VoR does RHOBH (1 Viewer)

I've just finished S7 and it seems she turns up to every party just to do NOTHING. I don't think we've ever seen so much, and yet so little of a Friend Of. Please tell me she remedies this in later seasons? I need Chaotic word of the day spilling Camille back.

The finale episode of Season 9 is called “Hurricane Camille”.
 
I’m REALLY missing Camille in Season Four.

She’s not always right, but she’s so good at cutting through bullshit with laser precision. I’m noticing that the arguments when she’s not in the room are much more likely to just be waffly and go round in circles.

You really need somebody who’s happy to, for example, straight up out LVP on camera for not owning her own restaurants. :D
 
Season 4: Episodes 6,7 & 8

I love how the conventions of reality television force these women to preface each doomed cast trip with multiple confessionals along the lines of "I just want to relax, have fun and let go of all the drama :)"

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Anyway this was very much Brandi's trio of episodes so I'll reserve most of my commentary for that.

Brandi
Brandi made a spectacular entrance in Season 2, easily slotting into the role of the younger, prettier girl with a trucker mouth and a zero fucks attitude. She could be petty and abrasive, but even in her first major spat against the obviously vulnerable Kim, she came across as a sympathetic person trapped in a nightmare feud with an unstable aggressor.

Season 3 and her alliance with Lisa took the bloom off a little, but Adrienne was too aloof and high-handed to really sympathise with too much. However, the entrance of a new younger, prettier model in the form of Joyce Giraud has really tipped the balance and exposed an ugly, ugly side of Brandi's character.

The thing is, Joyce shouldn't be a serious threat to Brandi. On current evidence, she's a bland, faintly grating type-A girl who has displayed none of Brandi's innate wit or likability. But for whatever reason - insecurity, problem drinking, a misguided awareness of her need to create good TV, or most likely a combination of all three, Brandi decides to relentlessly target her, resulting in some seriously ugly behaviour.

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It'd be more forgivable if Joyce rose to it, but she spends the entirety of the Palm Trip getaway politely bewildered at Brandi's awful behaviour. I still haven't found much to enjoy about Joyce, but she acts with a hell of a lot of restraint and dignity here. Which is probably not a recipe for success in this format, but it's as difficult not to feel for her as it was not to feel for Brandi every time Kim cornered her at a party and started drunkenly wagging her finger in her face back in Season 2.

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It's not just Joyce either, Brandi is on an all-round downward spiral through these episodes, drunkenly imploring Lisa to stop 'strategising' and pissing off Carlton by loudly announcing that they'd had a late-night makeout session. The Palm Springs episodes end on a somewhat sympathetic note when one of her dogs is stolen during a burglary, but on the whole it's a fairly disastrous showing for the one-time golden girl.

Stray observations

* Another example of Yolanda's penchant for passive-aggressive MIND GAMES at her horrible dinner party, when she draws little hearts on Brandi, Carlton and Lisa's place cards and leaves everybody else's blank, then claims she must have done it subconsciously. :D

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* Other than a slightly bizarre moment where she's caught crouching behind a BIN, Kim is largely background in these episodes. I do, however, continue to love the dynamic of her occasional flare-ups with Lisa, and the fact that she's the only member of the cast who seems capable of rattling her. It happens again here when they're bickering over some imagined slight or other, Kim apologises, Lisa starts trying her passive aggressive wounded martyr schtick and and Kim just snaps "Look Lisa, either accept the apology or don't" and leaves the table. :D
 
Ugh, after an entertaining start I'm having a hard time with this season.

I was drawn into the first three by the mind games and subtle social dynamics, but this season seems to have settled into a holding pattern of Brandi being relentlessly horrible. She's sucking all the air out of the show and turning it into what I thought Housewives was before I actually watched it. There's no subtlety or intellect behind her actions, just constant screaming and fairly unambiguous racism. I really hope she leaves soon.

Carlton has also atrophied for me. After an excellent start, she just seems to be absenting herself from group activities and having a few solo scenes per episode in which she talks absolute shite to whichever lackey is in her vicinity. :D I did enjoy that one random scene where she and Brandi went full Patsy & Edina at Kyle's white party, but I'd enjoy it a lot more if I hadn't soured on Brandi so much in general.

Lisa and Kyle both seem to be taking a back seat this season which is a shame because they are generally much more compelling. Same with Yolanda, whose only notable activity is her inexplicable loyalty to Brandi.

