Real Housewives RENAISSANCE

After reboots and cast shake-ups, the fading Bravo franchise is back to being must-see TV. Us digs into its revitalization

- ELIZA THOMPSON

When Real Housewives of New York City alums Luann de Lesseps and Sonja Morgan arrived in Benton, Ill., to film their spinoff series, Luann & Sonja: Welcome to Crappie Lake, they found themselves engaging in all kinds of activities you absolutely can’t do in Manhattan: mudding (off-roading in a mini monster truck), bull-testicle eating (what it sounds like) and noodling (catfish hunting with your bare or possibly gloved hands). Would the two city slickers crash and burn?

Shockingly, no. De Lesseps and Morgan started to fit right in within days, and the oddly heartwarming Crappie Lake became an instant hit. Even critics were on board, with Time calling the show a “captivating comedic masterpiece” and a “refreshingly conflict-free return to form.”

It’s that last notion that seems to have proliferated across the Housewives universe of late, a welcome respite from a few years where the shows had taken a grim turn. After the pandemic made filming extraordinarily complicated, some of the franchise’s brightest stars were hit with serious legal allegations. Erika Jayne of Beverly Hills was accused of embezzling money from families of plane crash victims (she’s in the clear for now), while Salt Lake City’s Jen Shah was arrested for wire fraud (she’s in jail for the next six years). Housewives has always trafficked in these women's woes - see any number of messy divorces and Teresa Giudice's 2015 prison stint - but to many fans, these developments felt different.

"Some of our shows have gotten very dark," admits Sezin Cavusoglu, senior vice president of unscripted content at NBCUniversal. "It's good to counter that with some Crappie Lake silliness."