\n\tBritish audiences have an insatiable appetite for reality television. \u201cBig Brother\u201d is still on screens after 25 years. There are countless reality shows where affluent people have passive-aggressive arguments over salad, or find out their partners are having affairs (although I suspect they would have found out anyway, considering there\u2019s a film crew).<\/p>\n
\n\tYet, for a while now there\u2019s been a surprising lack of innovation in this genre. Sure, there\u2019s new competition reality shows like \u201cRace Across the World,\u201d but in the specific genre of \u2018people dealing very publicly with all of their dirty laundry,\u2019 not much has changed for quite a while. \u201cMade in Chelsea\u201d is about to debut its 29th series. \u201cThe Only Way Is Essex\u201d is about to begin its 34th. And whilst there have been countless American streaming dramas set within the U.K., from Lena Dunham\u2019s \u201cToo Much\u201d to the soapy political series \u201cThe Diplomat,\u201d only a few reality shows have made the same transatlantic jump. One exception being, of course, Alan Cumming seductively saying \u201cMuurrrddderrrrr\u201d from his Scottish castle on \u201cThe Traitors\u201d U.S.<\/p>\n
\n\tUntil now. \u201cReal Housewives\u201d is launching a London series. The franchise, which began in Orange County, follows the lives of affluent and successful women. Storylines explore friendship, rivalry, grief and hardship, with cast members being so open and transparent about literally everything that you can\u2019t help but watch. The franchise is known for its arguments between cast members, such as the time \u201cReal Housewives of New York City\u201d cast member Aviva Drescher took off her own prosthetic leg and threw it across the table mid-argument. There are also high-stakes plotlines you didn\u2019t see coming, such as the arrest of Salt Lake City\u2019s Jen Shah for her role in a nationwide telemarketing fraud. So as you can imagine, with a new British series, the marketing wordplay around the cast spilling the tea is endless.<\/p>\n
\n\tThis isn\u2019t the first time \u201cHousewives\u201d have crossed the pond. \u201cReal Housewives of Cheshire\u201d has graced British screens for more than a decade. Another in Jersey lasted only two seasons, but neither have managed to spark a cultural conversation beyond the relatively niche British channel viewers they both aired on. \u201cReal Housewives of London<\/a>,\u201d brought to screens by the reality streaming platform Hayu<\/a>, feels more of an ambitious (and costly) effort to change all that, with a production feel much more in line with its other Stateside iterations.<\/p>\n \n\tYet, launching a British version of shows is never an easy task. Fresh from the success of the property reality show \u201cSelling Sunset,\u201d Netflix attempted a similar British series called \u201cBuying London,\u201d but the outlandishly expensive (and arguably quite ugly) properties didn\u2019t sit well with viewers during the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. The only reaction it caused with viewers was them wanting to eat the rich.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cReal Housewives of London\u201d doesn\u2019t shy away from similar eye-watering extravagance, but it gets away with it. Why? Because all of it is camp. One of the Housewives proudly owns a stuffed swan called Gertrude. Camp! All of them are oblivious to the existence of London\u2019s very good public transport network, persisting to drive in constant stationary traffic. Camp! A little dog called \u2018Monty True Madness\u2019 is waited on paw and paw so much (a dog cannot be waited on hand and foot, it is a dog) that he\u2019s carried everywhere, with his paws only touching the floor for seconds in the debut episode. Camp camp camp!<\/p>\n \n\tIn fact, \u201cReal Housewives of London\u201d doesn\u2019t feel like an accurate title at all. It\u2019s more like \u201cReal Housewives of Belgravia With a Bit of Chelsea and the Countryside in It.\u201d Good luck to them navigating a British street that doesn\u2019t have a Balenciaga store on it. Scenes often veer into the ridiculous. Skincare entrepreneur Amanda Cronin was introduced to viewers with an admission that she is actually \u201ca really private person.\u201d Before you even have the time to respond with \u201cAmanda, do you know that you are on \u2018Real Housewives?\u2019\u201d you learn that Portia, one of her friend\u2019s dogs, has just had a facial. As you launch ChatGPT on your phone and ask AI whether labradors can have facials (apparently they can!), Juliet Mayhew turns up wearing an outfit that fell out of Queen Elizabeth I\u2019s wardrobe from the 16th century. For no reason. It\u2019s never explained. Scenes such as these continue for the rest of the episode.<\/p>\n \n\tInevitably, nearly all the Housewives take considerable time to boast about their proximity to the Royal Family, as if you somehow become more Royal the more geographically close you are to them at all times. If that fails, they advocate some tenuous link to some dead historical figures. Do you know that event planner Mayhew\u2019s partner Tiggy is a distant relative of William \u2018Braveheart\u2019 Wallace who lived from 1270-1305? You don\u2019t?!<\/p>\n \n\tIn keeping with the Housewives brand, there are quotable one-liners from the array of constant arguments. An argument about someone\u2019s alcohol intake is responded with \u201cHow\u2019s that Ozempic you\u2019ve shot in your body for the last five years?,\u201d to which they retort \u201cpretty good, I lost eight kilos.\u201d In a trailer following the first episode, a heated argument leads to a dramatic yell of \u201cBack to Paddington!,\u201d which has already become an internet meme despite the episode not having aired yet. It shouldn\u2019t need pointing out, but I will anyway \u2014 I think she means the train station, rather than the bear.<\/p>\n \n\tNone of what I have written above in this review so far is a criticism of \u201cReal Housewives of London,\u201d by the way. In fact, this is why it works. It is moreish and enjoyably stupid. Yet a challenge is whether the British version will be able to sustain such outlandish arguments and unnecessary high-stakes situations that has made the original franchise so loved.<\/p>\n \n\tThe first dispute in \u201cReal Housewives of London\u201d is over someone siding with their dentist rather than them from a situation that happened before the cameras started rolling. It was delivered in such an unnecessarily complicated way that at one point I nearly quit watching to work out what was actually happening by writing it all out on bits of paper, attaching it on a corkboard and linking these papers together with string. Yet this wasn\u2019t the issue. It was that the argument was surprisingly forced and wedged into the plot rather than spilling out naturally, even though on reality television everyone knows that reality can be anything but.<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s hard to work out right now as there was only one episode available to preview, but perhaps there\u2019s a cultural challenge that \u201cReal Housewives of London\u201d will have to navigate. In Britain, we\u2019re less inclined to throw wine at each other\u2019s faces during heated arguments. In fact, instead of yelling, disputes often remain unresolved, sometimes for decades, because we don\u2019t communicate our frustration to the person who has offended us so much in the first place. This often results in sheer hatred toward the other individual bubbling away in our subconscious, sometimes without the other person ever knowing that there\u2019s anything wrong. Only mutuals know of any conflict because snark and jokes are shared between them on WhatsApp.<\/p>\n \n\tIt is this culture that \u201cReal Housewives of London\u201d will have to navigate in, or forcefully find a way through. Trust me, this culture runs deep. Honestly, it makes you proud to be British.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"British audiences have an insatiable appetite for reality television. \u201cBig Brother\u201d is still on screens after 25 years.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":352992,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7757],"tags":[748,393,4884,10318,257,12720,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-352991","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-hayu","12":"tag-london","13":"tag-real-housewives-of-london","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115047149306611408","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}