After their surprisingly delightful first season of the rebooted Real Housewives of New York ended on a rather bland note of weepy, bizarro reunion, one had to wonder how the women would fare in their first BravoCon panel. Seeing as fan-favorite cast member Jenna Lyons declined to be a part of the “Let’s Hear it For (New) New York” event, the result was up in the air. Would the panel be anything special, or would it simply just fizzle out like the last reunion between these women did?
Fans were eager to find out, given that the RHONY panel managed to turn out the single longest lines that BravoCon 2023 has seen thus far. Attendees stretched out the door of the entrance to the Glam Stage at Caesars Forum and into the warm Las Vegas sun. It was a shocking turnout given that, while the new RHONY was received well with audiences and critics, it didn’t fare so well with week-to-week ratings. Perhaps the excitement surrounding this panel is all that Bravo will need when considering whether or not its core audience wants to see more of this batch of fresh faces.
While the anticipation was palpable, the panel itself was largely just a good time. There were no major revelations from the cast members, which isn’t a shock considering that the actual reunion delivered about the same level of story progression. Moderator Matt Rogers kept a buoyant rapport with the ladies, discussing everything from Ubah Hassan’s banana obsession to Brynn Whitfield’s ex-fiancé’s foreskin. There were, however, two moments during the hour that fans fell hushed for, a rare moment of total silence in a room full of whispers, cheers, and laughter.
The first was when Rogers addressed the elephant in the room: Lyons’ absence from the panel. “Do we know where she is?” he asked at the top of the conversation. Cast member Sai De Silva chimed in, telling the crowd: “Jenna’s at an event tonight and she apologizes that she cannot be here.” De Silva’s diplomatic response caused Rogers to add that it might’ve been Sai’s PR background that made it sound so professional, but if these women are to be believed, Lyons simply was fulfilling a prior obligation rather than appearing at BravoCon.
Hopefully, Whitfield’s follow-up joke that “Jenna is in bed with her girlfriend” means that Lyons is in good spirits about her time on the show, and not that she’s considering dipping out before Season 15.
The audience once again hushed when Rogers asked Hassan about her unpredictable, somewhat strange behavior on the Season 14 reunion, which ended with Hassan trying to explain why she was upset that Lyons hadn’t told her there would be cameras present one afternoon when Hassan showed up to film.
“Ubah, I know you wanted to clear this up,” Rogers began. “What did you mean when you told Jenna at the reunion to not confuse being assertive with being angry?” Hassan prefaced her statement by referencing the moment at the reunion where she had previously tried to explain this, but was cut off by Whitfield during the taping. “Let’s hope Brynn is not going to interfere with me or interrupt,” Hassan said, earning a collective “oooh!” from the audience.
“I’ve seen on the internet people say I’m hating on Jenna, she doesn’t like Jenna, all these things,” Hassan said. “I saw on the show that Jenna said, between me and Erin’s argument [in Anguilla], that she had seen a taste of my ‘Ubah Hot’—or anger, whatever it is—a little taste of it at her house.”
“What I was trying to tell Jenna is: At your house, I was assertive. In Anguilla, I was angry. You cannot use that incident to give weight or justify what me and Erin argued about in Anguilla. [Jenna] wasn’t around, she was in her room the whole day. She didn’t know what was happening. That’s what I meant, but somebody interfered and interrupted, and I didn’t finish my sentence.”
With that finally clarified—and Whitfield apologizing for cutting Hassan off during the reunion—everyone can finally be on level ground ahead of Season 15 filming sometime in the near future. Let’s just hope that Hassan, Lyons, and the rest of the crew continue bringing the same fun and heat that the fans of the new RHONY are lining up to get more of.
