RHONY Season 5: What’s Not to Love?

luann de lesseps

Love, love, love it.  So far.

Despite the nay-sayers, consisting mostly of ex-cast members and Alex McCord fans, this season is a breath of fresh air, the same fresh air needed on the Real Housewives of New Jersey.

Coming off a dark and twisted Season 4, and the firings of Cindy Barshop, Alex McCord, Kelly Bensimon and Jill Zarin, Bravo did exactly the right thing in getting rid of them and re-vamping this franchise.

Simon van Kempen, husband of Alex McCord and one of the people who took the firing the hardest, recently tweeted that no RH franchise would ever get rid of half the cast again, speaking of the ratings, mostly. RHONY has always been the lowest rated of the RH franchise anyway….no reason to bring the old ones back, eh? This franchise is continuing to struggle after the departure of Bethenny Frankel.

The new RHONYs: Aviva Drescher, Heather Thomson and Carole Radziwill bring their own brand of cray-cray, an upscale brand.  The juxtaposition of these ladies against LuAnn de Lesseps, Sonja Morgan and especially Ramona Singer is fascinating to watch.  Watching Reid Drescher’s embarrassment around his father-in-law and Ramona on the last episode was worth watching just for the entertainment value. By the way, Aviva definitely “married up” when she dumped Harry Dubin for Reid.  Playboy Harry has an estimated net worth of $2M, Reid is worth a cool $18M. Now we know why, with Reid, suddenly Aviva’s phobias disappear!

Carole Radziwill fascinates. On the one hand, why would a woman like this bother with a famewhore show?  I love the fact that she did not marry for money, Prince Anthony loved her. She’s worth a cool $50M, and it’s her money. She is too accomplished in her own right to deal with this foolishness. But I’m glad she’s there. She also shows us that, no matter how rich and accomplished, women can be jealous of another woman’s’ looks (LuAnn, arguably the best-looking of all the RH’s.)

From the editing so far, it looks like Ramona Singer may be the big loser this season. Ramona was always this batshit crazy, but with Jill and Kelly  in the cast, it was less noticeable.

We’ll see.

Various perspectives on this season, some not so objective, as the RHONY’s, more than any other franchise, are known for attempting media spin.  from Bravo Ratings:

a scheduling change by Bravo executives to boost the flagging 5th season of RHoNY, only 633,000 viewers tuned in and that was the second lowest ratings of this 2nd season. Last week 815,000 viewers tuned in and so that drop of 182,000 was presumably not worth the 95,000 that RHoNY gained Monday by switching the RHOC Reunion part 2 from Tuesday to Monday.

I’ll leave it to you to figure out who owns this website.

The Real Housewives of New York airs Monday nights on Bravo TV.