How Do You Like Them Apples?

None of these women would deign to wallow in the mess that was pre-reboot RHONY. That’s the point, but it also may be a red flag. Photo: Danielle Levitt/Bravo

Each day makes it harder for me to justify continuing to use the platform that I refuse to call anything but Twitter, because I stick to the original. But Housewives fans who are sticking to the original are making my social-media experience even worse. Yes, I’m talking about the people who keep coming for the RHONY reboot. Some say it’s not giving enough, some think the new ladies will never give us great TV like the OG crew, some joke that Bravo is forcing fan accounts to post positive things, and some want the Bravo execs who ordered the reboot fired. Even Mary Cosby told Andy Cohen the reboot put her to sleep right to his face.

I may be in the minority, but I think that RHONY is actually pretty good these days. That’s probably because I very quickly accepted the fact that Bravo is trying to pull the franchise back from what it (d)evolved into over the course of 13 seasons. RHONY 2.0 feels a little old school in a way I appreciate: The women act more aspirational than messy, and the show is focusing on their luxurious lifestyles in a way we haven’t seen since teenage Avery Singer was in her mother’s closet talking about what an embarrassment she is. Now, we get Jenna Fucking Lyons in her closet pointing out dresses she wore while partying with the Obamas. Ramona could never (especially because she for sure votes red). We’re even getting onscreen price tags like back in the old days — just ask Sai de Silva’s $117,000 Range Rover.

Jenna would never be on the old RHONY. Neither would Erin or Ubah. They’re not the sort of women who are willing to get shouted at in front of the Morgan Letters by a bunch of middle-aged drunks. Jessel, Brynn, and Sai might have been, but I still don’t think any of them would have gelled with the old crew. These ladies don’t hang out at Beautique; they’re too busy dissing Catch and chillin’ at swanky members’ clubs like Zero Bond and Casa Cipriani. Sonja Morgan sells her clothes at Century 21, while Jenna’s lashes are on Goop, Ubah’s hot sauce is one of Oprah’s favorite things, and Brynn makes fun of Rebecca Minkoff for selling her bags at Nordstrom Rack. Just like the Jeffersons, the new RHONY is moving on up, but out of the stodgy Upper East Side and to the cooler confines of downtown. Sai, like Alex McCord, is in Brooklyn trying to raise a family in this economy, but her townhouse could eat Alex and Simon’s in one bite.

While casting could have surely found plenty of women in the five boroughs willing to eviscerate one another and humiliate themselves for a shot at being in Andy’s pantheon, that’s not what they delivered. It seems like they went after women who will only deign to be on reality TV if it can erase the stigma of trashiness that comes along with it. Imagine what Erin would do if the public ever found out she pooped on the floor of a Colombian villa. Do you know how hard Ubah would work to keep the footage of her drunkenly falling into a bush off of our television sets? Rebooted RHONY isn’t aiming for unabashed catfights and public embarrassment. It wants lowercase-d drama: Jessel bitching about an ugly freebie, Sai getting pissed Brynn said something she wasn’t supposed to, Ubah and Erin having a blowup about a prank gone wrong.

These are the sorts of fights that we used to have on the show before Real Housewives got cranked up to 11 million; the biggest blowup of the first season was when Bethenny Frankel didn’t introduce Countess LuAnn (as it was then spelled) to the driver as “Mrs. de Lesseps.” How quaint! That’s the thing about long-running reality TV like RHONY: It needs to keep outdoing itself in the mess department if it wants to keep viewers lined up. Luann went from being concerned with how she was addressed to sleeping with a hot pirate, to marrying someone everyone else had dated, to getting arrested, to becoming a cabaret star. Ramona walked out of the first-ever reunion because Alex took some nude pictures, and by the end of her reign, she had peed on various surfaces, talked about how she likes a man to please her but won’t please him, and acted so horrible that she not only ruined Black Shabbat but got the whole damn show canceled.

That’s why RHONY was in line for a reboot. It had to get the show back to square one, a place where it can be a little classier. Instead of Ramona having a party for her 50 closest girlfriends in a basement bar that she got as a freebie because she dragged Dorinda Medley and Sonja out to the party planner’s office in Long Island, Erin is throwing herself an anniversary party at the newly opened  Hall des Lumières. It was sponsored to the hilt and boring, but, honey, did it look expensive.

Photo: Ralph Bavaro/Bravo

That’s not really what Bravo has conditioned us to want these days, though, so it’s jarring for some fans that RHONY isn’t serving up story lines like Erika Jayne’s disgrace and Kyle Richards’s breakup, like Jen Shah’s arrest and Heather Gay’s epic takedown of Monica Garcia, like Shannon Beador’s DUI and lawsuit. It’s like going into a Wendy’s and suddenly the burgers aren’t square. (This metaphor was brought to you by Lisa Barlow.) I think there is definitely a place for the circular burgers in a square-burger world, but I understand there being a disconnect with fans who just want Dorinda to come back and angrily slur at everyone who comes within ten paces of her. Maybe it would be easier if our old gals were still on TV. (I will once again suggest RHONY: Hamptons, where we see Ramona, Sonja, Lu, Jill Zarin, Kelly Killoren Bensimon, and maybe even some newbies in their native Hamptons for a summer.) But even without them, we need to try to let go of the past and get into the future that Bravo is delivering. Try the round burgers. You might find them both delicious and XXPEN$IVE.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t things to worry about with the new RHONY. The original apple holders signed on to the show before they knew all the connotations being a Real Housewife would entail. The new crew wants to be on the show — they went through the casting process, after all — but they don’t want those connotations taking their personal brands too down-market. In order to woo these women, it seems like the production company has made some allowances about not exposing too much of their real lives to scrutiny. And this new season, like a group picture in a Hinge profile, is giving me some major red flags in that regard.

First, there was Jenna, who said very publicly that her new girlfriend won’t be filming for the second season of the show. (Even though her mother, who Jenna had never met, shows up in the season-15 premiere. Make it make sense.) Now she’s engaged, which would normally mean a wedding spinoff, but we’re probably going to hear nothing about it. Ubah Hassan just confirmed that her boyfriend won’t be making an appearance this season, but she says she talks about him a lot. She could write a book as long as War and Peace about him, but what good is it if fans can’t even see his face? In the premiere, Erin told her husband, Abe, not to make a joke about magic mushrooms, not because it was a lame joke but because she didn’t want it on-camera. In the second episode, Brynn asked new friend-of Becky Minkoff what they should say when people ask them about her connection to Scientology, and Becky flatly responded, “No comment,” as if she resented a question about her religion coming up on a reality show about her life. When the women were asked about Scientology in their confessionals, Erin started a story about noted follower of Xenu John Travolta, before saying she can’t say it on television and taking it back.

I worry that the whole season is going to turn into Erin in that confessional: teasing us with great things only to pull back in the name of privacy. I don’t think the women need to get as down and dirty on RHONY as on the other franchises to make it fun, but there does need to be an ease with having the camera around. It’s not that Housewives don’t deserve privacy or boundaries, but they need to be challenged a bit; I think that we’d love these women and their show a bit more if they were willing to get just a little messy, if they were willing to let us judge them just a little. Knowing that Erin likes to do mushrooms would be the coolest thing about her. Heck, it might even make me like her. (Unlikely, but still.) But we’ll never know. All we’ll know is the sense that there’s an even better show in there somewhere, if only these women could just forget about the cameras and their reputations for a minute. If Bravo wants to convince fans to try something a bit classier than they’re used to, it also needs to convince the women to get down into the muck a little and meet the fans on the level we’ve become accustomed to.