The apparent behind-the-scenes drama on Bravo’s Real Housewives of New York City could probably make its own reality show. Last Friday, as NYC natives put in their happy-hour drink orders at the end of a long week, the city’s gossip bible, Page Six, reported that Bravo would be taking RHONY off the air after 15 seasons. The report sent the Bravo fandom into meltdown, with fans mourning and celebrating the end of one of the network’s most controversial shows. Over the weekend, Andy Cohen — the show’s executive producer and reunion host — pushed back on a spreading narrative that the show had officially been “canceled,” instead insisting that it was simply on pause. “This is a cute story except it’s not canceled,” he commented on a post from The Cut with the headline “Bye-Bye RHONY.”
Semantics aside, at the very least, it looks like the show won’t be back for a while. And if it does return, it’s unlikely the cast will remain in its current configuration. As an insider told Page Six: “We’re trying to figure that show out. We want to figure it out. We think there’s still life in it.” This is hardly a glowing endorsement from the network that, after 13 seasons, took the unprecedented decision to recast RHONY — a show that was once the jewel in the franchise’s crown — around a new group of women. And it’s probably the closest we’ll ever get to Bravo admitting that their big risk hasn’t paid off. As the dust settles on the reboot’s not-quite-cancellation, the question remains: What went wrong?In some ways, you’ve got to hand it to Bravo. The decision to entirely reboot RHONY after its disastrous 13th season — a creaky, claustrophobic season where the cast were still navigating Covid restrictions — was a gutsy move. And while it’s easy to chastise them in hindsight, the “OG” group of women — including Luann De Lesseps, Sonja Morgan, and Ramona Singer — did appear to be running out of steam. Singer, in particular, subjected new cast member Eboni K. Williams — the show’s first Black full-time cast member — to a hailstorm of microaggressions and was the subject of several official complaints. The season ended in chaos, and for the first time in the entire Housewives franchise’s history, there was no Season 13 reunion.
On paper, the reboot made sense. First, it was financially savvy — with the exception of J. Crew’s savant Jenna Lyons, the new cast were likely paid a fraction of their predecessors, some of whom had been on TV for more than a decade. And with times changing, why not reboot the show around a group of women who better represent New York City today? That is why, when the first “RHONY 2.0” season arrived in 2023, viewers were cautiously optimistic. At first, there was plenty to be happy about — Jessel Taank, the show’s breakout star, was a revelation, and Lyons offered a quirky, understated take on Real Housewifery. And by comparison to the heaviness of Season 13, the drama felt refreshingly light.
But when the entire cast returned for another season in October 2024, something felt off. Scenes between the women felt more wooden and tentative, and many of the conversations felt staged, or at least prerehearsed. A now-infamous “prank” storyline — where new “friend of” Rebecca Minkoff (a.k.a. “boring Becky”) pretended to have cheated on her husband and gotten pregnant — enraged fans as being unnecessarily calculated and contrived. (The moment was teased in a preseason trailer as a major bombshell, so when it was revealed to be a silly prank, it felt like we, the viewers, were the ones being punk’d.)
The abysmal prank — which ran over several toe-curling episodes — became emblematic of a season that couldn’t get off the ground. Clearly, the cast wouldn’t have been doing that if they had anything resembling genuine drama to give the audience. And soon, ratings began to tumble. As the season limped on, Cohen — the man who fans consider to be most responsible for the reboot, with some referring to it as his “vanity project” — was flooded with angry replies on social media demanding a return to the “OG” cast. In interviews, he repeatedly defended the reboot with a hostage-like tone, saying, “I loved the original, but this is a new group.”
But to answer the question of what went wrong, it’s best to start there: The “new group.” A couple of years ago, over a bowl of overpriced Soho House granola, my friend Brian Moylan — Vulture recapper and author of the New York Times bestseller The Housewives — told me an important mantra: “Reality TV is a casting director’s medium.” When reality TV doesn’t work, it’s usually down to casting. If fans love and connect with the people they’re watching, then, within reason, this can overcome pretty much any other format issues.
When the new RHONY arrived in 2023, Bravo gave the impression that the women were already friends. But when the show began, it was pretty clear that most of them had only just met. It proved quite challenging to create the type of drama and emotional intimacy that drives the very best Housewives shows with actual strangers. The women clearly didn’t know enough about one another, or weren’t invested enough, to go beyond surface-level interactions. This is why, on most new Housewives shows, at least some of the women have been friends for years, or have a preexisting relationship with at least one other woman on the cast — it allows for more organic friendships and fallouts.
