In one of Sutton Stracke’s earliest appearances on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, she calls fellow castmate Teddi Mellencamp Arroyave boring.
It’s the third episode of Season 10, which aired in the spring of 2020, and the ladies are at a dinner party at Kyle Richards’ house. They're playing a deranged, obviously producer-orchestrated game in which they go around the table sharing their first impressions of the person seated next to them.
All of the other women follow the unspoken rule of paying each other phony compliments, but when it’s Sutton’s turn, she bats her false eyelashes and says in her soft, sweet tea accent, “I thought that, Teddi, maybe you were gonna be a little boring.”
The other dinner party guests seem stunned that this newbie is not following the unofficial Housewives code of being fake-nice to people you hate. “I’m sorry,” she follows up, sounding not at all sorry. “Are we supposed to be honest or not?” If you watch this moment closely, you can just barely catch the corners of Sutton’s peach-tinted pout curling into a mischievous smile.
Was it a mean thing to say? Yes, for sure, and Sutton’s half-assed faux-innocent act suggests that she knew it was. But more importantly, it’s true. And funny. Teddi IS boring! During her tenure on the show (which thankfully ended with the 10th season), she was consistently a huge buzzkill. Finally, someone was saying it!
In that moment, a polarizing Housewives legend was born. For this writer, it was love at first insult.
Dressed like a walking Fornasetti candle in gaudy Dolce & Gabbana couture, Sutton first arrived on the scene in Season 10 as a “friend of,” Bravo jargon for a recurring cast member who is not yet a full Housewife.
Fan-favorite OG Lisa Vanderpump had just left after a rocky ninth season, and this Georgia-born newcomer seemed primed to fill the LVP-shaped hole in the cast. Like Lisa, Sutton speaks in a voice that oozes fussy ladylike posturing, only instead of a posh London accent rasped by decades of chain smoking, she affects an “oh, my stars!” Southern drawl.
Both women are also disgustingly rich, of course, and both primarily channel their wealth into growing their collections of overpriced pussy-bow blouses.
Over time, however, Sutton has proven herself to be entirely her own brand of Housewife. She’s so different from the other women, with her manufactured properness and girly outfits inspired by the anthropomorphic teapot in Beauty and the Beast. She responds to call outs from her co-stars not with words, but by silently widening her saucer-like blue eyes in a sort of disapproving “are we really doing this?” look.
She’ll disarmingly say something shady about a castmate in the sweetest voice you’ve ever heard, and then play the victim so effectively that you forget she was the one who started the drama in the first place. In other words, she makes for great reality television.
After one season as a “friend of,” Sutton really came into her own as a Housewife when she was the only person on the right side of history regarding Erika Jayne’s legal troubles. Much of last season focused on the aftermath of Erika’s split from disgraced lawyer Tom Girardi and the subsequent allegations that Girardi embezzled millions of dollars from his clients—orphans, widows, and burn victims—to, in part, fund his and Erika’s lavish lifestyle.
Things did not look good for Erika, who refuses to travel without a small army of stylists and once starred in a music video bankrolled by her husband in which she sings about how expensive (sorry, XXPEN$IVE) it is to be her.
And yet, only Sutton was brave enough to question Erika about her knowledge of her husband’s horrendous crimes and to point out the many inconsistencies in her stories. She was villainized for consulting her lawyer on how this all might affect her, even though that just seems like a smart thing to do when you’re on a TV show with someone facing criminal charges. Meanwhile, Kyle, Lisa Rinna, and their coven were terrified into silent submission by the threat of Erika’s admittedly fearsome wrath, and spent the season cowering and apologizing for daring to ask questions.
In addition to being a surrogate for frustrated, confused viewers amidst the Erika Jayne controversy, Sutton also possesses the essential Housewives skill of the succinct, artfully timed clapback. When Crystal Kung Minkoff accused her of being jealous during a fight last season, she dramatically stormed out of Rinna’s yard, pausing just before exiting to quip, “Jealous of what? Your ugly leather pants?”
Though only three episodes in, this season of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills has basically been the Sutton Stracke show, and we’re not mad about it.
The season premiere was devoted to Dorit Kemsley’s terrifying home invasion, during which she was held up at gunpoint and robbed while her young children slept in the house. Between the security camera footage and Dorit’s emotional retelling of what happened, it’s an utterly chilling, heartbreaking narrative for a franchise that typically deals in booze-soaked boat rides and group outings to the plastic surgeon’s office.
Thank God for Sutton and her tone-deaf narcissism providing some comic relief.
When Kyle tries to talk to her about the break-in the morning after it occurred, recounting how Dorit had to beg for her life, Sutton sighs that she “has been putting out fires all day, too.” She is talking about one of her designers not being able to enter the country because of an immigration delay, an inconvenience that she seems to be equating with Dorit having a gun held to her head. It’s so awful, so stunningly self-centered, and so far removed from a normal human reaction that it’s completely hilarious. And frankly, way less annoying than Kylie co-opting Dorit’s trauma as her own storyline.
The second episode was also Sutton-centric, with the ladies rehashing some incredibly boring drama about whether or not she paid for Rinna’s ticket to Elton John’s AIDS fundraiser. The details are convoluted and uninteresting, but Sutton does show up to Harry Hamlin’s 70th birthday dinner as though it’s a reunion, armed with literal printed out receipts that prove she paid for the table. Opening her eyes wider than a bush baby’s to signify that she is above all of this pettiness, she slides the receipts across the table to Garcelle and tidily makes Rinna look like an idiot.
In last week’s installment, freshman Housewife Diana Jenkins, coming in hot in her second ever episode of RHOBH, says that though she doesn’t know Sutton very well, she thinks she is “really weird.” First of all, does the woman who doesn’t know what an outlet store is get to call someone else weird? And second of all, yes, and…?
That’s what makes her so much fun to watch. Sutton is mean and awkward and prone to martyrdom. She’ll refer to a mille crepe cake as a “pancake cake” to remind you that even though she’s a self-proclaimed Francophile, she’s still a Southern girl at her roots. She’ll call someone’s pants ugly while wearing a hideous shift dress emblazoned with a giant leopard. She’s a vegetarian, except when it comes to bacon, which she cannot resist.
So, yes, Sutton Stracke is absolutely a stone cold weirdo, and she is also the most refreshing addition to a Real Housewives cast in years.
