Hello Internet! I’m back after a three-month absence from this blog, during which I managed to survive my fourth year at university while balancing big changes that happened at work, but now that summer is here I plan on posting regularly again and keeping my writing skills sharp.

Anyway - The Real Housewives of Sydney. Holy shit. I recently binge-watched the nine episodes of this that I could find on torrents (as of this time of writing, I believe the tenth episode has just premiered in Australia) and I was absolutely enthralled by it. I’m not anything close to being a devotee of the various Real Housewives iterations that have sprung up around the English-speaking world but I have watched The Real Housewives of New York sporadically, and I did watch most of the first (and thus far only) season of The Real Housewives of Dallas awhile back and enjoyed it enough to consider giving RHOS (which is also on its first season) a shot. I also recently got into the 20th (!) season of The Only Way is Essex but the obviously-manufactured drama on that show was getting pretty stale for me so I needed something else to fill the void.

RHOS is honestly one of the most entertaining reality TV shows I have ever watched and yet, though the catfight count is off-the-charts high (especially from about the fourth episode onwards, after they go to the Whitsundays), it never feels as though these ladies are behaving trashily even when the insults being thrown around are less than proper. I think this is partially because the ladies on RHOS are pretty much the ultimate cast one could ever wish for on a show like this. There’s both crazy drama queens (and man, I do not use the word ‘crazy’ lightly) and slightly saner voices of reason but everyone seems really good at dishing out their feelings and opinions in sassy and witty ways. I was really impressed by how funny these women were in confessionals especially; Lisa makes a joke about cameltoes and smuggling yo-yos which I will probably carry with me for the rest of my life, it’s that amazing.

I wanted to jot down some of my thoughts about the cast members of RHOS as well since they are a pretty crazy group of women.

  • Matty: I actually surprised myself with how much I ended up liking her, since she happens to run what is essentially a spa-slash-plastic surgery clinic and (if I’m honest) I’ve always been a bit judgmental of women who have cosmetic procedures to look younger. Maybe not the opinion which I’m proudest of admitting to but that is how I have felt for much of my life - and yet Matty has consistently been one of the aforementioned voices of reason on this show. With the exception of a little tiff early on in the season at a lunch, I don’t think she’s really been involved in any significant drama even though she still more or less speaks her mind pretty freely. The centrepiece of the sixth episode is a party that Matty holds to celebrate the Persian New Year, Nowruz, and I really liked how proud she was of her heritage and culture and that she tried to use the party as a method to get the other ladies to bond. Whether or not the others did so is another story but I still appreciated the gesture and I really like her overall. (NB: Matty also makes a hilarious joke involving cunnilingus and Persian caviar in that episode which had me laughing about it for hours afterwards.)

  • Nicole: Nicole is a former Miss Australia from the early 2000s who is now an event planner of some sort, and when I Googled her I also learned that her family is quite well-off and prominent in Sydney high society. I don’t know if it’s the showrunners purposely making her seem so, but the show definitely depicts her as a woman who’s always grown up in the lap of luxury and really likes being part of the upper class. She’s probably the most boring of the RHOS cast, which is not necessarily a bad thing but none of the most entertaining moments on the show (so far) have really involved her to a large extent, and she’s not as good a peacemaker as Matty or Melissa so she hasn’t really endeared me to her on that front either.

  • Victoria: Victoria looks a lot like Yolanda from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (mother to Gigi and Bella Hadid) to me, and I think Victoria is my personal favourite of the “drama queens” on RHOS. She’s openly very rude and judgmental of some of the other women, notably Athena X, but she doesn’t seem to give a shit what they think and it’s kind of refreshing to see someone who just refuses to apologize and repent for any of the sass she dishes out. That said, a major subplot of the series is Victoria hiring a private investigator to learn about what happened to her birth father (who left her mother when she was two years old) and it culminates in Victoria meeting someone from her past who I think really humanized Victoria a lot in the audience’s eyes - but without making Victoria’s emotional vulnerability seem contrived and staged. I didn’t necessarily agree with Victoria’s tactics towards the other ladies all the time (she handled a charity auction / product launch in episode seven pretty badly IMO) but I’d be lying if she wasn’t an absolute hoot to watch most of the time, and plus she was responsible for organizing the trip to the Whitsundays which was easily some of the most beautiful scenery porn shown on the show. Can’t hate someone too much for that.

  • Lisa: I really wanted to like Lisa because she seemed a lot like the type of woman I am (career-oriented, a sense of humour which is a little irreverent, likes to do things which are very unconventional but also enjoys some of the more traditional “girly” things as well) but I honestly found most of the stuff involving her to be either off-putting or uninteresting. The main subplot involving Lisa revolves around her insecurities about her deteriorating marriage and, as insensitive as it probably sounds, I found most of those scenes to be either uncomfortably personal (I’ve never liked seeing things like divorce, or the direct lead-up to divorce, in reality TV because I can never put aside the fact that there are real children who will be affected by what’s being depicted) or just plain boring. Lisa’s main enemy on the show is Krissy and in the later episodes it seems that Lisa takes every single opportunity (especially in the confessionals) she gets to slut-shame Krissy, and I really didn’t like seeing that because it was very unwarranted and women who insult each other on the basis of sexual promiscuity just doesn’t fly well in my books.

  • Melissa: Melissa is a singer and sometimes-actor and you can really tell her experience in show business contributed to how she chose to present herself on this show. I think she’s the only cast member whose SO and children have not appeared on screen in any significant quantity of time; there’s a brief shot of her being with her kids in like two episodes, and then a five-minute scene in one episode where she interviews potential nannies, and that’s about it. I really appreciated that she chose to make the show focus on her social life and not on her family members and I do like Melissa a lot overall. Possibly due to the fact that she is a very blonde and bubbly person and that she generally seems to be a people-pleaser, Melissa gives off the initial impression of not being the sharpest knife in the toolkit (an opinion echoed by Athena X in the fifth episode), but I think she quickly dissolves that facade and comes across as someone who’s seen a lot of this sort of crazy drama before - and purposely chooses to just laugh about it rather than get herself involved in it.

  • Athena X: Oh my God. I don’t even know where to begin with this woman. This show basically operates singlehandedly on the drama that Athena X manufactures because the woman cannot go more than half an episode without destroying an established alliance and forming a new enemy (usually at the same time). She is also a big fan of quasiBuddhist spiritual theories and practices and often talks about “regression” and her past lives completely unironically. But honestly Athena X is borderline insane IMO and her antics really have to be seen to be believed. Descriptions wouldn’t do her particular brand of craziness justice. I guarantee you will walk away from RHOS shouting her more infamous catchphrases (“Captain Eyebrows” comes to mind).

  • Krissy: I think Krissy is the most beautiful of the RHOS cast (she looks a lot like Cindy Crawford!) and to me she is the best balance of the “overdramatic” and “boring” (for lack of a better descriptor) ladies of the cast. She has a great scene early on in the series where she hosts a big dinner party for most of her extended family and while I have no idea how manufactured or staged it was, I really loved the dynamic she had with her family and you can really tell that having had a close-knit family has influenced the way that Krissy treats other women - which is to say, she treats other women really positively and with a lot of shared respect. This is not to say that she isn’t embroiled in drama on the show because she comes to blows with Lisa several times in the series, usually over Krissy’s flirtatious behaviour with pretty much every man working in the service industry (something which I personally never had a problem with, FYI), but where I expected to sympathize with Lisa a lot I actually ended up seeing more of myself in Krissy.

All in all, I’m actually pretty obsessed with this show now, and I’m really excited to watch the remaining episodes and Season 2 (when they start - and finish - making that) as well.