Real Housewives of Orange County: This Is the Way the World Ends

Hobbies include: yelling, gesturing with hands, killing old men.

So I had originally begun this Real Housewives of Orange County recap with a whole fake mystical Middle Earth saga about five old gods and witches, from time before time began, who suddenly met their flaming doom in the glorious light of a new era. Of course it was all deliberately strained metaphor for what happened a mile or two downtown of where I sit right now, that great canyon that caved open on Wall Street and gobbled up all of our money back in the gauzy hell of August 2008. And these women, living in Southern California as they do, and Southern California sort of being the epicenter of the terrible housing crisis as it is... well, let's just say that, for a moment there, grandiloquent musings about old dying gods did seem appropriate.

But then I realized that these women don't really deserve that august treatment. No, these creatures are dimmer and denser than that, they're lower to the ground. These women are down here in the muck with the rest of us, and if they didn't have their TV cameras and cheaply-built mansions to hide behind, everyone would realize it. We'll get there. But for now, there they were last night, trundling up to the feeding table for a fifth time, and damned if they weren't all looking a little battle weary. Maybe it's my big fancy new high-def television set (I'm very rich), but wooooftie did these dames look a new level of haggard last night. Vicki's entire face looks like a cobweb made out of Silly Putty. Lynn is an old mountain lion wearing a wig and trying to pass as human. Jeana's put some sort of soft-touch focus on her face so you can't really make out any of her features. Tamra looks like a witch's shoe. And even Gretchen, young hip hot Gretchen, looks worn and tired and way too made-up. It's a sad old bunch, these busty broads. And that's just their looks.

Their finances are also a shambles. Especially Jeana and Tamra's, both of them pretend real estate agents who can't pretend to sell any pretend houses anymore because that big honking bubble done gone and burst and the entirety of tract-living SoCal is now a desolated wasteland of empty houses and dead, dried-up dreams blowing around like bug wings or tumbleweeds. It's a pretty bleak picture, I gotta say. Jeana was pretty open about it, made it pretty clear that she'd have to be selling her big rambling nouveau manse. And there was something sort of sad about it, I guess. I mean, sad in the way that a former Playmate who married a baseball player and then frivolously spent all of her money with no mind toward the future is sad. It's a deserved sort of sad, a harsh wrist-slapping punishment for someone who stuffed her hand greedily into the cookie jar because she felt for some reason that she was owed cookies simply by virtue of her wanting cookies. Which is sort of how America works half the time, but then that other half tends to come along and satisfyingly slap people back to cold, hard, Pilgrimy reality. Tough is tough for everyone, work is work for everyone. Fattened, lazy Jeana is learning that cruel yet practical lesson now. Maybe a bit late in life, Jeana's shuffling around somewhere in her 50s, but that's just how this particular slab of history happened to be laid down. Some people are lucky and get sense smacked into 'em when they're young. Others get it when they're old. Jeana's old. Jeana is old.

The other person who's going toe-up broke is Tamra. Tamra is, I think, the worst housewife. I know that Gretchen kills old men for fun and profit and that Vicki will someday beaver-gnaw a hole in the atmosphere and we'll all be incinerated by sun flares, but Tamra is just still the most awful. Because she's such a little lying sneak about her life. Pretending she's this fabulous richie when her husband, all rotting and loose-shirted and strangely sinister as that hobgoblin is, doesn't really do a real job, he just made something up that gets him quick and easy profit that later disappears into thin air, like invisible ink or those stitches that dissolve. Tamra, so obsessed with being "the hottest Housewife" when there is, in fact, absolutely not one molecule in that creature's body that could be described as "hot." Tamra who pretends to hate Gretchen for some kind of principled reason, but really it's just because Gretchen is younger and prettier. It's funny to watch that furious glint in Tamra's eyes when she looks at Gretchen. Ohhhh how she hates her. Oh how she really does. So it's great—great great skippity-do-da great—to hear that Tamra is broke and her ugly sham marriage is falling apart. Oh I hope this season ends with her trying to thumb it to Reno, sad duffel bag full of cheap expensive clothes and ugly jewelry that she'll slowly hock away, watch disappear at the bottom of glasses, thunk and die inside the belly of slot machines. I can't wait.

Speaking of that young bitch ruining Tamra's day, every goddamn day, let's look further at Gretchen. You know that SNL skit where Kristen Wiig tells people they look like a rabbit? Yeah, well. Gretchen, thy face is rabbit. But enough about faces! Let's talk about love. True and lasting and genuine and abiding love. The kind of love that Gretchen has for a young man who's pulled himself up by his velveteen bootstraps every day of his life. I am, of course, talking about the beautiful Slade Smiley, a classy and charming dude who has now dated three of the Real Housewives of Orange County. (I believe he also had a brief, misguided affair with Simon van Kempen.) Yeah, Slade and Gretchen are dating and isn't that just about the worst thing you've ever heard in your life? Worse still is that because Gretchen, at 31, is a good twenty years younger than Slade, he feels the need to act and dress younger. It's like how, probably about ten years ago, he changed his name from something like Doug to the ridiculous "Slade." I mean, there's no way someone his age was born with a name like Slade. You can't ever really have a trendy name that's trendy when it's trendy, you know? Like, all the babies named Malia right now aren't gonna have cool names when they're 30. It's like how poor Tiffani Amber Thiessen has to haul around that hideous first name for the rest of her life, because it sure did sound great in the mid-'70s. Anyway, Slade is an invention of the '80s and since "Slade" Smiley was well into his 20s by then, there's no way he was born with that name. Phew. Thesis over.

