The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is TV’s best soap opera, week after week offering twists more shocking than secret twins and characters returning from the dead. That’s because it’s all real, happening in the most haunted suburb in the continental United States.
Where else do two women connect over knowing the long-lost birth father of one’s child? Is there another city where women squabble over body positivity in a parking lot off the side of a snowy mountain? Surely, there’s no other place on Earth where Lisa Barlow could come across anywhere near a voice of reason.
But that all happens here in Salt Lake City. Five episodes in, Season 5 has continued to evolve into the most captivating season in modern Real Housewives history, carried by the ever-changing bonds between our OGs and a team of wonderfully bizarre newbies.
Past the snowy slopes, the soapy reality of Lisa knowing the man who fathered Bronwyn’s daughter Gwen is discussed in a reflexology bar and spa, whatever that means. Back in the Milwaukee airport, the two were discussing Gwen, and Bronwyn innocuously showed Lisa a photo of her dad. There, Lisa realized she knew him. (He passed away 15 years ago.)
Bronwyn breaks down the conversation she had with his family at the age of 19, detailing how coldly she was treated and subsequently dismissed. The conversation is incredibly raw—despite it happening while spa employees rub Lisa and Bronwyn’s feet—and peels back the ever-disturbing layers of Mormonism this show has long made its bread and butter.
Lisa, the sole practicing Mormon left on the full-time cast, has a relationship with the father’s family. She says that Gwen’s grandparents are ready to meet her, but Bronwyn struggles to reconcile their change of tune with the apathetic people she has known.
It’s bold and beautiful. It’s young and restless. And it’s a necessary scene to understand not just Bronwyn’s character, but Lisa’s. Despite being “Mormon 2.0,” Lisa has long danced between the restrictive views of Mormonism and her own image as a progressive, post-patriarchal woman. She’s a needed contrast on this cast full of recovering Mormons, toeing the line between Utah’s disturbing past and its complicated present.
It’s not too surprising, then, that the family sings a different tune to Gwen than they did with Lisa. The Salt Lake City Lisa lives in is not the same as the rest of the ladies. The Mormonism she ignores as archaic is fully prevalent in the rest of their experiences, which further exposes just how unique Lisa’s purview is.
That’s exemplified pretty well in her growing issue with Britani. Britani, Mormon 1.0 in every way, has shown herself to be the brand ambassador for naivete all season, proudly holding up a fictional relationship with a D-list Osmond in the hopes of finding self-worth through romance.
While in Milwaukee, Lisa simply told Britani what’s obvious to everyone else: This man sucks and he’s playing you. Lisa comes from a place of reality, and Britani lives firmly in the land of delusion. She just resigned her lease, too. She can’t move now!
Britani’s one of those people you spend two hours on a phone call with, listening to all her issues with her boyfriend before helping her make a hard, but necessary, decision. The next time you see her, you discover she’s gotten back with him. And you realize it doesn’t matter what you say, she will make the same stupid decision, over and over, and the best thing you can do is stop caring.
Once she returned home, Britani was met with flowers and a bizarre “love” letter from Jared Osmond. In it, Mr. Osmond says he learned from a “credible source that your new “friends” on the show helped come to the decision to dump me. How sad.”
“That’s the price I pay for loving a ‘Real Housewife.’ Our private life isn’t private anymore,” he adds.
Now, a normal person would see this as the manipulative, disturbing note it is. Britani is not a normal person, though. She’s just a girl in love! She can’t be held responsible for her actions. And maybe she’s smarter than we think, since she has become the rare friend-of to get a solo scene (even if Jared’s note makes perfectly clear Britani was filming as full time, before it was cruelly ripped away).
The queen of Salt Lake City meets Jared at one of the five restaurants that allows the Housewives to film, so he can manipulate her into believing she is a disgusting person who no longer deserves his divine love.
“What makes this different than every other break up?” Britani asks him. Just a guess, but it’s probably that this is the one time you initiated it, Brit.
Jared is furious with Britani for allowing Lisa to text him from her phone, and Britani’s pissed that Lisa would jeopardize her amazing relationship. Jared sometimes holds her hand, even if he drops it when they’re around pretty women. And yes, he’s on dating apps—to prove that no one else is as perfect as Britani, I’m sure. Lisa is evil for trying to threaten that.
Later, on the side of the mountainous road, Britani tries to take Lisa to task. Plastic unicorn in hand, Britani tells Lisa she’s upset with her for “causing a huge rift” between her and Jared.