Another part of the issue is Bravo’s emphasis on “aspirational” casting. The network purposefully made the new RHONY younger and richer than its previous incarnation, because a lack of glamor was something fans had previously complained about with the OG cast. But the problem with casting more established women is that they typically have brands to protect (and self-promote) on the show and tend to be more guarded and hesitant about getting messy. Lyons, for example, had a contract stipulation that allowed her to keep her relationship with photographer Cass Bird completely off camera. And the other wives are heavy on brand promo — like liquor mogul-in-the-making Erin Lichy, who once claimed to have brought mezcal to America, slipping a mention of her drink into any conversation she can. This feels emblematic of the fact that the mostly millennial RHONY 2.0 women have also grown up with reality TV, in an era where “reality star” is an official job title now, and are all too aware of the opportunity that getting themselves on TV can be. That brings a certain savviness that can erode authenticity if it starts to feel like the cast are using the show primarily as a springboard for business opportunities (thank you, Bethenny Frankel).
By comparison, the original group of RHONY women mostly found themselves on the show by being at the right place at the right time, giving them a touch of innocence and hopefulness, too, like it’s never too late to reinvent yourself. They might not all have as much money as the newbies, but they had something else: A life that had been lived, full of interesting backstories. On these shows, there is more to aspiration than cash — indeed, some of the worst housewives ever have been the richest.
Another reason why some fans haven’t given the RHONY reboot a chance — earning the nickname “PHONY” — is because they’re mad at Bravo for failing to keep the OGs in the fold. When Bravo announced the reboot, the network also announced plans to create a “legacy” show featuring the original cast. Contract negotiations eventually broke down. Instead, a handful of RHONY women filmed an “Ultimate Girls Trip” season in St. Barths, which aired in 2023, but this wasn’t enough to satisfy some fans — or keep them off the “new” RHONY’s back.
In fact, the peripheral presence of the OGs — haunting the new cast like the ghosts of reality-TV’s past — has been almost inescapable. The Housewives franchise’s online fandom is increasingly fueled by nostalgia. To many fans, it doesn’t really matter that Ultimate Girls Trip: RHONY Legacy was a little dull and creaky, or that Singer doesn’t seem to have learned from her mistakes — just this week, she posed with Daniel Penny, a police officer who was acquitted of killing a Black man on the subway in 2023. To these nostalgia-obsessed fans, the OGs are the magic solution to all of RHONY’s problems, and they won’t be happy until they’re back on our screens. However, it’s hard to escape the reality that the fans wouldn’t be as nostalgic, and the clamor for the OGs wouldn’t be so loud, if the new crop of RHONY housewives had made a compelling show. Some fans didn’t give them a chance, but they’re ultimately responsible for failing to deliver.
Still, the decision to “pause” or reconfigure RHONY 2.0 could be short-sighted. The Season 15 finale, which featured a dark and disturbing confrontation between Brynn Whitfield and Ubah Hassan, was undoubtedly captivating. On the cast trip in Puerto Rico, Whitfield accused Hassan of slut-shaming her while knowing that she is a rape survivor. Hassan insisted that she had no knowledge that Whitfield had been raped. Screaming ensued, and the cast trip ended early. The thorny issue was re-litigated at a fascinating reunion, where Lyons finally spoke up and asserted herself as the voice of reason — and the matriarch — of the group.
On social media, some fans complained that the storyline was more distressing than entertaining. It’s a fair criticism — I personally had whiplash from the show moving from dull pranks to such high-stakes, life-altering subject matter. Equally, though, it could have trauma-bonded the cast enough to finally form the deeper connections needed to make a great show. Something similar happened to the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City when, in the Season Four finale, Monica Garcia was unmasked as a co-conspirator of Reality Von Tease — an anonymous gossip account that had been trolling the cast for years. When the women returned for Season Five without Garcia, the incident had clearly bonded them, which helped them to create one of the all-time greatest Housewives seasons. I wonder whether something like that might have happened with RHONY if given the chance, too?Perhaps the real lesson here is that entirely rebooting Housewives shows is rarely the way to go. On a show like Below Deck, we’re used to the cast changing every season, but Housewives is all about familiarity and a perceived friendship between the women and their audience. When RHONY was successfully rebooted ahead of its fifth season, three women — De Lesseps, Morgan, Singer — remained, giving fans that sense of grounding while transitioning them into a new era. It’s unclear why they didn’t take a similar approach with RHONY 2.0 to give fans some continuity. Maybe the way forward would be to blend the best women from the old and new cast, because it feels like the fans aren’t fully done with either of them. I would be personally devastated if we never saw Jessel and Pavit again, but I’d also be lying if I said I wouldn’t kill to watch a new season with the Countess, Dorinda Medley, and even a throwback like Carole Radziwill, now that she and Cohen have buried the hatchet on their yearslong feud.
As Bravo’s chief antagonist and former RHONY star Frankel put it in 2024, when ratings nose-dived: “Go get the old girls and dust them off and mix them in. Humble pie is coming in hot.” Such scalding feedback might be difficult for the network to swallow, but at least that way, we could watch the women argue about all the little digs they’ve made about one another in interviews. Bravo could break the fourth wall and let us hear what it was like for the women who were replaced, or how it felt for the newbies to be constantly told that they’d never live up to their predecessors, with whom they were inescapably bonded by a TV show. It could be a car crash, but it might also feel real — and in reality TV, what’s more aspirational than that?
