Cheese Boards and Party Puke: Meet the (New) Real Housewives of New York City

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The greatest endorsement I can give the new reboot of The Real Housewives of New York City is that the entire premiere revolves around a fight over whether or not one cast member made a rude comment about a cheese board at a party.

What was actually said about the cheese board? Why would someone insult something as innocuous and, most would say, normal as presenting a cheese board at a gathering? Who is the person who spread the gossip that someone was maligning the cheese board? Then, in the classic Housewives evolution from ludicrous to existential: Is everyone overreacting about the cheese board, or does the cheese board discourse represent something deeper about relationship dynamics?

If you are a scholar of what we in the field like to refer to as RHONY, this should be thrilling information, like music to the ears. (A Countess Luann original, perhaps.)

On Sunday night, an entirely new cast makes its debut on RHONY, the first time Bravo has ever rebooted a Housewives franchise entirely. Fans are equal parts bereft and excited: How could RHONY possibly exist without the batty charms of Ramona Singer or Sonja Morgan? But also, how could that iteration have possibly continued, with the late-run episodes cannonballing into problematic, uncomfortably dark waters? Moving on is hard, but is it worth it?

The cheese board incident says yes. It’s a classically inconsequential, legitimately funny tiff that would have been right at home in the original RHONY. The fact that it’s so ridiculous entertains us. And if we were all to stand in front of a mirror and tell our reflection the harshest, meanest truth about ourselves, it would be that escalating such petty nonsense is all too relatable. That’s the magic of Housewives: We judge the cheese board incident, and we’ve experienced the cheese board incident.

What else does the new RHONY cast have to offer us beyond cheese squabbles? More, what does it feel like to be in the crosshairs of the unforgiving Bravo fan spotlight? We chatted with the new RHONY cast and Grand Poobah of all things Housewives, Andy Cohen, at the RHONY premiere at the famed Rainbow Room to find out.

“I know! Right?!” Cohen excitedly reacted when I met up with him and, as anyone who had just seen the show’s first episode will be compelled to do, gushed about the cheese fight.

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But there were more serious things to discuss, like what Cohen thinks fans of the O.G. Housewives should know going into the reboot. “It’s a totally different show,” he said. “We all love the original RHONY so much. I think you have to really do a trust fall and understand this is different. This is a different group of women.”

Just how different is the anxiety-inducing concern that has Bravoholics reaching for the pinot greege with more gusto than they typically would. “I’m nervous. I don’t like change. I MISS MY PROBLEMATIC, SLIGHTLY GERIATRIC, LADIES OF NYC,” a follower messaged me, after I posted about being at the premiere—an example of the audience’s hesitance to embrace the new cast.

“I’m really glad that Crappie Lake is airing right now, because you get a great taste of classic RHONY from that show and all the comedy,” Cohen said, referencing the new series Sonja and Luann: Welcome to Crappie Lake, a hilarious chronicling of the RHONY vets’ life in rural Illinois. “Then you get to meet our new women in this show. They’re formidable, and they’re interesting, and they’re fashionable, and viable, and funny, and outspoken, and everything we love about New York.”

This is a decidedly younger, more diverse group of women than before, most with families and jobs. (The most New-York-at-this-moment aspect of the show is that maybe two-thirds of the cast could fairly be described as influencers—which, if you can believe it, is celebrated, not shamed.)

“Look, we haven’t seen husbands in New York in a long time,” Cohen told me, about the benefit of a more youthful cast. “We haven’t seen children in New York in a long time. I think they’re in a different phase of their lives, which presents different stories.”

“A Housewife of New York City [today] is not a housewife, obviously,” new cast member Sai De Silva, a content creator, told me. “Girlie has a job.”

That’s the biggest difference between the old guard and the new guard, fellow new Housewife Erin Dana Lichy, a real estate agent and interior designer, told me. “A lot of the time, Housewives were literally housewives, right?” she said. “Not many of them worked. I think a lot of them created their identities through the show. Whereas we have our own identities already, so we’re going into the show with them.”

