screenshot: the real housewives of melbourne

Yes, the Housewives have hit Melbourne. Only none of the six are actually housewives in the traditional sense; one’s a twice-divorced property developer and another is a successful barrister. So, what gives?

Much like its American predecessor, the Melbourne makeover of The Real Housewives of franchise sticks to a tried-and-trusted formula of wealthy women arguing, gossiping and taking sides, before repeating the cycle against a backdrop of product placement. But this local instalment misses out on the crucial batshit-craziness that made the US editions ratings successes, and we’re left to uncomfortably ponder how adults can possibly be this awful – and how television got this bad.
Say what you will about American reality television, but the folk at Foxtel and production company Matchbox Pictures have got a lot to learn if we’re still being served this drivel after the train wreck that was Network Ten’s The Shire. Please, never do that again. The Real Housewives of Miami, Beverly Hills, New York and Atlanta have been met with huge success – their casts are outrageous and excessive to the extreme, with bold personalities to match, and reality television audiences lap it up. It is typical of the franchise to showcase a bunch of glamorous, affluent women bickering and socialising with one another while cameras hone in on their every move.
The Real Housewives of Melbourne producers really have tried their best to keep up with their counterparts in the US but, even after taking a whole year to find the six housewives for the show, all we’re delivered is an hour of trashy television so sedate and lifeless it could double as a sedative. At best, it’s a toxic combination of narcissism and consumerism; at worst it’s a dramatic fetishisation of sex, affluence and plastic surgery. Beneath the perfectly coiffed hair, sparkly dresses and impeccable manicures, there’s a darkness lurking in Planet Toorak – and it’s not a bad fake tan job.

What really grates is the unwieldy mix of uncomfortable nastiness and borderline hysteria that reduces the six housewives to mere caricatures of themselves. There’s Gina Liano, the formidable barrister; Chyka Keebaugh, the business-savvy mother of two; and Janet Roach, the twice-divorced cougar with a penchant for cosmetic surgery. In Malvern there’s Lydia Schiavello, interior design student, mother of three and compulsive bedroom over-sharer, and Andrea Moss, wife of a notable plastic surgeon and the reining queen of Planet Toorak. In episode one, we meet the housewives through newcomer Jackie Gillies, a celebrity psychic with an international rockstar for a husband, who’s just moved to Hawthorne from NSW. Did we mention he’s an international rockstar? Throw in an over-scripted narrative, egotism and an absence of actual drama, and all viewers are left with is the systematic trivialisation of the central cast and all the unpleasant assumptions this entails.

The series doesn’t air a great deal about Chyka’s business success story The Big Group, a catering company she runs with her husband, Bruce. The pair are so busy they have to schedule lunch with each other weeks in advance, but we never hear how living life by a personal planner is working for their marriage. Likewise, aside from a few shots in early episodes showing Gina dashing glamorously to the office clad in towering stiletto heels and her lawyer’s getup, we see little of her pouring over cases, nor does she mention the difficulties of being a single mum raising two sons and juggling her successful career as a criminal barrister.

We can hardly expect this to be a show that delves into the darkest recesses of the human condition, but I’m sick to death of the clichéd characterisations and gross animosity it offers instead. Seeing grown women gang up on each other, particularly against Gina, to target everything from the barrister’s appearance to her social standing and personality, nothing short of the worst kind of bullying – it reinforces negative stereotypes of the Housewives as nitwitted, tasteless bitches.

Forget high drama: the in-fighting on The Real Housewives of Melbourne frequently makes for extremely uncomfortable viewing. Two of my housemates vetoed the show from its post-Game of Thrones Monday night viewing slot – the same pair who didn’t bat an eyelid at the explicit torture of Theon Greyjoy at the hand of Ramsay Snow in Season 3. Hell, Mamamia writer Rosie Waterland resigned from her weekly recaps earlier in April because she was so disgusted by the frenzied bloodbath the show has become.

One of the gaffes Waterland highlights is this terrible spiel from Lydia (which could easily have been plucked from the script of the 80’s cult classic film Heathers, made infamous for its depiction of cut-throat high school cliques): ‘You’ve gotta understand what’s triggered this [fight]. Because she’s lonely,’ Lydia said of Gina. ‘And she’s so ugly. We’re rich. And that would annoy her.’ As Waterland observes, this vitriol is coming from a 45-year-old woman. Really, Housewives?

But considering Gina ruffled some feathers with the show’s creators before filming had even begun, it was little wonder that producers tried to turn her into the show’s villain. The US series frequently sees bouts of physical violence between its stars, with clauses that allow assault. Armed with her legal training, Gina, Lydia and Janet approached the show’s legal department to demand changes to their contracts.

In an interview with The Sun-Herald’s social columnist, Jo Casamento, Gina explained how the clause was removed.
‘Even in the contracts in the US, I understand they are actually allowed to assault each other. It’s part of the contract. When we got our contracts that was one of the conditions. It said that we consented to being assaulted. But I got rid of it.” 

It’s a comparatively small win in a show that’s short on satire and too willing to sacrifice human decency for threadbare plotlines. Bullying, extravagance and a lack of humility are not the makings of sympathetic characters – or a decent reality television series. Resident celebrity psychic and rock star wife Jackie Gillies said it best in the very first episode when she quipped: ‘A party for a fat-sucking machine? I really have landed on Planet Toorak.’

If that’s not a choice metaphor for the burning train wreck that is The Real Housewives of Melbourne, I don’t know what is.

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