Not Well, Bitch: How the Real Housewives Helped Me Learn to Cope With Depression
These reality show franchises gave me permission to celebrate all of the most difficult aspects of myself
As I began my sophomore year of college, the combo platter of anxiety and depression I’d been quietly coping with for months suddenly spiraled out of control. Time slowed to a painful drip. The school, ill-equipped to deal with my abrupt mental shift, sent me home to New Hampshire to recalibrate for two weeks. There, while searching for small reasons to stay alive, I discovered the one thing that actually managed to compress the ponderous march of time back into its previously manageable chunks. I discovered the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
I instantly became enmeshed in their fights and backstories, carefully picking my way through who had done and said what to whom. From there, my obsession only grew. With an iron grip on the family remote control, my mother — a diehard Bravo fan — introduced me to more and more of the franchises. Each day, we would recap the series with a fervor and gravity typically reserved for gossip about people we actually know. These shows became a momentary respite from the fictional narratives my anxious, depressive brain was frantically whipping up about myself.
I started to divvy up my weeks in terms of these series, the same way I did as a child when the duration of a car ride was described not in terms of minutes, but Rugrats episodes. Each day became synonymous with a different franchise, something to look forward to that also held the rare promise of guaranteed diversion. The structure of the shows’ storylines helped reframe the way I thought about my life.
In the series, weeks of filming are condensed down to a single hour, offering a rapid-fire, well-delineated version of life. Plotlines unfold in perfectly articulated arcs, dialogue is cut back to only the most stinging barbs, and life becomes one endless string of brunch, parties, and contractually-mandated vacations. Perhaps because of my strictly Housewives media diet, the stories I told myself began to shift to match the show’s breakneck framework as well.
I started to see the ways in which the editing of these shows could serve as a lesson in the construction of memory itself. Instead of drowning in the depths of my mind’s sinister obsession with self-criticism and doubt, I was able to take a step back and observe how malleable the whole process actually is. Various moments are called forth and emphasized, while others are suppressed. Details are picked out at random and reconstituted into some cohesive narrative not organically present. And, occasionally, I’d even catch my brain in the midst of attempting to add elements of pure fiction to past events.
An experience any person with a mental illness, or any housewife caught in a lie about her own previous bad behavior, knows all too well. Once I came to this revelation, instead of obsessing endlessly over trivial events, I was able to reorganize and condense my thoughts and experiences until they fit whatever smaller, more wieldy storyline I was constructing. I created my own personal sizzle reel of salient memories.
It wasn’t until discovering the podcast Bitch Sesh some ten years later that I fully realized the key role this reality franchise had played in my own healing process. The show’s hosts, Casey Wilson and Danielle Schneider, also discovered their passion for Real Housewives in the midst of some of their lowest moments. Wilson first watched Orange County following her mother’s passing, binging the series after realizing one of the show’s stars, Jeana Keough, reminded her of her late mother.
Likewise, Schneider found the series while she was struggling to conceive, telling Entertainment Weekly, “It was a dark time, and I was drawn to this sparkling wish fulfillment, with crazy people yelling at each other. It’s escape.” Via their podcast, both women propose that while the show is undoubtedly a form of unfettered pleasure, Real Housewives also offers an in-depth look at female interpersonal dynamics worthy of serious (and comedic) examination.
Most articles attempting to rationalize our fascination with reality TV hone in on the idea of schadenfreude, a concept most simply defined as the pleasure we derive from someone else’s misfortune. In his book Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Nietzsche wrote that “Schadenfreude originates in the fact that everyone, in certain aspects of which he is quite aware, feels badly sometimes; that he has sorrow, or envy, or pain. The misfortune [Schaden] that befalls others makes them equal in his eyes; it appeases his envy.”
So if we accept this argument, we watch Real Housewives because of a deep-seated envy for these women’s lives, an envy we can only appease through witnessing the various tragedies that befall them. Under this prescription, our feverish enjoyment is transformed into a study in jealousy and avarice.