It’s an interesting, fresh dynamic for the series. Based on what it used to mean to be a Real Housewife of New York City, few members of the cast ever thought they would be considered the kind of a woman who would make sense for the show.

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That’s certainly the case with Jenna Lyons, the former lead designer for J. Crew, whose enigmatic vibe is an entirely new and unexplored dynamic for the franchise. “Never in a million years,” she said, when I asked if she ever thought that she’d be a Housewife. “Everything that’s happened to me in the last five years feels like I’m in a foreign entity, like I’m an alien dropped down on this planet. Like, what am I doing?”

“People keep comparing us to the one that’s already been,” Lyons continued. “We’re not replacing them. They created something in this city that was a place and time… We’re a tooootally different group.”

Even as the cast sets out to redefine it, there’s no denying that the label “Real Housewife” carries baggage. “Even with the plastic surgery aspect, or fillers, or all that stuff that ends up happening to a lot of them,” Lichey said. “Not all of them! But a lot of them really go H.A.M. with it. That gave me pause, because that’s just not me. That was hard for me, to be categorized as like the Barbie doll wife.”

While undeniably more obsessed with fashion and turning out “looks” than their RHONY predecessors ever were (at least beyond the confines of the Jovani flagship store), the new cast appears to have avoided the plastic surgery trap. According to Cohen, they also avoided another landmine that might have been the downfall of the previous RHONY. While the cast is candid about their backgrounds, hardships, and what they’ve experienced because of their race, pasts, and sexualities—and there is certainly drama—things never get that serious.

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“I’ve seen a lot of chatter about [wanting] more light drama, that people like light drama,” Cohen said. “So that it’s not so bloody, so to speak. I think this delivers on that front, too. It’s not as intense to start. It ratchets up, as everything does. But I think there’s something to be said for that.”

It’s tempting to say, especially after meeting them, that there’s a certain polish to these women that sets them apart from the previous RHONY iteration. But don’t confuse that for a lack of fun. If possible, the new RHONY has more sex talk than the previous. (You won’t forget when you first hear about the time one of the cast members put a popsicle up her vagina.)

The goofy unpredictability that’s very much a trademark of RHONY remains too. To wit, while I was talking with a friend at the premiere about the merits of the reboot, new cast member Jessel Taank scurried by in her gold peekaboo column gown with her hand over her mouth. Just as she passed us, she threw up, in the Rainbow Room, at a Real Housewives premiere party. It’s now a Page Six headline. (A Housewife’s rite of passage!)

Brynn Whitfield, another new cast member, told me her biggest concern about the show was that “it better be funny!”

“I have high standards for this,” she continued. “I love Real Housewives.”

Earlier this week, Whitfield starred in her first viral moment, when the cast’s first taglines were released. Hers—“I love to laugh, but make me mad and I’ll date your dad”—received the internet version of a standing ovation for its cheekiness. After seeing the reaction, “I posted the Erika Jayne speech, ‘I’m going to give the gays everything they want,’” Whitfield said. “And then 500 gays were like, ‘We love you!’

Truly, everyone at the premiere was buzzing about Whitfield’s scene-stealing hilarity, whispering her name as she passed by, as if it were some sort of flash-mob performance of “Roxie” from Chicago. Of course, it’s dangerous to be a fan favorite in the Bravo universe. As quickly as people fall in love with you, they’ll turn on you too. Once you’re on a pedestal, people come for that pedestal with flipped tables, prosthetic legs, and a restaurant supply store’s worth of wine glasses, hoping you’ll come tumbling down.

Whitfield laughs at that thought. “Some people will hate me. Some people will like me. I could really give two shits about it. My head is so far up my own ass that way. I don’t really care if you like me. I’m just obsessed with if I like myself today.”

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