The first season of The Real Housewives of Potomac officially ended last week. This being Bravo, though, we’re stuck muddling through two reunion episodes.
In Sunday’s first reunion episode, our heroines, above, cosplayed as disco balls.
When last we left our heroines, they were starring in history’s saddest post-episode sequence. Now they’re on set, and they’ve seen all the trash their frenemies talked in earlier episodes.
Gizelle is back, with some fresh glasses…
… and some fresh bigotry!
Gizelle: What are we doing today? Are we coming to Jesus?
Robyn: I think so.
Gizelle: How is Katie going to fit in? Because she doesn’t know Jesus, she knows rabbi.
Katie brought her own bad attitude to the reunion. After the collapse of her engagement to cold-footed golf maniac Andrew since last week’s episode taped, Katie has decided to bring a rhetorical baseball bat for the other women. When Gizelle talks about her house, Katie cuts in and points out that Gizelle only rents her house:
And then:
Self-styled Potomac “grande dame” Karen spends most of the episode vamping it up with Bravo host Andy Cohen and displaying her twin passions: sex and manners.
Karen, for one, thinks it’s great that Katie’s engagement fizzled. After all, Andrew lost a finger joint in a car accident.
“Who is Andrew with a missing digit?” Karen asks, to Cohen’s delight. Katie points out that making fun of an injury isn’t exactly Emily Post material.
Naturally, there’s some Robyn quasi-marriage stuff, and as usual no one cares. More importantly, Karen and Ashley continue their war over which of their old, rich husbands is more fuckable.
Amusingly, Ashley claims that all the sex Karen alludes to having with husband Ray wasn’t actually happening. Ray, in Ashley’s telling, isn’t the hot property Karen thinks he is.
“She also thinks that everyone wants him, which is funny,” Ashley says.
Karen counters that she hopes Ashley’s husband Michael remains as devoted—providing, she snipes, that he manages to live that long.
I’m sick of Karen and Ashley dividing Ray and Michael, the show’s two most reliably great characters. Between their love of party hijinks and “voodoo juice,” there’s no question in my mind that these two titans of industry should be carousing together. Give them their own show, Bravo.
Charisse, as ever, is the episode’s MVP. With Karen and Ashley fighting, Charisse cuts in to say that she never wanted to see Karen again after hearing her call Ray “the black Bill Gates.” When Cohen says Gizelle’s ludicrous tag line—”Word on the street is…. I’m the word on the street”—Charisse isn’t having it.
“Must be a small street,” she says.
Charisse also disputes the show’s premise that Potomac, Md. is a rigid mannersocracy.
“I actually lived in Potomac and didn’t have to fit into Potomac,” Charisse says. “I just bought a house, like most people do.” That’s no fun!
Next week’s teaser trailer offers Ashley angrily discussing, uh, Michael’s semen with an unseen antagonist.
“You’re going to tell me to have my husband stay inside and ejaculate in me?” Ashley says.
Oh boy.