The Soul Of Bravo

A year of national reckonings on race and inequality has tested how real the Housewives should be.

- By Anna Peele. Photograps by Landon Nordeman

In 2020, Leva Bonaparte considered a job opportunity. Bravo had been pursuing the hospitality executive for years in an attempt to get her to join the cast of Southern Charm. The series, which premiered in 2014, featured a group of genteel degenerates living in Charleston, South Carolina. For many seasons, the central tension was the romance between 52-year-old Thomas Ravenel, the former treasurer of South Carolina, who’d resigned after being indicted on drug charges, and his 21-year-old girlfriend and the mother of his two children, Kathryn Calhoun Dennis. (That’s Calhoun as in John C. Calhoun, the proslavery vicepresident of the United States of America.) Dennis and Ravenel were drawn to each other in a way that felt authentic but dangerous; as in the film Mr. and Mrs. Smith, it seemed equally plausible that the couple would wind up with a happy ending or dead by each other’s hands. Along with the show’s other stars, Dennis and Ravenel would play polo and drink rosé out of pint glasses while dressed in brick-colored shorts embroidered with critters. The activities often took place at cast members’ ancestral plantations, but sometimes—and this is how Bonaparte, who is not a degenerate, comes in—at Bonaparte’s restaurants.

While other Charleston establishments had refused to be part of what they called Charmageddon