When I’ve thought about the small but mighty state of Rhode Island in the past, it’s mostly been in the context of A) getting rejected from Brown (honestly, I had a B-minus average; what did I expect?) or B) wishing I was at Taylor Swift’s Fourth of July party in Watch Hill. Now, though, I will likely associate the Ocean State forever more with The Real Housewives of Rhode Island, my current favorite Bravo juggernaut and the main reason I didn’t so much as pick up a book last weekend.
I was, admittedly, an easy target for this show, given my history with the Eastern Seaboard-set Real Housewives franchises: I cut my teeth on The Real Housewives of New York City as a teen and wrote most of my first book with The Real Housewives of New Jersey on in the background. (I don’t know why the dull roar of the Manzos and Giudices was so conducive to cranking out pages, but it was.)
And, at its very best, RHORI reminds me of the early, Danielle Staub-led days of RHONJ, when the show was mostly a lot of beautiful Italian broads yelling at each other about who was or was not an escort, with breaks only to go shopping or swill wine at various establishments owned by the other wives’ husbands. My knowledge of Rhode Island’s local culture was somewhat paltry prior to starting the show, but now I know that the state has, among other things, a notable Italian mob history and a sizable Syrian-American community, which tracks with the makeup of the show’s cast, most of whom are Italian, Syrian, Lebanese, or a combo thereof. (I beg you to simply imagine the mozzarella-studded mezze plates they serve up while fighting with one another over who sent photos of whose husband’s side piece to the group chat!)
Thanks to the RHORI’s dubious subtitling and its cast’s consistent strings of inanity (at one point, star Alicia simply tells the camera: “I ran over a woman.” That’s it! That’s all we get of that story!), I have almost no sense of what’s happening on the show at any given time. But that’s the magic of the Real Housewives industrial complex in a nutshell; I’m pretty much always confused, yet I’m also locked in in a way that belies the upsetting amount of money my parents paid for me to “think critically” throughout my primary, secondary, and collegiate education. At least if the season continues at this pace of inscrutable drama, I may get a second book soundtrack out of it? God willing!