Joyce remains a beacon of dignity in the face of Brandi's vileness, but aside from that she's dull. It did strike me watching the episode where she goes to a gun range that this season was very obviously airing at the peak of Sofia Vergara's Modern Family popularity. :D

I may just skip the recaps and plough through until something interesting happens...
 
I would skip to the trip and then the reunion. Season 5 is coming and it’s a much needed refresh.
 
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Season 4 is mostly a slog but it does have a twist coming which should renew your interest.
 
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So Season 4 kind of lost me when it just became the Brandi Glanville show, but I am intending to pick it back up after Christmas when I have a bit more time on my hands.

However, in the meantime I found myself dipping back into the accursed Real Housewives of Vancouver, of which I'd seen the first three episodes and then kind of forgotten about, and I am so grimly compelled by the dark-souled husk of what was allegedly once a woman named Ronnie Negus.

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I've seen most of the key Housewives players by now via various clips and memes, but never on any reality television medium have I encountered a woman so utterly, chillingly dead behind the eyes. She's like some creature of Greek myth who has lived a thousand lives and grown so bored with existence that her only pleasure is casually tormenting mortals, although even that brings her no real joy, only the bitter aftertaste of whatever pleasure used to feel like.

The way she casually sits back and lets the cartoonishly evil Jodi Clayman (who by the midway point in Season 1 is being routinely accompanied by sinister piano chords and stock footage of CHILL WINDS blowing across the leafy streets of Vancouver :D) repeatedly tear absolute shreds out of her supposed best friend of 18 years, the insipid MARY ZILBA, is the through line of the show, and it honestly makes Kyle and Kim' whole thing look relatively healthy by comparison.

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However, the real gold for me so far has been her half-arsed attempts to market a line of wines called REHAB, seemingly purely as an excuse to terrorise the staff at whatever marketing/branding agency was foolish enough to work with her.

There was an incredible scene in the last episode I watched where the underlings are nervously pitching various taglines to make the name slightly less horrific (an obviously futile task)

Marketing gay; "So we’ve got a couple of options we’re going to show you. This first one is called Rehab for your Soul…”
Ronnie (flat, deadpan, thousand yard stare):
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“…”

CHILLING

Anyway, I love how the cast is basically three of the very worst women you could ever have the misfortune to meet (in very different ways!) and two seemingly nice, personable ladies of middling wealth who grow increasingly horrified as the season progresses at the NIGHTMARE they've signed up for. Christina Kiesel is a creature of pure light and I hope she's thriving wherever she is now.

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Vancouver is alongside Melbourne and Auckland for me as my holy trinity.

Ronnie is such a character, Christina is such a QUEEN, and Jody is so horrendous I even feel sorry for sad old Mary. What a season :disco:
 
Finished season one of Vancouver. I'm not sure whether it was the editing or the fact that she was probably shooting heroin into her eyeballs throughout filming, but the internal logic of Ronnie's ever-shifting loyalties between Mary and Jody were completely impenetrable. :D

It was quite exciting when she apparently had a moment of lucidity and recognised that Jody was clearly a sociopath in a cheap tiara, but then the next episode it was as though no such revelation had ever taken place!

Christina - absolute queen of life, especially in the reunion when she clearly already had one foot out of the door and was in zero fucks mode. I ended up looking up her whereabouts and discovering a podcast she recorded with Mary years later. They're still friends/the only cast members still on speaking terms, she openly describes Ronnie and Jody as 'evil cunts' and tells a delightful story about meeting 21 year old gay fan and taking him on a night out which ended with him being JAILED because she talked him into driving her to a Wendy's with a bag of cannabis in his pocket at 3am because she was stoned and wanted a burger. :D
 
I've now finished my trek through the surreal fever dream that is Real Housewives of Vancouver and I'm mildly obsessed with this dreadful slice of Shania-lite balladry which we were subjected to at literally every opportunity.



I DON'T CARE IF YOU NEVER WROTE A BOOK
I DON'T CARE ABOUT NO SUPERMAN LOOKS


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There are so many scenes in that second season that are literally this sketch :D

 
I'm FASCINATED by her 90s/00s pop career and I'd love to know how popular she actually was, but the Canadian charts are really hard to look up. It's bizarrely obscure for such a giant country.
 
After a long hiatus, I'm going to attempt to get back into Beverley Hills, at least while it's Eurovision off-season and there's nothing much else going on in my life.

My completionist tendencies won't allow me to just skip what remains of the rather duddy Season Four, so I'm picking up where I left off. Promisingly, the first episode back features a rare non-Kyle related Kim plot, as we get a fascinating glimpse into her life treading the faded celebrity convention circuit alongside facially alarming fellow Hollywood burnouts such as Leif Garrett(?) and Jimmy McNichol(?).

