Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Bravo
After a premiere that lit the Bravo fandom abuzz with unnamed, allegedly uncool restaurants (which Twitter sleuths were hard at work deducing) and fights over cheese, Real Housewives of New York Season 14 silenced its remaining detractors with only one episode. Replicating that magic for the rest of the season is one thing, but surpassing it for something even better is another entirely. There have been plenty of late-period Housewives seasons that start with a promising premiere, then fly off the rails only a week later—I’m looking at you, Salt Lake City Season 3. So when the second episode of the RHONY reboot kicked off with a trip to the Hamptons, I almost fell out of my chair.
Any Real Housewives of New York diehard knows that the Hamptons are where great reality television is made. The lush area of Long Island is a favorite of the rich and famous, and a magnet for good drama. Who among us can forget the dispute over Cindy Barshop trying to drag everyone from their McMansions in Sag Harbor out to Quogue in Season 4? Or what about Ramona Singer having a pissing match with former New York governor David Paterson over which one of them is more blind?
The Hamptons bring out the restless energy that we’re looking for from our Housewives, and whoever’s idea it was to force the new cast to stay under one roof for three days should be awarded one of those presidential medals that made Ellen DeGeneres cry. This episode cements the reboot’s cast as tailor-made television perfection. Each of these women is both accessible and completely unrelatable; we should want to party with the Housewives as much as we fear them, and that’s precisely the kind of consistently frenetic energy that this Long Island delivers in droves.