This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by editor Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
There are four words that send a sharp chill up my spine, tingling my entire body—nay, soul—with a thrilling cocktail of giddiness, fear, and excitement: “dinner party from hell.”
When the aliens (who apparently exist and we somehow don’t spend every waking moment talking about) return from Earth to their home planets, they will report back on our society’s greatest cultural achievements in this medium they discovered called “television.” They will speak about the masterful comedy talents of Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, and Mary Tyler Moore. They will go on and on about great HBO dramas like The Sopranos, The Wire, and The Leftovers. One will mention Oprah, and the rest will bow their heads in solemn respect. And then the sagest of the group, the one who took the most time to understand what makes great human TV, will chime in: “And let us not forget the classic dinner scenes from The Real Housewives.”
After this week’s episode of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, our alien friends have another example to add to the list.
I’ve said it before and I will say it until my dying day: You don’t have to be a reality TV fan, or even understand what in the world these grown women are going on about, in order to appreciate what makes these episodes riveting television. (And to the harrumphers who scoff at the idea of reality TV being “good”: Please do tell me how you built your time machine to arrive here with that argument that was already stale in 2012.) As I take my last breath, my last words—my “Rosebud”—will be, “Mention it all.”
Treat this like any other piece of writing about pop culture you’ve yet to see. If you’re capable of appreciating an advanced review of Killers of the Flower Moon, then you can do the same as I explain the invigorating experience of witnessing Meredith Marks summon a demon and begin slurring in tongues as her eyes bulge out of her head while demanding that an uninvited dinner guest “CAN LEAVE!” (Good luck to The Exorcist: Believer for presenting anything close to as compellingly supernatural when the film premieres next week in theaters.)
Still, if you are a Bravo fan, you’re fully aware that we were being treated this week with “All Tricks, No Trust,” the RHOSLC dispatch from Palm Springs featuring a proverbial “dinner party from hell” that belongs on a Bravo Mount Rushmore alongside similar (iconic) fiascos that aired on the Beverly Hills, New York City, and Potomac franchises. The entire episode, though, offered primo Housewives chaos, veering from Shakespearean fights and power plays to award-worthy slapstick comedy.
The only background you really need to know is that the RHOSLC cast is on a trip to Palm Springs, where they are staying at Trixie Motel, the all-pink establishment owned by RuPaul’s Drag Race superstar Trixie Mattel. (Mary M. Cosby, in her first of many unintentionally hilarious one-liners: “Trixie Hotel…Is that a person?”) And Angie Katsanevas—always referred to, typically with scourge, as “Angie K.”—crashed the trip uninvited in an aggressive attempt to be accepted by the show’s stars, and yet is consistently confused why everyone was annoyed that she is there. (Mary M. Cosby: “Who is Angie?”)
Angie K. is a fascinating figure in the pantheon of Real Housewives. She is what I would call, in purely professional terms, a flop. No one wants her around. Her blinding desperation to be on the show blares from her like the neon lights of Las Vegas, at a level that’s in direct opposition to her ability to be even remotely entertaining. And yet here she is, a lynchpin of one of the greatest sequences in RHOSLC’s run so far.
After a half-baked activity in which pairs of the women dress each other as a gesture of trust and healing—Uninvited Angie K. has no one to do this with—the cast shows up at a swanky restaurant looking like they raided a Spirit Halloween store during a blackout. Angie K. seizes her opportunity for a storyline and confronts Meredith for being a “fake” friend, an argument that Meredith squashes like a spotted lantern fly on a city sidewalk by asserting she doesn’t think of Angie K. as a friend at all.
Meredith then turns the evening into her audition to star as Toni Collette’s character in a stage production of Hereditary, summoning some sort of dark spirit that suddenly and bafflingly takes over her. She begins bellowing at Angie K. about her manners and how inappropriate it is to bring up her issues when there are things like “children who are going to be disabled for the rest of their lives” happening in the world. (?????) She then chases after “security” (a waiter named Chad) to have Angie K. removed, and eventually runs to the parking lot, where she threatens to reveal “the rumors, the nastiness,” and “the husband.”
It’s important to note that each of these phrases is spoken in a different international accent. (The delivery of “security” has so many vowel sounds, Catherine O’Hara as Moira Rose would say, “That’s a bit much.”) The bizarre slurring even reaches a point where subtitles are put on the screen.
You’d think that when the group finally leaves the restaurant to go back to Trixie Motel, things would be over. But hidden camera footage in the sprinter van shows Mary dressing down Whitney Rose for getting in other people’s business and, at one point in the past, calling Mary and her husband “a pornography.” Heather Gay, who drank a bathtub’s worth of espresso martinis, is also there, rocking in a corner and trying not to hurl.
After an amusing lost-in-translation back-and-forth, Heather pops up from having her head spinning between her legs and clarifies: “Predator!” That’s what Whitney called Mary, not “a pornography.” With that, Heather hunches back over again.
Listen, is it high art? Well, one could argue yes. It’s certainly no Succession, just like Succession is far different from Abbott Elementary, which is a universe away from How To with John Wilson. But they’re all great shows. This RHOSLC season is firing on all cylinders and, like many Housewives seasons before it, proves that it is a great show too. And if you don’t agree? Well, let me grab Chad because “YOU CAN LEAVE!”
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