Three times a year, Bravo films a chosen set of walking empty handbags trimmed with Juvaderm in their natural habitats (sallow McMansions, echo-y McCondos, styrofoam-filled dreams, etc.), edits the footage for maximum ridiculousness (not that hard), and airs the results on TV as The Real Housewives series. Everyone who watches is alternately appalled and amused by the Housewives' flagrant displays of shallowness and stupidity, while the Housewives seem to have no idea that we're almost always laughing at them, and everyone is completely satisfied with the arrangement. Everyone, that is, except the NY Times:
Money is the only currency: the status markers understood by a huge faction of the privileged class figure not at all in the “Real Housewives” universe. Here there is no premium placed on education or refined tastes, and a businesswoman is someone who makes cuff bracelets at her kitchen table. The whole enterprise, like so much else on Bravo, the “affluencer” network, feels like a moldy leftover from the pre-Obama age; the currently fashionable values — humility, intelligence, restraint, style — are eclipsed by money-grubbing witlessness and big-carbon-footprint living.
“The Real Housewives of New York City” continues to feel especially yucky in this regard — and fraudulently offensive to a certain kind of New Yorker who would never actually envy someone like Alex.
First off, stop trying to make "pre-Obama age" happen, news media. Not everything has to be viewed through the Obama administration prism.