The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Season-Premiere Recap: Separation Anxiety
Hello and welcome to the return of your favorite show, Rich Women Doing Things, and, let me tell you, the rich women are doing things. They are going to visit their best friend, Jennifer Tilly, at her house, which looks like a haunted carnival. They are in Atlanta with their son talking about all the movies about abductions that they’re currently filming. They are going to the Pacific Design Center to look at $2,000 boxes that no one should have in their living room. But what are they mostly doing? Oh, honey: Mostly, the rich women are getting divorced.
No! Wait. Sorry. They are not getting divorced, they are getting “separated.” But that is kind of like when Bravo puts a show on pause. It’s not canceled. Oh no. It might come back. When? Oh, somewhere in the neighborhood of 2072, but since we all know that the world is ending in 2069 it’s not every really coming back. Dorit, the same thing is true about your marriage.
Dorit sits Erika down at the Pacific Design Center, which is a handbag throw away from SUR, and tells her that she and PK, a sandwich made out of boogers and dried scabs, are getting separated. Why? Well, because he got sober, and then he realized that he can’t fucking stand her. That’s not really the reason, but that’s kind of what it sounds like. Dorit tells Erika, “We sat down like two very mature adults who love and care about each other and mutually decided that taking some space and separating is the best thing for us.” This is my problem with Dorit; it’s always sunshine and unicorns and ignoring what lies underneath. It’s like Dorit goes to a new restaurant, and you ask how it was, and she says, “Divine, darling. You simply must go.” Meanwhile, she was up all night retching in her bidet because she got food poisoning from undercooked shrimp. The truth always comes out; why can’t she give it to us straight?
When the news hits the press, we see all the cast reading the announcement and Garcelle says, “Oh, it’s from Dorit. Of course it’s long-winded.” We joke about how much she talks and how she never listens, but based on the dissolution of her marriage and her friendship with Kyle, that might be the defining problem of her life.
We get a scene with Mauricio and PK, a liver spot in the shape of Harvey Weinstein’s mutilated genitals, in which they meet to talk about the divorce. Um, excuse me. What are these dudes doing here? They divorced their wives, which means we never have to see them again. Why are they getting to talk about themselves? This is not how the show works. The guys get a voice as long as they’re with the women, but as soon as they’re dumped, we never have to look at their ugly mugs again. Thems the rules.
I almost don’t mind because PK comes for Dorit, and I find it extremely amusing. When Mo asks what happened, PK says he got sober and realized they were “taking bites out of each other” the whole time. Then he says, “Dorit is not the most able to listen. She’s not.” Yes, my friend, we have seen this in action, and we know it’s true. He then says that he was always working to maintain their lifestyle and her ambition, which basically means he was working to fake their wealth so that they could stay on the show even though their house is getting foreclosed on.
Dorit goes over to Kathy Hilton’s house to talk about the divorce — sorry, sorry, “separation” — and Kathy has an IV drip, eye pads, lip pads, and a full glam squad working on her, and she is sipping on a chocolate milkshake you know she ordered from the Beverly Hills Hotel and the manager had his least favorite bellhop deliver it. Dorit tells her that PK, the food-poisoning barf from undercooked shrimp that is clogging up your bidet, is a full-blown alcoholic, that they would get in these huge fights when he was drinking, but she told him that he needed to sober up, and that started his sobriety journey that ended their marriage.
The way Dorit is painting it, she stood by PK’s side during all of his scandals with money, taxes, and DUIs, but as soon as they get into one fight he decided that he’s done. She says there is something between getting in a fight and going to a separation, but PK doesn’t see it that way. He doesn’t want to do the work to stay married. She also tells Kathy that she’s a great listener. Yes, just wonderful. She’s as good of a listener as a stone Buddha sitting at the entrance to a shitty spa in Thousand Oaks.
While Dorit’s separation will definitely be a big story line this season, the real story line the premiere is setting up is Kyle and Dorit absolutely coming for each other. After sitting at the Pacific Design Center with Dorit, Erika goes to Kyle’s house to talk to her about Kyle and Dorit. We then get to see both of their perspectives on this fight we’re in mediated through Erika. It’s funny that by merely surviving her scandals and hanging in there longer than any other woman, Erika has become the only ally of the two remaining members of the Fox Force Five. It’s a great spot to be in since neither Dorit nor Kyle is going anywhere. This is what job security looks like. Maybe that’s why Erika has decided now is the best time to redecorate.
Anyway, I’m not entirely sure what the deep, deep down of this fight really is. Dorit thinks that Kyle has been punishing her ever since two reunions ago when Dorit tried to get in between Kathy and Kyle. Kyle traces it back to the last reunion, where she texted Dorit not to talk about how they were having problems, and then Dorit read the text, which Kyle thought was private, on air. Since then, it’s been just seemingly petty things. Dorit is mad Kyle went on Amazon Live and said that she and Dorit were never really that close. “We only went on one trip together as couples,” she says. Um, I don’t know. That seems pretty close. I have plenty of good friends who I haven’t been on one trip with (unless you count mushrooms, then I have been on a trip with nearly all of my friends).
Kyle is mad that at BravoCon, Andy Cohen was playing a game where you had to tell the truth or take a shot. Dorit was asked to rank the Sisters Richards based on how much she liked them, and Dorit was about to take a shot rather than reveal her answer, so Kyle snapped. Erika says, “Amazon Live, Watch What Happens Live, BravoCon. To me, I could say that it is small, but to them, it is big.” Oh, it’s so big, but I love how Erika just so quickly distills the new information ecosystem these shows are living in and how all the ancillary participation in these things is now bleeding into the show.