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Predictably, the motley crew of pale, dewy-faced salamander people who line up at Kim's table seem to fall into three occasionally overlapping camps.

* quasi-ironic gays
* creepy middle aged men who obviously keep a well-stocked box of kleenex next to their well-worn VHS copies of pre-teen Kim's early appearances on Little House on the Prairie
*
people who seem... troubled.

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I could honestly watch an entire season of Kim and her sweetly earnest attempts to navigate these events without getting kidnapped and locked in a sex dungeon, but alas we have to check in with the other ladies...

The other centrepiece of this episode is yet another supremely tacky party thrown by Carlton and her very mobster-coded husband. It's mostly notable for Brandi continuing to tug at the leash with LVP's mother hen routine, and Kyle mistaking Carlton's new neck tattoo for a star of David, which goes down about as well as you might expect. Kyle makes amends by gifting Carlton a crystal, which leads to a thawing in relations... for approximately 12 hours. :basil:

Carlton, Saturday night
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Carlton, Sunday morning

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I do love the ever-present sunglasses in the latter scene at Yolanda's arts & crafts party(?) - clearly on an absolute monster of a comedown. :D

That's about all there is to say about this episode really. There's a fairly meh b-plot with Kyle doing a little guest slot on Days of Our Lives, and a possible Yolanda/LVP fallout involving the latter's quite reasonable decision that she can't be arsed wasting a morning doing macrame for Gigi Hadid.

Enticingly, the next episode teaser does suggest that I'm finally about to get to this much-memed moment. :disco:

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Stay tuned!
 
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Season 4 Episodes 14-17: The end of Carlton

For a one-season wonder who - as far as I can tell - has done little to no TV work of any description in over a decade, Carlton Gebbia seems to be held in fairly high nostalgic esteem by Housewives gays, at least if online memification is any kind of measure.

Could it be that she was slightly ahead of her time? At this point in the show, Beverley Hills has still retained 50% OG cast members, with Brandi and Yolanda slotting into the Beverley Hills milieu so effortlessly that it’s easy to forget they haven’t been there from the very start.

By comparison, while Carlton gives good TV with her wiccan weirdness and faded WWE wrestler turned softcore porn actress aesthetic, her whole vibe just felt a little too effortful and calculated for maximum screen time, without the more subtle interactions that actually make this show fairly compelling.

She’d probably fit in just fine in 2024, when the franchise seems to have surrendered any pretence that the various cast members are anything more than fully self-aware colleagues doing the bits that are expected of them. In 2014 she feels like an overly effortful interloper.

(Obligatory note on poor, sweet, boring Joyce, who has the opposite problem in that she makes a seemingly sincere attempt to befriend the ladies, but doesn’t bring any actual drama to the table. Her rapid forgiveness of Brandi for her racist bullying speaks to her class and maturity, but with no other conflicts to lean into, it pretty much renders her useless to the show.)

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So I still have a couple of episodes and the reunion to go, but given Carlton is notably absent from the obligatory end of season group holiday, and the focus shifts to a long-overdue reckoning for Lisa Vanderpump, it feels like the fight at Ken & Mauricio’s joint birthday party is essentially her final flame out on the show.

The fight has its moments. I particularly enjoy Carlton’s reveal that the peacemaking necklace from a few episodes back has been placed into a pool of distilled water to cleanse it of Kyle’s EVIL ENERGY. :D But I couldn’t possibly tell you what triggered it beyond unsubstantiated bitchiness and general BAD VIBES. There are manifold entirely rational reasons to dislike Kyle Richards, so it’s a damning indictment of Carlton that she can’t really land a single blow that sticks.

The fatal blow is of course when Kyle calmly accuses Carlton of being anti semitic, precipitating the mother of all meltdowns in which Carlton basically shrieks "WELL THAT'S WHAT YOU PEOPLE DO, ISN'T IT?" as her husband physically drags her to the exit before she can make things any worse.

(Aside: While the weaponization of antisemitism does leave a bit of a sour taste on this scene, there is something rather THRILLING about seeing Kyle calmly and efficiently destroy Carlton's social standing without breaking a sweat. It might be her most imperious moment on the show to date.)

