Meredith Marks, so drunk her eyes are crossed, glows faintly through the midday Sunday light on my TV screen.  

“The rumors and the nastiness about her, we can do that. You want me to go there with the husband? I can go there,” she slurs to Lisa Barlow in reference to Angie Katsanevas’s hairdresser husband.

I laugh—it's a flashback of a scene in season four of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. 

“Everybody thinks her husband is gay,” I tell my two suitemates, all sitting together on our giant sectional couch. 

I can’t tell if they’re paying attention at first. I’m stretched out selfishly over half the couch, my eyes still red and swollen from a bad week that seems to be getting worse. It’s the first time I can say I’m thoroughly depressed in college. Last year, I decided to dub the month of November “Evil November” in the spirit of silliness and mischief. It caught on beyond my immediate friends, and I was asked several times if we would do it again this year to which I said, “Of course.” Yet a few days into November and this slump, I shook my head and declared:

“I think for me, and just me personally, it’s going to be ‘I’m Gonna Sit on the Couch November.’”

So here I am, on the couch, marathoning The Real Housewives franchise. 

When I was 12, I noticed that my mom had started watching Bravo network reality shows. At dinner time, she would cook with the TV playing 2016 seasons of Botched or I Am Cait or, as I would soon come to know, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Surprised, I scoffed. How could my mother, the intellectual, be watching this trash television? And not only trash television but television that seemed to portray women in such a one-dimensional, heteronormative way? I asked her something along these lines, perhaps in terms less sophisticated for a 12-year-old. 

She shrugged. 

Still, I would watch out of the corner of my eye. Dorit Kemsley had just joined the cast of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. She had a fake British accent that would sometimes mysteriously disappear, claiming that she had simply “traveled so much” as to have picked up multiple accents. Wearing Chanel headbands that often looked more akin to pirate costumes, she would drink and shrilly scream obscenities at the other women.

“God, Dorit is so annoying,” I blurted out one day to my mom. She smiled, knowing I was hooked. 

I have loved The Real Housewives franchise ever since. In middle school, my mom and I began watching episodes of Beverly Hills together as they aired weekly, watching through my high school years. Each season brought fresh drama that we would debate in detail over lunch on the weekends. Was Brandi Passante lying about hooking up with Denise Richards? Did Erika Jayne know that her husband was exploiting the victims he represented in the Lion Air crash? Here, entrenched in the Augusta, Georgia suburbs, where my mother and I admittedly both felt tired and out of place, this was our excitement: gossiping about the lives of aggressively out-of-touch rich women thousands of miles away. 

Soon, Beverly Hills wasn’t enough. We began watching New York City, Salt Lake City, and Dubai. Separately, my mom got really into New Jersey, and I would binge seasons of Potomac in my room. With our combined knowledge, we were able to watch The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip together—an “all-stars” season that gathers fan-favorite cast members across all the different spin-off cities. It didn’t really make sense, but we ate up every episode. While I now have extensive knowledge of the Andy Cohen Bravo universe, my intellectual discussions have expanded beyond my mother to now include mostly Southern women or older gay men.  

During my second semester at Brown, my friend, with whom I had largely hung out one-on-one, introduced me to her other friends, who I thought were way cooler than me and frankly made me nervous. In her first-year dorm one day, sitting on her bed and debating what show to watch, I suggested a reality show. After some convincing, hoping they wouldn’t think it was stupid, we settled upon Vanderpump Rules, a spin-off show about Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Lisa Vanderpump’s restaurant, and started season one. 

Perhaps inadvertently, Vanderpump Rules became an important catalyst for our group friendship. We finished season one in a few months, meeting up sporadically on weekends in our dorms to watch it or binging it on the floor of my friend’s home in upstate New York during spring break. It felt like home to me; I loved that my friends enjoyed it as much as I did, enthusiastically telling me that we should take our senior trip to California and go to SUR (the restaurant the cast works at), which we hilariously discovered stands for “Sexy Unique Restaurant.” 

It’s silly, but nothing brings me more comfort than reality television and The Real Housewives. What started as an annoying hum in the background near dinner time became the catalyst for my strong bond with my mother and the foundation for the deep, caring friendships that have carried me through my time at Brown. 

Back on the couch, I find myself frustratedly caught up on season five of Salt Lake City, now resigned to waiting for the next episodes to drop on Wednesdays. Whereas I once binged the series in a state of restlessness, alone in my room senior year of high school, today I find myself overwhelmed with the start of my young adulthood and coming into my own, my twenty-first birthday looming as the precious minutes at Brown tick away toward an uncertain future. I’m unsure about everything, calling my mom in tears so many times this semester that she helped me move up my flight home for the holidays. In the meantime, I switch the channel to the latest episode of Dubai. 

My roommates come home, returning from activist meetings and clinical hours and logic study sessions. The cloud looming over my head momentarily fades, and I smile as I hear the door creak open each time, swiftly followed by the thump of each of them flopping onto the couch. 

“You guys are never going to believe what Lesa said to Ayan…” I start.

It feels like home because it is. I’ll call my mom later and fill her in on my thoughts. I remember that there are small things to be happy about and that I can always return to this little vice I have when I need to escape. I think about the mundanity of one day being in my mid-50s, probably stuck back in suburban Georgia, watching whatever new variant of Real Housewives will exist then. It’s a comfort to know that, when I need to, I can always have this series to dwell on other people’s problems rather than my own. It’s a bit shallow and trivial, but that’s the best comfort in the scheme of it all.