Like I could just watch Sonja pack for a weekend trip by herself and mumble to herself and think it’s hilarious. “She has everything I love about a Housewife,” he says. Moylan, who has watched more ‘Housewives’ than anyone probably ought to, says his all-time favorite is Sonja Morgan of “The Real Housewives of New York City.” “You see these places want to be featured on the ‘Housewives’ and you think, ‘Oh, how much good can that do?’ And then you talk to the guy who owns the Rails Steakhouse in New Jersey (where the women of that franchise often dine) and women are flying in from California just to go to lunch there.” The end of the road “I am fascinated in general with money and how much things cost and how much people make, so that chapter to me was my favorite,” he says. “I loved when I called Jovani, which is the clothing line made famous by ‘Real Housewives of New York,’ and their rep telling me the show gave them like $2 million to $2.5 million in free advertising. Or his favorite parts, the money side of the “Real Housewives,” from salaries to how much the women pay for the fancy trips, restaurant meals, and parties that occur each season. Things like how scripted or unscripted the franchise is: Not at all, he was told, though topics of talk might be prompted, situations set up. From those sources, Moylan gleaned the kind of information that reality TV shows such as “The Real Housewives” typically keep hush-hush. “Many of them want the chance to get back on the show, or think they’re going to get back on the show, so they don’t want to do anything to (tick) Bravo off.”Ī few did talk, but it was behind-the-scenes staffers, producers and the like who proved more valuable, especially when granted anonymity to speak.
Getting Housewives to talk for the book proved even more difficult than Moylan imagined.
“One of the reasons is what they call ‘habitual pastime.’ It’s like, ‘I watched Bravo because I watch Bravo.’ Like, this is just what I do to pass the time. “There have been very few studies about why people are into reality television,” he says. Moylan has a few thoughts on why the shows endure. “I think it gave you a way into ‘New York’ that you didn’t necessarily have in Orange County where all of the women were of a more similar type.” Why we watch “Having Bethenny as this kind of surrogate for the audience in that she wasn’t as wealthy, she wasn’t married, and she was kind of firing shots at these women,” Moylan says. “That’s bonkers.”īut the Housewives on the New York City spinoff, women such as Ramona Singer, Jill Zarin, Luann de Lesseps, and Bethenny Frankel, also appealed to him. “My partner is from Orange County and I always make fun of him about high schools with lockers outside,” Moylan says. “The Real Housewives of New York City” grabbed him partly because he was from the Northeast, a far cry from suburban Orange County.
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