Home ENTERTAINMENT The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills recap: Reunion part one, minus one

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills recap: Reunion part one, minus one

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<em>The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills</em> recap: Reunion part one, minus one

At one point during part 1 of the RHOBH reunion, Kyle is declared the (new?) queen of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. But I think we can all agree that the throne was promptly usurped by Judy from Arkansas and her hand-of-the-queen, Andy Cohen. It’s Judy for her simply savage viewer question, and Andy for acting as if he had no other option but to read from a notecard: “Dorit, Judy from Fort Smith, Arkansas, wants to know how your gigantic breast implants affect your mammograms.”

And you guys — that is not the last time we’ll talk about mammograms tonight! Part one of this reunion is kind of all over the board, including the graphics team really getting a long leash on the opening sequence wherein we see “RHOBH9 Reunion” typed into a Google search bar. (Who uses capitals when they google? Well, probably Lisa Rinna actually.) And wouldn’t you know it, that fake search yields some weird fake video conference call between Andy and his bestie Anderson Cooper where Anderson just can’t believe all the wild RHOBH happenings.

It is all very weird, and I don’t know why they’re even being this extra, because the preview of what’s to come actually looked pretty juicy. It’s almost like they could have distilled it down into one part, and made one really good reunion episode…

But noooo. This is The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills so, contractually speaking, we have to cut through a thick layer of passive aggression and sequins before we can get to any real drama. And speaking of sequins — the RHOBH ladies do at least still know how to serve a lewk. Perhaps receiving the feedback that this season was a little bland, they’ve all arrived in full sequins and/or neon, with Dorit going so far as to pin a full deconstructed disco ball to her scalp (and Denise wore a dress for the occasion, so y’know, baby steps).

In reaction to the blinding array of fashions, it seems, Andy is starting this reunion off with some shaaaady-shade-shade. You see, the day before the reunion filmed, Lisa Vanderpump told a reporter that she would not be attending the reunion, nor would she be returning to RHOBH. “This brings to mind the season 3 reunion when Adrienne Maloof didn’t show up,” Andy says immediately, cutting to a clip where 2013 Andy is saying, “Adrienne Maloof’s final act as a Housewife is not showing up tonight.” And then — 2013 Andy Cohen asks the 2013 cast what they think of that…

Cut to 2013 Lisa Vanderpump going on and on about how she thinks it’s a mistake for Adrienne not to show up, and when you sign up to do a reality show, you have to be prepared to open up your life, and Adrienne leaked stories to the press about how she wanted to quit, but Lisa thinks she really wanted to stay, she just didn’t want to come and clean up her mess. Ahem. It’s, uh, pretty uncanny the parallels, especially when 2019 Andy throws it over to 2019 Kyle who says it’s a mistake for LVP not to come to the reunion and she thinks Lisa gave the interview the day before “so that she could say she quit because she knew if she didn’t show up, you would probably do the same thing you had to do with Adrienne and fire her.”

But something tells me Lisa Vanderpump’s life-after-Housewives will look a little different than Adrienne’s (as in, we’ll still have plenty of access to her on our reality televisions, and Andy might just have to swallow some of his pride on this one). For their part, the other women seem to think it’s all a stunt and LVP is going to walk in the door at any moment. But I don’t — if LVP is anything, it’s staunch.

The montages kick off with Denise, which is kind of an odd way to start. It is her first season, and don’t get me wrong, I love Denise Richards and every single one of her PINK by Victoria Secret bralettes, but our girl didn’t have much of a singular storyline this season. So, mostly it’s talking about how great Denise is: she’s really good at being an ex-wife to Charlie Sheen, she’s a really good mom to her adorable daughters, and she’s really good at embarrassing her new husband by reminding everyone that she talked him into getting a happy ending massage from an elderly woman, and telling them about his huge penis in the process of saying she never talks about his huge penis.

And now that we’re up to speed there, onto Kyle whose montage featured some of her futile attempts to discipline her menagerie of variously sized dogs, but frankly, I wish the whole thing had been her attempts to discipline her menagerie of variously sized dogs. Alas, the montage also brings up when Lisa Rinna took Kyle to her mammogram appointment, which gives Andy an excellent opportunity to call on “Judy from Arkansas” to ask Dorit about her “giant breast implants,” and when Dorit balks at the description, Andy is all, They don’t look gigantic to me, I just read what comes up on the magic caaaards.

Finally, it’s time for Camille to come out, which guarantees some drama in the near future, but first Andy has to get out the giant spoon Brandy Glanville gave him for Hanukkah last year and stir this pot into a frothy lather.

From the moment Camille comes onstage, Andy is drawing comparisons between her and Denise. He tells Camille that Denise just talked about her philosophy on raising kids with a famous ex, and Camille responds that her mom has told her to watch the way Denise always makes her relationship with Charlie Sheen about what’s best for their kids because “that’s the classy way to do it.” Camille does not smile while relaying this, nor does Denise smile while hearing it. There is already bad blood here.

Then Andy brings up Denise’s comment during the season about how she didn’t have a prenup with Charlie Sheen, but she didn’t try to get half of his money because she’s not “a greedy f—ing whore.” At the time, I do not believe that was directed toward Camille, but Andy’s all, Do you think she should have asked for half, Camille? And I’ve found Camille pretty intolerable this season, but I was with her when she was like, “I…don’t…know…her…life?” Camille says she worked hard during her marriage to Kelsey Grammar, she didn’t just sit around “buying fancy clothes and shoving bonbons in my face.” I think she’s just trying to explain why she deserved whatever she got from Kelsey, and I certainly don’t think it was directed at Denise, who no one would accuse of sitting around and buying fancy clothes, but Andy is all, “Do you like bonbons, Denise?”

Oh, he is being messy! But the fallout of that weirdly tense exchange will have to wait, because — as we always knew it would — the conversation has finally shifted to Lucy Lucy Apple Juice. And man, Teddi and Dorit came together so wholeheartedly in their turn against Lisa Vanderpump for the RadarOnline story that I had forgotten juuuust how shady Teddi’s original dealings in the LucyLucyAppleJuiceGate were.

As the montage shows, at the very beginning of the season, Teddi went to Vanderpump Dogs and was told about how Dorit adopted a dog from them that eventually ended up in a kill shelter; Teddi then confessed to Dorit about how Lisa’s employees told her this in the name of not gossiping; Teddi made a lot of Nixon-like exclamations in the vein of, “Never once have I told a lie, and never will you hear me tell one;” then Teddi had to fess up to being in cahoots with Lisa’s employees to expose Dorit landing the dog in the kill shelter the whole time.

And to be fair, Teddi did eventually own up to her part in the plot and apologize to Dorit. Well, she mostly owned up to it; as Andy points out, it’s a bit suspect that Teddi only ever communicated with John Blizzard about what she alleges was Lisa Vanderpump’s grand plan to expose Dorit all along. But according to Teddi herself, she wasn’t that close with John Blizzard and was certainly close enough with Lisa at the time to be coordinating the take-down of a castmate directly.

But I think the most significant point of the night is made by — and I can’t believe I’m saying this — Dorit. She says that during the season Teddi kept repeating that she “couldn’t go through with it” as though she’d had some crisis of conscience about throwing Dorit under the bus alongside Lisa. But in watching the actual scene at Vanderpump Dogs where Lisa suddenly acted all reticent to talk about Lucy, Dorit tells Teddi that she now sees, “It wasn’t actually your conscience, and you thinking, ‘I don’t want to do this to Dorit’ — it was, ‘I don’t want to be the only one to do this to Dorit.’”

Boom. That’s why her hair is full of Claire’s clips — it’s holding in all the good points in.

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