I’m with Erika. It seems like a lot of miscommunication. Kyle didn’t mean for the text to be manipulative (according to her), but Dorit saw it as such. Dorit didn’t mean for her taking a shot on WWHL to be taking a shot at Kyle, but she saw it that way. It seemed like one of those things where if they sat down at some sort of resort that had dream catchers in the gift shop, they could work through it all and decide to be friends. But when Erika tells Dorit she thinks it’s miscommunication, Dorit says, “I think there is more manipulation than miscommunication, and I think she’s more of a master manipulator than I ever realized.” Oooooooh. Okay. So this is bad. This is kind of bad that there is no coming back from it. Okay, got it.
The two finally sit down to talk at Sutton’s Surrealist Ball, the big event that kicks off the season, but we only see a little teaser of it before the end of the episode. I’m hoping to get a bit more clarity on exactly what Dorit thinks Kyle is always doing to her and how their friendship is so lopsided. I’m not saying she’s wrong; I just need a few more real-life illustrations if I’m going to buy her story. However, those few illustrations will probably be as long as War and Peace, combined with that Martin Scorsese movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, which I refused to watch because it’s more than three hours long.
Speaking of the Surrealist Ball, I think we need to go around the horn and talk about everyone’s lewks, right? Sutton is wearing a black gown with a pink lining and a long train and is sporting antlers on her head. This is basically just a good outfit plus antlers, but it is on theme and looking good. Her friend Jennifer Tilly is taking notes from Björk and wearing several black swans. Surrealist, yes, but there’s something about the cut of the dress that doesn’t seem that flattering to Miss Tilly.
Dorit shows up wearing a plastic dress that is molded to her body and makes her look like that old Svedka robot. The real reason to wear this, though, is the enormous disc that is her headpiece. Alright, this is a really cool outfit and would have made Thierry Mugler (RIP) precum a little bit. However, it is not surreal. It’s more futuristic. As Sutton says, Dorit went to the wrong wing of the museum. Dorit says the newest housewife, Bozoma “Boz” Saint John, understood the assignment, and Dorit is only saying that because she, too, misunderstood the assignment. Boz’s dress, like Dorit’s, is amazing. It’s like a giant cream-colored loofah with a train longer than one of those mile-long freighters that we all need to get our Amazon Prime deliveries in one day. There is nothing at all surreal about this. Is it big, beautiful, and over the top? Yes. But it is not a Big, Beautiful, and Over the Top Ball.
Garcelle — now she understood the assignment. As soon as she stepped out of her car in a white gown with a long white cape and white butterflies in her hair, I shouted at the TV, “You better work!” That is until I saw Erika’s outfit, and then I said, “You better retire because you have been working so hard you must be exhausted.” She’s wearing a black-and-white bodysuit with a cape and two enormous eyeballs on the shoulders. That is surreal, that is haunting, that is something that Salvador Dalí would have painted.
Kyle is just wearing antlers like Sutton. Her antlers are giving more woodland while Sutton’s are giving Art Nouveau, so maybe they’re not quite as good. But Kyle is showing off that new body with a plunging neckline so maybe she wins? I don’t know. Finally, Kathy Hilton pulls up three hours late, and she’s just wearing a green muumuu from the Phyllis Diller for Chico’s collab with a little tiara on her head. “I thought the theme was ‘So Real,’ so I came in what makes me feel so real,” she probably would have said. Kathy gets to the party, sits down with the women, and immediately starts taking out her extensions and piling them in a chair. She claims that she is too hot and couldn’t handle it, but if she can’t work some extensions, what is she even doing on this here reality television program?
Once everyone is at the party, Kyle sits down with Erika and Garcelle because she wants to talk about Morgan Wade, but she won’t mention her name because, apparently, like Dorit’s divorce, if she says it out loud, she’s making it real. I’m with Garcelle though, it’s not like we can stop talking about Morgan now. Kyle brought her on the show, she starred in that racy music video, she took her to WWHL even after all this stuff started in the tabloids, so what is Kyle even talking about? I understand Kyle is upset by all of this speculation, but she brought it upon herself as soon as she brought Morgan on the show and started flirting with her like J.D. Vance flirts with a La-Z-Boy.
Finally, Kyle says definitively that the two of them are not together, and I believe her, but everything else she says in this conversation is weird, veiled, and inscrutable. She says she never questioned her sexuality until it started to be questioned in the tabloids. She said she talked to her daughters about it and were worried about what they were going to say, but if she’s not queer and not with Morgan, what would they be worried about? Kyle says that it’s not her place to talk about the situation when there is another person involved, but if she’s not with Morgan and Morgan is openly gay, then why can’t she mention her name? How is Morgan involved if they’re not involved?
But I get it: Kyle is trying to figure it out. She’s in this new landscape where things aren’t real, or maybe they are. It’s a place where clocks melt on tree branches, and everyone is wearing antlers like they’re half beast. It’s a place where divorces become separations because we will them into being better than they are. It’s a place where husbands get to be on the show without their wives and friends get to talk about their relationships melting without addressing what heat was even added to the relationship. Yes, it’s all surrealist and it looks like, this season, we’re all about to have a ball.