Real Housewives of New York City
The Real Housewives of New York City is a popular reality program on American television with a huge following. Originally titled ‘Manhattan Moms’ for its opening on Season 1 in March 2008, it eventually took the moniker from a spin-off of an earlier Bravo cable network, The Real Housewives of Orange County.
But make no mistake; this is no show about actual housewives. In reality, barring one, LuAnn de Lesseps, the four other women portrayed on the show, namely Jill Zain, Ramona Singer, Alex McCord and Bethenny Frankel are shown as affluent career women. The show goes into the lives of these five women and their families in an attempt to bring out their lifestyles.
When the show first premiered in March 2008 it met with mixed responses and a lukewarm reception but a tight, but altogether unflattering storyline, generated great interest and gradually viewership increased. When the second season opened in February 2009 it had climbed several rungs up the ladder in performance ratings and introduced a sixth “housewife” Kelly Bensimon into the show.
The third consecutive season which premiered in May 2010 featured two more women, Jennifer Gilbert and Sonja Morgan although the former’s role is limited and she has not been formally introduced into the show.
Plans are afoot to film a fourth season beginning the summer of 2010 but the continuation of one participant, perhaps more, is in question.
The show itself is graphic and leaves little to the imagination, spinning tales of friendship and familial love amidst deeper, negative feelings of vindictive and selfish behavior with tones of jealousy and promiscuousness. At the time of its third season in May 2010, the show had begun to pan out on the psyche of the common American who liked lapping up the seemingly unflattering human feelings and failings that were dished out.
Surprisingly, the lives of these women inexplicably intertwined and brought together for the world to view at large is not very different from reality. As Alex McCord recently said in an interview her life has undergone a sea change. In her first season on the show, she was working full time with a retailer and shooting for the show on weekends which was indeed frustrating and eating into precious time. But over the recurring seasons, she has worked out a comfortable schedule for herself and family that allows for as much time among them as possible. She is now into business on her own but still admits that it is a far greater responsibility than holding a full time job. She readily admits that filming on sets for the show was itself a learning experience in many ways, there is an underlying layer of competition and insecurity among participants which leads to situations at times becoming volatile with someone making a remark that they didn’t mean to or which sometimes was taken out of context. McCord readily admits that social networking has added a new dimension to the show by closer interaction with fans and critics and has helped keep most of them with feet firmly on the ground.
Jill Zarin, another participant, confessed that she has been receiving hate mail and threatening letters from overzealous viewers who take their obsessions with the stars too far. She says that the downside of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter is that, there is hardly any place to hide, and the whole world out there wants to have a piece of you.
Media critics have been quite harsh in their reviews of the show. To sample a few, “it’s all about seeing how other people live……characters are most certainly from an alien planet, but isn’t that the whole point…”
Another review goes, “awful series don’t waste your time…the women are unattractive, dumb, boring and just trash…Orange County was funny and worth watching”.
“The women act as if they like each other, then on camera they are all over each other…..have to shake head in disbelief”.
In reality, that explains the concept of disconnection and cluelessness that the spendthrift, squabbling women put across so effectively that promotes Real Housewives of NYC.
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