But upon closer examination of the subtle, complex joys these shows provide, the schadenfreude argument begins to fall flat. It feels like a surface-level rationalization akin to believing that Sex and the City is universally beloved because we’re all secretly covetous of Carrie’s debt-inducing Manolo Blahnik collection. In other words, the schadenfreude analysis is an oversimplification of and discredit to the multi-layered drama, character development, and nontraditional forms of female representation that can be found within. These women’s riches, rather than being a source of envy, serve as a reminder that money and fame are not panaceas. If anything, they only exacerbate the myriad of quotidian problems that were already present.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Schneider explained, “This is truly drama at its best. Yes, it’s trash, but some of it is real and pure.” The schadenfreude element of these franchises is only the tip of the iceberg of our enjoyment, underneath which lies something deeply cathartic, something “real and pure.” These reality stars are permitted visibility in a dimension not typically available to everyday women, especially middle-aged women. They deliver relentlessly raw, over-the-top, emotional reactions, get into screaming fights in crowded restaurants, and shamelessly flirt with men barely old enough to drink, all while clad in flesh-baring ensembles most women half their age would never have the balls to wear.
All of the housewives live life without rules or a filter and instead of being punished for it they are rewarded with more screen time, a higher salary, and a renewed contract. There is something subversively inspirational in that. What started out as a way to essentially monetize catfights has accidentally provided America with some of its most fraught, nuanced portrayals of women. Wilson has even said there are no better, more complex parts for female actresses on television, adding, “They’re the Medea of our time!”
Along with all that high key, confrontational melodrama, we are also introduced to their very real, brutally honest interior lives. We see divorces, cancer scares, struggles with alcoholism, and the deaths of parents, husbands, and siblings, all of which must be handled under the unrelenting gaze of the camera. Our joy in watching them doesn’t come from their humiliation but from their deep familiarity, from seeing pieces of ourselves and our struggles reflected back in these ladies’ lives. Our viewing experience is one of catharsis.
Despite all the histrionics, Real Housewives gives us portrayals of women that are fundamentally human and, therefore, deeply flawed. Because of that they also inevitably feed into some of our gender’s worst stereotypes. The housewives backstab, they gossip, they sabotage each other, and regularly get so blackout drunk they flip tables and repeatedly fall into bushes. But while we may not like them as people, they’re also not asking us to. And because of that, these housewives have found a way to magically escape the no-win patriarchal trap of likeability that millions of us still struggle against every day, from the barista at your local coffee shop to Hillary Clinton.
This idea of likeability is a topic fellow Housewives devotee, Roxane Gay, has expounded upon at length. In her essay “Not Here to Make Friends,” she unpacks that classic reality show trope, writing, “It isn’t that they are terrible, you see. It’s simply that they are not participating in the show to make friends. They are freeing themselves from the burden of likability or they are, perhaps, freeing us from the burden of guilt for the dislike and eventual contempt we might hold for them.” She continues, “an unlikeable woman embodies any number of unpleasing but entirely human characteristics,” concluding, “In many ways, likability is a very elaborate lie, a performance, a code of conduct dictating the proper way to be.”
The best housewives are the ones who have never been party to that performance. We are drawn to these women precisely because of their shamelessness, talking and acting in ways that popular society considers unbecoming of our gender, behavior that, conversely, this television genre cultivates and champions. They routinely refuse to perform femininity for us in the ways we’ve been conditioned to expect it to look like. Instead, over and over again these women insist upon their own humanity.
These programs also offer us an almost Buddhist lesson in being present. Without any real thrust or conclusion to the myriad plotlines, let alone any substantive personal growth, the show serves as a kind of shrieking 40-minute meditation on the ever-evolving now. There is no higher purpose or goal to what we are watching. Even as these women demonstrate their own interminable obsession with the perceived slights of the past, the elliptical editing forces the viewer perpetually back into the current moment, giving us no choice but to deal with whatever is immediately at hand and on screen. For those of us fighting ceaselessly to outrun the tidal wave of memory, the show transforms into a source of zen-like release. The Tao of Bravo.
And perhaps because of both those elements, it makes sense that so many of us find Real Housewives in our own moments of profound sadness. Because ultimately, what these women are providing us with is the permission to feel deeply, live loudly, and take up more space than we think we’re entitled to. They teach us that there’s no shame in embracing the messiest versions of ourselves. They ask that we be unapologetically human too.