But yeah, Doug Smiley feels the need to look and act young, so we saw him fooling around in a garage with Gretchen, sporting a practiced shaggy beard and hip untucked collared shirt, all giggling and acting youthful and fancy-free. It was perhaps the saddest and most revolting thing I've seen in a long time. (And I've been watching Cougar Town.) But it was also sort of strangely perfect. This horrid, fame-grubby fake couple, caught on camera in the complete throes of the game. They were so fully immersed in their make believe—that Doug is young and ageless and hip, that Gretchen is cute and whimsical and Americanly likable—that it was almost lovely, a fully-realized vaudeville, a chintzy dumb show played out by actors trying to get into the real company, actors desperate for leads. Actors who will never get leads, never be the leads of even their own lives. But they don't know it. And we shouldn't tell them. Let's be kind. We'll let them believe the lie. Dance on, young Gretchen and Doug. That warmth you feel isn't coming from heat lamps we set up around the perimeter. No, no. It's from our love. We love you, because you are beautiful, young creatures.

Changing the subject completely away from beautiful young creatures, we have Lynn. Oh Lynn. What a dud. What a fufffft. What a waste. All crinkly and cotton-mouthed and brittle and stale. Is Lynn drunk all the time? She talks like she's drunk all the time. She's always mumbling and gooing about some dumb thing, some weird half-formed idea that passed briefly through her head while she stared out a window or stood in her kitchen with her eyes closed for hours, as she's wont to do. It's always late-afternoon when Lynn is around, you always have a slight headache, the sharp airy kind of headache you get from being on an airplane too long. Lynn doesn't make sense. Lynn crafts long, drawling five minute sentences about carpeting. "You..like that? I got... that... from... wha'washe...was 'e Persian... wha'washe... I think he was Persian... I got that carpet... you like it? Iss from a Persian guy... was 'e Persian?.... It's a good carpet... you can... put yer... feet... on it... here, see... it's a Persian rug, I think... Guy was... was 'e Persian? I dunno... You like this carpet?", and so on forever. Lynn is what you find when you look up "tired" in the Coto de Caza (where do they live?) directory. Snooze.

Lynn also makes jewelry. Is it jewelry? I don't know what it is. It's something. Accessories. Lynn makes these things she calls cuffs, these arm band things that are made to cover up old, too-tanned arms. I think Lynn must have seen some teenagers or college girls wearing cuffs back when people were wearing cuffs, maybe five years ago?, and said "Ohthose'er nice... Those'er realnice... I'mgonna, I should make those." So she just stuck to it, this idea that people wear cuffs, for so long.  In that kind of mom/older lady way, that insistence, this pride in having recognized some trend, and then it becomes the only trend. Boys only wear those carpenter pants, don't they hon? Girls are only wearing cuffs, they are the only thing. So Lynn makes these detestable wrist guards—she glues feathers on them, beads them, affixes elbow macaroni to them—and then she has little selling parties for them where all the ladies in the neighborhood come over and pretend to be interested in buying things, but really they're there to be seen, there because they like the idea of an activity, "Oh no, you know I can't go to that Bob. I told you, I have Lynn's cuff show today. I'm just very busy these days. I have the cuff show today, and then tomorrow some unemployed twenty-five-year-old girl is having a show for the skin cream she made up. Schedule's full." So they all mingle and hiss and say "Ooooo Lynn, this is adorable," and Lynn smiles her sad kittykat smile and she says "Youlike 'em? Imade'em... They're cuffs, see? Cuffs. Theygoon yer arms... Cuffss... Idunno,Ilike 'em. Saw acoupla girls in the mall wearin' 'em and I said, oh those'er cute... I could wear'em. They call 'em cuffs. Idunno.I like'em."

So that was the big event of this premiere episode. After Lynn went to the gym with Tamra (it's that special kind of gym where you go and stare through a trick mirror as two 60 year old women do a crazy workout, and you sweat so much from mortal anxiety that you lose like ten pounds a session), she put on her party hat and poured herself a bottle of wine and it was time for cuffs. It was the first time all the ladies had been together in a long while, since the last season, and naturally there was tension. Just so much tension. But it was so much more acrid than usual, everyone just seemed exhausted and miserable and pissed-off. The joy was gone, was it not, dear readers? Orange County is my favorite of all the Housewives, but man oh man was it a depress-o-fest last night. Everyone is just such a piece of shit. Such a miserable, tired, slurring, babbling, angry piece of shit. It's really astounding.

