To be a Real Housewives obsessive is to wade into the murky darkness of the death-laden and designer label-strewn realities of being an affluent older woman. There isn’t a single Housewives loyalist who isn’t intimately familiar with how dismal this franchise can become in mere minutes—that constant emotional ricochet keeps fans hooked!
Take, for instance, a scene from Real Housewives of New York Season 5, where Ramona Singer and Luann de Lesseps chat on a park bench after a micro-spat. In one moment, Singer accuses de Lesseps of being an absent mother, before peering back at herself in the ornate, invisible mirror sitting in front of her face, blocking her view of anyone but herself. “Somebody has to be very evil to want to ‘get’ somebody,” Singer says. “I don’t even have time to do my nails! Actually, I do this new thing, it lasts three weeks, it’s like a shellac, it’s pretty good…which is wonderful.”
Having devoted a hefty chunk of my adult life to studying these women like they’re injured gazelles in the Serengeti, I know that it’s harder to parody a Housewives show than one might think. There’s nothing quite so damning and delicious as the real thing (although fellow buffs Casey Wilson and Danielle Schneider came close with their short-lived Hulu spoof series). For so long, I’ve believed that satirists have been unable to duplicate the twisted magic of Housewives because they don’t understand why these shows are so funny: They’re not braindead bitchfests, they’re champagne-soaked studies of the human condition! I held firm to that conviction until, to my shock and delight, the season finale of Julio Torres’ brilliant HBO series Fantasmas introduced me to The True Women of New York.
All season long, Fantasmas has expertly skewered culture, government, and identity with Torres’ signature distortion. We’ve seen an ALF parody where Paul Dano leaves his wife and kids for a pink puppet; a power struggle over insurance policies that veers on BDSM; and Aidy Bryant as a manipulative saleswoman who makes dresses for toilets. Every episode topped the last installment’s genius, but Episode 6, “The Void,” threw me for a loop I could’ve never anticipated. Torres’ comedy is steeped in pop culture, but rarely does he flirt with it in such straightforward terms. So, when he took on a monolith like Housewives, I had no clue what to expect. What begins as parody veers into something dark and undeniably hysterical, questioning our obsession with these shows in a way that no reality TV satire has before.
The moment I saw the True Women of New York title card, I gasped. It’s a credit to Torres: He knows how to lure viewers in with gay catnip before pulling the rug out from under them. And then, a dolled-up Rosie Perez appeared, uttering a sentence so ridiculously Housewives-ian, that I melted into my couch, ready to experience nirvana. “When I build a sandcastle, I expect the next year, it will be there,” Perez’s character, Bianca says, her stiff pointer finger jabbing the air.
Perez is one of four perfectly cast actors throwing on wigs and a full beat of makeup for the Fantasmas parody. Perez’s Bianca stars alongside Emma Stone’s(!) Genevieve, Cole Escola’s Dina, and Rachel Dratch’s Rellany, each True Woman a compendium of different Real Housewives and all of their brutally narcissistic traits. The fake episode begins at the opening of Bianca’s new restaurant, which Genevieve designed. “I am completely disturbed by what I see,” Dina says, before pointing out a corner of the restaurant that is left bare of furniture or decor. “It’s negative space, what’s the thought there? People are expected to eat here, they’re going to be disturbed by the hole.”
Escola is clearly having the time of their life, trying to smile with their cheeks taped up behind their ears. But Stone gives the actor and comedian a run for their money. “I think I know what I’m doing, I went to SCAD!” Genevieve retorts. But Dina hits her with another blow: “Online.” Genevieve defends her interior design expertise in her confessional, telling viewers that the degree might’ve been online, but it doesn’t matter, because the computer was big. It’s such a supremely stupid justification that it sounds like it’s directly out of the Housewives handbook.
With all of this drama concerning “the void,” plaguing their friend group, Rellany organizes a trip to the Bahamas to take their minds off it. (Naturally, everything is filmed on a green screen, with archaic simulated computer graphics that look like shoddy staged homes inserted into the scenes.) “Look Genevieve,” Dina says upon entering their villa, “alllllllll the corners are filled!” Two separate fights break out about the void, and while Genevieve is complaining to Rellany, she takes a bite of an apple that makes her world glitch. Rellany and Dina power down, but Bianca and a producer named Brandon (James Scully) approach Genevieve in a hush to show her a video that she recorded for herself the last time she woke up.
“The fact that you’re seeing this means you’re no longer under their control,” Genevieve says to herself on the video. She looks to Dina and Brandon, demanding to know who she’s talking about. “Jared, the producer,” Brandon replies. “You’ve been trapped in his sick little play. What you believe is your life has all been a simulation.” Brandon promises to save Genevieve and Bianca from their altered reality by hatching a plan for their escape before leaving them to endure one more shooting day.
When the set powers down again, Genevieve and Bianca make their escape, but run into a larger bout of trouble. In a pitch-black room filled with monitors, the two True Women discover that Brandon is Jared (now sporting some poorly applied bronzer and frosty gloss.) Jared tells them that he is their creator and God, and that he seems familiar to them because each True Woman has a bit of “the source” in them. That source is the brain of Jared’s mother, the original rich bitch of New York. “I get to play with her through you, forever!” Jared tells them.
This is bizarre and uproarious enough as it is, but in his typical fashion, Torres takes it another step further. When Genevieve and Bianca try to leave, Jared tells them that it’s impossible. “Did you forget? You’re here because you signed a contract, remember? Better this than going to jail for tax fraud.” It quickly becomes clear that the Andy Cohen-like Jared has struck a deal with the government, allowing women guilty of major crimes to avoid jail time by allowing themselves to be True Women puppets. And these attempts at freedom, captured on-camera, are the perfect season finale to “rattle the cage.” It’s essentially the Fantasmas version of the fourth-wall-breaking, Reality Von Tease reveal in the latest season of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.
It speaks to Torres’ knack for biting irreverence that this parody feels both like a celebration and a sendup. He doesn’t chide Real Housewives viewers for their obsessions, only asks them to look a little bit deeper to consider the ramifications. Having covered BravoCon twice, I’ve seen firsthand how some Bravo lovers genuinely don’t see the women on these shows as people. Real Housewives are objects to these types of diehard fans, little playthings that can be made fun of or poked and prodded at will. It’s disconcerting, and Fantasmas perfectly illustrates how easy it can be for viewers to make the jump from adoration to objectification simply because cast members have chosen to televise their lives.
The True Women of New York vignette is constructed with more of a wink, but that doesn’t mean it’s not serious. That’s the joy of Torres’ writing: It asks us to contemplate our complacency with all kinds of systems, while making sure that we laugh at ourselves while doing it. A satire can rarely indict its target audience while letting them be part of the joke, but the world of Fantasmas allows for that kind of nuance. Here’s hoping that Torres gets the chance to do it all again in a second season, because television needs the ludicrous laughter only he can provide.
