“Mention it all!” “I made it nice!” “Who gon’ check me, boo?” “But now we said it.”
Sixteen years of The Real Housewives on Bravo has produced more viral reality TV moments than the number of drinks the cast of the New York City franchise consumes on a given night of filming, which is to say … an ungodly amount. (And thank the TV gods for that.)
As online culture has, in those 16 years, morphed into Extremely Online culture, those viral moments have become memes. Those memes have become incorporated into the way that a segment of the series’ fandom speaks, an indelible part of a certain modern pop-culture lexicon.
Now, there’s a new all-time great moment to add to that list—and into that dictionary.
The hilariously—and yet also achingly sad—moment came courtesy of Vicki Gunvalson, the O.G., now former star of The Real Housewives of Orange County. She has since joined the cast of The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip: Ex-Wives Club. (Currently airing on Peacock, RHUGT is the strongest Housewives-related series on TV right now.)
The series unites Housewives who had been fired from their respective franchises—or, as cast member Dorinda Medley swears up and down, “put on pause”—for an eight-day “vacation” at Medley’s Berkshires estate, Bluestone Manor. “Vacation” is in quotes here, as each woman discusses this trip and its itinerary as if it’s a months-long, violent gauntlet they’ll be lucky to survive.
That weariness soars to the surface during a scene that, since it first aired last week, I have watched maybe 17 times a day on a loop. It is bizarre. It is touching. It is quotable. It is iconic.
“If I die now,” Gunvalson tells her castmates, her face stoic as she’s curled up on a bed, “tell them she died sad.”
TELL THEM SHE DIED SAD!!!
The line delivery, first of all: Meryl Streep wishes. It is a masterclass of martyrdom. The context is absurd, in that there is almost no context; the morose pronouncement seems to come out of nowhere.
That tonal whiplash has, of course, been the highlight of RHUGT. In the span of about 20 minutesthis particular episode featured the women joking about having sex with each other; screaming about deceased husbands and the hypothetical death of one of their children; debating whether one cast member was an alcoholic; praying at a winery; falling over drunk while laughing and then rolling down a bucolic hill at a vineyard; and, of course, a woman speaking her own depressing epitaph into the universe.
It is the definition of “being too much,” which is exactly how we like our Real Housewives.
There was something so grand about the way she said it, like she fancied herself some sort of tragic heroine. It was all very Dickensian. It was as if Gunvalson had just seen Les Misérables and thought, “I am just like Fantine.” I can’t stop picturing Olenna Tyrell on Game of Thrones saying, “If I die now, tell them she died sad,” in the same cadence as, “Tell Cersei. I want her to know it was me.”
There is, technically, an explanation for Gunvalson’s outburst. Gunvalson’s fiancé broke up with her while she was on the way to shoot the show. When she arrived, she was a shell of the gregarious powder keg that she was known to be on RHOC. The rest of the cast, rather insensitively, kept needling Gunvalson about being such a drag on what was supposed to be a raucous girls trip. After a week together, they finally came around and dignified her heartbreak and why she would feel so unmoored. (Which: Duh!)
Still, there’s no circumstance in which “tell them she died sad” does not come completely out of left field and land with a jarring thud. It certainly did in this case, based on the other women’s startled and exasperated reaction. A supercut following the moment of Gunvalson’s morbid obsession with death when she was on RHOC was a genius editing choice.
Unsurprisingly, fans on social media have been reeling from and praising the now-legendary line. Of course they are. It’s a brilliant moment:
The current seasons of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and Real Housewives of Atlanta have been rocky, at best. The cast of RHOBH is every shade of delusional, besides Garcelle Beauvais and Sutton Stracke and Diana Jenkins is one of the most unwatchable new cast additions in memory. Meanwhile, the fighting on RHOA is either too sad and ugly to enjoy—thanks to Kenya Moore and Marlo Hampton—or too uninteresting. (Sorry, Drew Sidora and … everyone Drew fights with.) RHUGT has been a spark of joy in the Bravoverse’s current darkness.
Vicki Gunvalson may not have “whooped it up” this season, the way her castmates wanted her to. But she has given us something better: an outrageous line that I have repeated to every human I’ve seen in the last three days, breaking out into hysterics each time.
