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Last week’s episode of The Real Housewives of Orange County ended with Meghan telling Vicki that she is old, bitter, and pissed off at the world. Like an echo-filled scream heard reverberating through every corner of Heather’s cavernous mansion – even in the luggage closet that’s behind the butler’s pantry which you can reach if you make the wrong turn coming out of bathroom #8 – Meghan’s statement results in every other woman sitting there momentarily stunned. How dare Meghan tell the truth? These women have taken a blood oath over champagne flutes and plasma-soaked safety pins that they would never reveal to the masses certain things they all know to be accurate. Nobody is to say that, in spite of her good-natured and self-effacing comments about being rich, that Heather cares enormously about being wealthy. It is never supposed to come out verbally that Tamra’s son Ryan looks like a serial killer who keeps a dead family in his basement. It’s just polite to pretend when speaking that Vicki is physically lovely and totally emotionally balanced and that Brooks is positively dreamy. And one should never say that Shannon is a walking, talking, and vodka-guzzling shell of a person who is married to another human being who is also currently just a rattling collection of bones and regret because those are the kinds of things one simply doesn’t say unless it’s behind that person’s back.

I just have to say something: I have no idea why someone would choose to become a Real Housewife at this point. It was different in the beginning, back when the franchise was just a colorful daydream in the mind of Andy Cohen as he sat in his living room and pretended that he was a talk show host by chatting with his dog and his plants. Nobody could know back then what exactly they were getting themselves into as they allowed cameras into their bathrooms and into their bedrooms and into the parties they threw for absolutely no reason whatsoever except for the fact that a producer dying to get a raise said something like, “Why don’t you invite everyone over for a Game Night?!” Nobody back then could be entirely sure how the massive amount of footage would eventually be edited. Certainly nobody could possibly fathom how the behavior that once seemed – at best – mildly bipolar in some of the participants would eventually morph into a cottage industry that has allowed rudeness to become acceptable and rampant cruelty to become simply part of a never-ending storyline. And definitely not one woman involved so much as considered the afternoon when it would hit the press that her husband’s name appeared on the hacked list of Ashley Madison clients.

THE BLOOD OATH

A PRAYER FOR PEACE IN THE OC