The appeal of all the “Real Housewives” series is, to a large extent, that they are funny and often campy. Even the fights and feuds generally have at least a bit of humor to them. It’s amusing to see these rich women going after each other.
The Housewives themselves don’t entirely get this, but we’re usually laughing at them, not with them.
But there was precious little humor in Season 3 of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.” The series sank under the weight of Jen Shah’s repeated false claims of innocence — even though she pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges before the season began airing.
But Jen was not the only problem. Season 3 has been dominated by mean-spirited nastiness. It’s as if the cast members were advised that it was in their best interest to be combative and even vicious. Add in the unsatisfying, unexplained and unresolved plot lines, and maybe there’s a reason that the Utah version of “Real Housewives” is generally the least watched on Bravo.
(Fred Hayes/Bravo) Meredith Marks and Lisa Barlow on "The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City."
• The Meredith vs. Lisa war has gotten completely out of hand. Yes, Lisa went on an unjustified rant about Meredith in Season 2. But which is worse — Lisa spouting off in the heat of the moment, or Meredith calmly, coolly plotting to assassinate Lisa’s character?
• Whitney Rose’s continuing battle to overcome what she keeps referring to as “childhood abuse” is so vague there’s not much impact. We were never told what the abuse was — emotional? physical? sexual? We were never told who perpetrated the abuse. We were told it was a family member, and there’s an obvious insinuation. Clearly, there were legal issues here. But by not identifying the abuser, Whitney and the show have made suspects of all of her relatives. And they have done nothing to promote any sort of discussion around abuse.
• The increasingly nasty falling out between Whitney and Heather Gay was both ridiculous and aggravating. Don’t forget, it started because Whitney wanted Heather to back her up by lying and saying she remembered something she did not — and it was all downhill from there. Neither of them are blameless, and both of them made it worse by thinking the worst of the other.
(Fred Hayes/Bravo) Whitney Rose and Heather Gay on "The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City."
• The dispute between Angie Kastanevas and Jen over the $13,000-plus cost of Sharrieff Shah’s birthday party seemed manufactured for the show.
• The actions of Angie Harrington’s husband, Chris — he created a fake Instagram pager to troll Lisa and Jen, and Jen said it drove her to attempt suicide — were simply heinous. And yet they were mostly glossed over by both Angie H. and the show itself.
• For the show to work, it has to be believably real. Clearly, the situations are manufactured, and some of the women would never be in the same room if they weren’t being paid because they loathe each other. But it so often felt like the “friends” — Angie H., Angie K. and Danna Bui-Negrete — were actively campaigning to be promoted to full-time Housewives by stirring up trouble deliberately and not in a convincingly realistic way.
• And then there was Heather’s black eye, which created far more aggravation than drama. Her conflicting statements about how she got it weren’t funny (although she was clearly joking at times), they were annoying.
(Bravo) Somehow, Heather Gay is going to end up with a black eye on "The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City."
What she failed to realize is that, by refusing to say what happened, she cast doubt on several people. Which was not funny, bad storytelling, and inherently unfair.
But the biggest anchor dragging down Season 3 was Jen. Producers apparently operated on the assumption that her declarations of innocence were true, when it would’ve been better for the show if she had been dropped at the end of Season 2.
I’m willing to give the producers a bit of a break on that, however. During production of most of Season 3, Jen was still innocent until proven guilty. It was bad for the show when she pleaded guilty a couple of months before the season started airing, giving us a lot of lies and killing any suspense.
Of course, you could also argue that the producers have mostly themselves to blame. Reading through the charges, her guilt seemed pretty obvious. Especially after her assistant/partner Stuart Smith changed his plea to guilty before production began on Season 3.
Honestly, I wasn’t 100% certain of her guilt then, either. But I wasn’t shooting a show that still had her front and center.
Hers was not a victimless crime. A lot of people — many of them older and vulnerable — were swindled out of a lot of money, ruining their lives. And Bravo and “RHOSLC” gave Jen a platform to lie about her innocence over and over again.
It was not funny. It was not entertaining. It was … awful.
Bravo has not announced that “RHOSLC” has been renewed for a fourth season. At this point, that really doesn’t mean anything. It is Bravo’s standard operating procedure. But you’ve got to at least wonder. Ratings vary week to week, but Salt Lake City generally lags behind the other “Real Housewives” series. And, given that so much of the first three seasons was built around Jen, will the producers see less value in “RHOSLC” going forward?
I don’t know. Stay tuned …
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