Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Bravo/Getty
If there’s been one irrefutable consistency in Real Housewives of Potomac’s history, it’s that—perhaps more than any other series in Bravo’s crown jewel franchise—Potomac is a masterclass in editing. The most talented, wickedly ingenious editors on this great earth sit on the top floor of Bravo HQ (which I believe to be a 3,000-foot-tall skyscraper, surrounded by thunderclouds and lightning, like Skeletor’s castle) and go absolutely wild in the editing bay. There is no idea too wacky, too esoteric, or too ludicrous to make it into the final cut of an episode. If there’s one thing that the premiere of RHOP Season 8 shows us, it’s that these gifted artists behind the keys are as much a reason for this show’s success as its charismatic cast of stars.
That much is true for the Season 8 premiere of the series, which launched Sunday night. Though the episode unfurls into a rather standard entry into the Housewives canon—far from the outstanding debut that one might expect, given the amount of drama that happened between seasons—the editors make it exceptional. The result is something that falls firmly in the middle of the road, not nearly as close as the franchise’s heyday that longtime fans would like to see RHOP return to, but not as exhausting as Season 7’s flat-out bad and disappointingly manufactured drama. Frankly, that’s a good enough start for the series at this stage, and a promising way to tease what’s to come.
Season 8 kicks off with another delightful bit courtesy of the show’s editors: a ’90s-style sitcom intro of a fictional series called Potomac Proper, starring all of our favorite Housewives. This nostalgic sequence is intercut with an equally absurd montage of some Season 8 events, set to a pulsating electronic score. There’s talk of Wendy Osefo’s mother building voodoo shrines to sabotage new cast member Nneka Ihim; Robyn Dixon sobs in the back seat of a sprinter van; Karen Huger tells us that she had a “contact high with ‘ganji,” before a cloud of purple and orange smoke frames her face in slow-motion, distorted laughter. It’s an instant reminder that, when these Housewives are good, they are so good.