuts through a plastic bag he’s just pulled from a pot of boiling water.
The other women watch as if it were some kind of failed joke. “I feel like I’m on an infomercial,” Alexia exclaims, and we know just what she means.
When Philippe finishes his presentation of flaked, pre-cooked salmon with a few diced tomatoes, we wondered if he would place the plate on the floor for his over-privileged and hungry house cat.
Your show keeps staging the same failed dinner party (with psychic) as if it’s Groundhog Day and even Bill Murray couldn’t save you. We knew from the first terrible party at Lea Black’s house that no good could come from these “cooking lessons.”
No one learned to cook, but the girls were great with knives. Elsa shows up in stylish sunglasses and what looks a like a Roberto Cavalli frock, and there wasn’t enough wine in Philippe’s well-stocked refrigerator to dull the shrill voice of Larsa Pippen.
When Adriana asks for one of Elsa’s famous readings, Elsa plays coy, saying, “I’m very expensive, darling!” Larsa shrieks that she doesn’t believe in psychics, but then goads Elsa into reading her vibes.
“I like you very much,” Elsa says, “but you’re emotionally immature.” Worse still, “you’re worried about a man, your man.” She doles out kinder words for Lea, Adrianna, and Alexia before telling Cristy that her split from NBA star Glenn Rice was her own fault.
In a video diary Larsa shrieks, “I’m the most stable person here” before attacking the other wives for their many divorces and children. Elsa must be the problem, she concludes: “My mom always gave me a pat on the back and told me I was fabulous, so I grew up thinking everything I did was great.”
Well, a girl can dream. Elsa says it best later. “Stupid and redundant,” she calls them, and, “a bunch of people who probably didn’t even go to high school. I don’t remember anything intelligent or even funny they said. They are Miss Nobodies.”
We couldn’t have said it any better. Come on, Bravo, give Elsa her own show. We’re sure she can reverse the Miami ratings slide.
You need a Canyon Ranch vacation and newly-learned stripper moves to get a man to marry you. Adrianna and Frederic spirit themselves away for an erotic mud bath to discuss future plans. Within seconds Frederic agrees to marry her, adopt her son and tell-off her ex-husband. All of this happens before she performs the strip tease she’s been practicing with a coach.
We’d hoped to be spared an unseemly display. But when she whips off a gold lame dress to reveal a chintzy red negligee and stutters “I work in a strip club” in some pale imitation of longing, we found ourselves missing Danielle “Garbage” Staub of New Jersey Housewives fame.
Your son aspires to a modeling career, which excites you more than it excites him. Alexia is full of girlish anticipation when she brings her 17-year-old son Peter to meet Ron, a high-powered Miami modeling agent.
“He came out in Ocean Drive Magazine!” she says of his one and only gig. Surely, it’s just a small step up to the cover of GQ!
Alexia is practically drooling when Peter has to take off his shirt for the photographer, and her voice-over reminds us that he’s beautiful and he has a beautiful body. Perhaps, but he doesn’t look like high-fashion material to us, and once the photographer leaves, he’s quick to yell at Mom for not preventing him from stuffing himself before the shoot.
“Of course I’m gonna show a little belly after that,” he retorts. “You’re ready to model for Calvin Klein!” she insists. Haven’t we seen this unfortunate dialogue played out before, in New Jersey and Orange County?
Even a celebrity chef and fresh organic produce can’t save your disastrous luncheon.The crass Lea Black, in a white ruffled collar that reminds us of a paint-by-number clown portrait, decides to surprise the other housewives with a two-hour SUV limousine drive out of Miami. When they arrive at Paradise Farms to enjoy a meal cooked by none other than Michelle Bernstein, all the women can do is complain about the heat and the bugs.
And on top of it, they have to harvest their own vegetables! Even a sampling of some fresh clitoria flowers (“it tastes just like honeysuckle!” farm owner Gabriele Marewski exults) doesn’t lift the mood.
Marysol looks like a goth chicken in her black-feathered hat. When Larsa pipes up with, “My mom is even a bigger bitch than your Mom,” Marysol just goes silent. That remark would have flipped a table in New Jersey. Here it just dampens the already humid crowd. Cristy pines for a cheeseburger, and Larsa wonders if the multiple stray dogs have been pissing on the produce.
The wise Chef Bernstein busies herself softening some rhubarb and mostly ignores them. “To make Michelle Bernstein and us drive all the way there to pick some weeds and put them in a bowl was a waste of time,” complains Alexia, and we couldn’t agree more.
It seems there’s no better place to jump the shark than in Miami. The beaches are great, but we hate to see this flop of a franchise stealing all the best bits from the other Housewives only to ruin them.
Bravo, get your act together. Find us more terrifyingly frivolous hausfraus with rude psychic sidekicks, slick stripper poles, indifferent children, weekly charity events and drunken cat fights.
Are you sure you won’t try Houston?