But anyway, after a period of everyone pretending that Lynn's little craft project was an actual real thing, it was time for the main event: putting on an elaborate farce of having a classy dinner, when all the ladies were really doing was swilling wine and berating each other. The main problem was between Gretchen and Tamra, because as mentioned above, Tamra hates Gretchen for being younger and better-looking, and Gretchen hates Tamra because she's a reminder of what she'll turn into in a few short years. So while everyone pretended to enjoy the wine ("Ohh, this is nice," they would try to say knowingly as they took huge hungry slurps) and the meal ("Now, is this a foie gras?" "No, m'am, that's a salad"), Tamra and Gretchen boiled and raged and then exploded. Though Gretchen repeatedly assured us that she is, in fact, a classy person, she decided to make snide little comments about no one really being sincere about apologies around here and ohhh hurble burble, I'm talking to you old lady. And so then there was Tamra diving into the fracas, hurling wigs and fake eyelashes all over the damn place, farting and braying, making accusations about the clear and present fact of Gretchen's gold-digging black widowism. (Any sympathy earned by Gretchen's whimpering and weeping earlier about Jeff earlier in the episode was immediately undone when she pulled back that sheet in the garage and revealed her most cherished memory of the old sucker, not a picture, not a box of his clothes, but the big shiny motorcycle he bought her. That was the best thing ever.)

Jeana tried to mediate—"We don't need to like each other, but we need to respect each other", as if any one of these toothy weirdos actually understands what the concept of respect is, I mean how can you respect anyone if you treat the very act of living like a competition?—but to no avail. Gretchen's still young in this game, she's still hungry for the camera's cold glare, she wants the attention. Most of the ladies are just wearily punching their time cards and putting out their hands for their checks at this point, by this fifth lurching bolero. They don't give a crap if what they do on camera has any entertainment value. They just want to show up and get paid. Well, OK, that's true of Jeana and Vicki, who've been on since the beginning, the lone original gangstas. Tamra sort of likes the attention still, but mainly as it compares to Gretchen's attention. And Lynn... well, I don't think that Lynn really knows where she is most of the time. ("Whattsthis? 'mIonabus'ersomething?" "No, mom, we're at the Baskin Robbins." "Ohyeahhh. Gimme anicecream.") But Gretchen. Yes Gretchen's still in the full-time game, so she buttered and brashed about mean old Tamra and you could see a hungry eye flick toward the camera to make sure it was trained on her and it was a brief spell, a flashing bit of pure dumb evil and I shivered in my apartment and wanted to hide.

But you can't hide. Not from the inevitability of Gretchen's wickedness. Not from the gurgling fits of Lynn. Not from the dumb plumpness of Jeana. Not from Tamra's sour spirit. And you can't hide from Vicki. I've sort of deliberately ignored Vicki until now, because though she's long been my favorite of all time—clueless and shrieking, tumbling and spilling—she does not give good interview. She gives brusque and self-important interview even. She's a lot colder and more calculating than I'd imagined. I guess I didn't really believe that any of these women, especially Vicki, could watch the episodes of this program, see what they are like on national television, and then get a full head about it. I mean, I'm surprised these people haven't moved to South America or hurled themselves into the sea. No, instead they just get worse, they get haughty and vain. Sadly Vicki, our dimmest bulb, has fallen prey to this trap. So that's why I've ignored her. Because she's disappointed me.

Also, she didn't really do anything terribly exciting in this episode, did she? She talked about how last season she was really mean to/about her husband Don, a poor skinny bald pillar of strength, and about how this time around they're gonna be in love and she's gonna be nice. So happity dappity about that, but, boring. And of course Vicki has gotten more work done. The left flap of her lower skin quadrant has been hoisted and riveted to a different shard of bone. Her exterior flesh phalanges have been sanded down and scooped up into one of her tertiary epidermal pockets. Then the whole package was given a special hot flame treatment in a kiln and, though it did hail that one day so there are some gummy crater holes here and there, mostly they did a good job. I, personally, don't like to see the dorsal skin valve quite as engorged as hers is, but that's really just an individual preference kind of a thing. On the whole, I think the team of Swiss engineers did a really nice job. But that's about it for the Vickster. She didn't do anything else.

I don't know folks. I'm beaten and broken down by this. Something about the economy has seriously curdled this experiment. It use to be good daiquiri swizzling fun, and now it reminds me of how injured animals are sometimes the most dangerous, knowing that they need to protect themselves even harder, struggle and bite and gnash even tougher just to survive. It looks as though Jeana gets foreclosed on in this season and... leaves the show. From homelessness? From embarrassment? I really don't know. What I do know is that Jeana foolishly hooked her star to a real estate wagon and that wagon done just broke all its damn wheels. And so did Tamra. And so did everyone. So did absolutely everyone. And while that's interesting in a dark, sociological kind of way, it makes for rather intimidating soap entertainment. It's suddenly stopped being stupid and now the stakes are deadly serious. A world entire is crumbling around these ladies, and we must watch as it does.

We must and should. Early and often. Wooo hooo?