“You were so mean to him” Britani yells, to which Lisa replies, “He deserved it.” And she’s right.
Britani has decided to leave the ladies out of her relationship, going forward. They just don’t get it. What Britani doesn’t get is that the man she sees as a boyfriend does not like or respect her, and if Lisa Barlow is coming across rationally while you spiral out of control, you are in deep with your delusion.
Britani just wants to make it to Heaven. How can she do that without the devout spirit of this Osmond descendent? She already sacrificed her relationship with her kids. She’s putting her snowflake at risk. She can’t lose him, too! It’s genuinely tragic, even though it is so absurd it continues to come across hilariously. The world is a cruel place.
What’s nice about this episode is that it works to ground RHOSLC, meshing the truly over-the-top aspects wonderfully with the characters’ deep-rooted trauma. One second, we’re listening to Whitney freak out over Lisa defaming her to a Housewives fan account, and moments later, we watch Bronwyn have a true heart-to-heart with her daughter over the rocky relationship with her paternal family.
Whitney Drew, as the episode titles her, spends this episode stewing on the sidelines. First, a hotel employee alerts her that there was a box found in Lisa’s room: the Prism gift Whitney gave all the girls. Then, Heather informs Whitney that Lisa, not Meredith, was the first to bring up the Alibaba business drama. Finally, a podcaster calls Whitney to deliver her the devastating news of his background check.
I’ll skip through all the nonsense: Lisa allegedly leaked this info to the account. OK? We didn’t need a team of independent podcast fact-checkers to let us know that Lisa dislikes Whitney and gleefully spreads rumors about her. Never in any of this has Whitney properly disputed the claim she dropships her jewelry, anyway.
Maybe she should spend less time talking to D-list podcasters and more time asking the employees of the Vida Tequila mines to dig up a diamond or two for her. No one wants to work these days.
Well, that’s not entirely true. No one is working harder than Angie K., who’s fighting to escape Lisa’s shadow and make herself a real power player. Between seasons, she recruited Mary Cosby, and now she’s launched a full-on attack against her former best friend.
Angie lays it out in a confessional: It’s impossible to keep Lisa happy, that’s why she’s had beef with each cast member (sans Jennie Nguyen!). But Angie made a fatal mistake by confiding in Heather, who’s fully enjoying her reclaimed spot as Mormon mean girl now that she’s in with resident queen bee Lisa Barlow.
Angie may or may not have implied that Lisa lets her son Henry game until two in the morning. It just depends if you think she was making a generic example or taking a direct show at Lisa. I err on the side of the latter, and clearly so does Heather, given she spins Angie’s words to Lisa in this way. She adds a little sauce and some spice too, but Heather “thought what Angie said was mean,” and she wants her held to account.
The lines have been drawn. The Lisa, Heather, and Meredith trio of terror have their sights set on taking Angie K. down, and once Meredith has returned from her Bat Mitzvah-induced sabbatical, they’ll be in business. It’s a good thing Angie has that evil eye popsocket on her phone. Plus, she has the second coming on her side, as Mary “God” Cosby firmly makes clear in the episode’s final scene. Here, Mary calls out Heather’s potstirring and backseat producing.
“I feel like you leave a trail of lies,” Mary shoots at Heather, noting the black eye and her backtracking on body positivity amid her use of Ozempic. This brings us to the most interesting fight of the episode, as both Mary and Heather make a supreme amount of sense. That’s a shocking statement in and of itself.
Yes, Mary has a point that Heather is a bit wishy washy. She’s certainly changed her tune a lot in the five years she’s been on TV. Heather’s right, though, that saying “body positivity is a lie” is not a hypocritical statement. We can play dumb, but it’s simply the truth that society treats people differently depending on the size of their body, and Heather’s own experience with this—further spotlighted by a TV-documented transformation—is pretty interesting.
Maybe Heather’s a bit of a hypocrite. She’s certainly flawed. But as Ozempic has become such a hot topic on and off Housewives, Heather’s explanation resonates.
The Salt Lake City ladies are full of beautiful nuances. One week, they’re fighting incomprehensibly about the “hilled Whitney” and the next, they’re grounding themselves in the deep-rooted complexities of humanity. The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City may be one of TV’s finest comedies, but the reason it’s such a refined piece of entertainment is its ability to balance its many genres under one umbrella. If you don’t think too hard about it, they’re the closest thing to a modern take on Little Women.