…and unless I’m missing some eleventh hour comeback, that seems to pretty much be the end of Carlton’s arc on the show. She’s present in the post-party episode to lamely uninvite Kyle from an event that she clearly had no interest in attending anyway and there’s a truly mortifying blubbering talking head about how she couldn't possibly be prejudiced because she grew up in South Africa!!!! But even her fairweather allies Brandi and Yolanda pretty much insta-ditch her, and when she’s the only cast member not to join the trip to Puerto Rico, it seems like the writing is on the wall.

The witch is dead!

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Random observations

*
Much of the rest of these episodes was yet more boring party planning and Vanderpump rules crossover, which I will not be commenting on
* Kim is 100% checked out of this season, isn't she? :(
* There are also developments in the Brandi-Lisa-Kyle toxic friendship triangle, but that seems to be building to something so I'll cover it on my next essay.

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It turned out Carlton was a friend of Alison DuBois, the infamous e-smoking psychic friend of Camille’s, which might explain her entering the season gunning for Kim’s sister.

Her deciding that a dream where Kyle was bitching behind her back was enough to start the war was iconic.
 
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We need an expat themed Ultimate Girls Trip. Carlton, Cat (RHoDC), Yolanda, Vanderpump, Dorit...and I think of any more but it would be great!
 
OK this thread is clearly NEVER going back to any kind of regular cadence, but I did take advantage of a quiet January to finally finish season 4 so here are my random thoughts.

Lisa Vanderpump
For a clearly intelligent person and celebrated mistress of manipulation, Lisa Vanderpump is shockingly weak in a direct conflict situation. Whether it’s Brandi, Yolanda or Kyle, any time she’s directly called out on her bad behaviour, she seems to completely shut down, start mewling piteously about how MEAN the other women are and essentially try to CTRL ALT DELETE the conversation. The shot of her chain smoking on a balcony after being exposed by the other women in Puerto Rico was a moment of high camp, but on the whole… SAD!

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Brandi
I generally hated Brandi this season with her racist bullying of Joyce and obnoxious main character syndrome, but my God did she come into her power in the last stretch of episodes!

She definitely seems more emotionally invested in everything than the other ladies, and consequently her takedown of Lisa in Puerto Rico felt very real and was legitimately THRILLING. I suspect she’ll be found floating face down in a pool come the first episode of Season 5, but she came for the queen and did not miss! :disco:



Yolanda
Oh Yolanda, Yolanda, Yolanda. I have become so obsessed with this under-the-radar psychopath over the course of this season.

In many ways, Lisa V’s most consequential mistake this season was bailing on the invite to spend an afternoon making MACRAME TRIBUTES to Gigi Hadid. Because make no mistake, Yolanda nursed that petty grudge for the entire rest of the season and silently vowed to burn the Vanderpump empire to the ground, not dissimilarly to Lisa’s own successful quest to destroy the Maloufs in season 3.

Was there a more thrilling moment in the last episode than Yolanda shrieking “DON’T TOUCH ME, KEN!” at whatever that party was? One simply DOES NOT FUCK with Yolanda Hadid! :disco:




Kim Richards
Did Kim actually have a storyline this season? An inconsistent presence at best, but she remains a hugely sympathetic character and I am low key obsessed with her random moments of sober lucidity. This summation of Lisa V’s personality is shockingly on the money and hints at the healthy, tough-love relationship she and Kyle *could* have if she could only maintain her sobriety and Kyle wasn’t so fundamentally evil.



Carlton
As discussed in my last write-up, Carlton was a dead woman walking the moment she took Kyle’s antisemite bait. I found Lisa desperately recruiting her as an ally in the final episode darkly hilarious - what a rock bottom moment for both of them!

Beyond that, it was clearly all over for her. She has an embarassing showing in the reunion, with Kyle calling her WITCHYPOO as a particularly juvenile high/lowlight. :D

Joyce
Basically a nonentity at this point. I end this season with a lot of respect for Joyce’s dignity and integrity all season while totally understanding why she was summarily fired.

I did find it funny how she rocked up at the reunion with an entirely different personality, having clearly been informed that she was on the chopping block. Too little, too late chica.

Kyle
Loathe as I am to admit it, Kyle played an absolute blinder this season and possibly checkmated Lisa to secure herself as the long-term lynchpin of the franchise.

With minimal Kim drama to distract her, she effortlessly destroyed Carlton and maneuvered the subsequent Lisa takedown like a pro. Brandi softened her up, but Kyle really delivered the coup de grace to Vanderpump at the reunion, and the results were quite thrilling to watch :disco:



Assuming season 5 will be another soft reboot after Joyce and Carlton turned out to be SAD FLOPS. I’m excited to see it!
 
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