Even by reality TV standards, the litany of events the cast of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City has weathered, endured, and lived openly on camera is intense.
In the six years since the show first arrived on Bravo to an avalanche of attention, cast members have resigned from the Mormon church and put its history of abuse on blast, dealt with rumors about Mafia dealings and gay husbands, lost their businesses, and separated from their spouses.
They confronted a cyberbully that infiltrated their friend group on the beaches of Bermuda in a sequence that resembled a Fellini film.
They had their sprinter van swarmed by federal agents who arrested a castmate who then went to prison with Elizabeth Holmes and Ghislaine Maxwell.
One dated a member of the Osmond family.
Still, nothing has been as difficult to deal with as what kicks off Thursday’s Season 7: the death of cast member Mary Cosby’s son, Robert Jr., at age 23, from an apparent overdose.
Ever since seven strangers stopped being polite and started getting real 34 years ago on MTV, the tragedy of “real” life has certainly surfaced across the genre: addictions, mental illness, family strife, and loved ones passing. But rarely has an event been so unspeakable as this one, let alone so unfathomable to portray on TV, on a Real Housewife franchise better known for table flips and drink tosses than dignified depictions of grief.
“It was an emotional bomb,” RHOSLC cast member Heather Gay told me. “It flipped the script immediately.”
I traveled to Salt Lake City ahead of the season premiere to talk with Gay and her castmates at the places where they work, live, and, most importantly, gossip. I visited Gay at her Beauty Lab + Laser business—the historic site of the Jen Shah raid—and caught up with Angie Katsanevas in front of a wall of wigs at her Lunatic Fringe salon. Whitney Rose and I had brunch. Lisa Barlow sang to me and served Wendy’s at her recording studio, while Britani Bateman and I dished at dinner before reuniting at her cabaret show in New York City.
Look out for a series of features on each of those conversations, but first I wanted to dig deeper into how this show and this cast pulled off a return shrouded in such sadness and deep emotion.
Prior to the trip, I cued up my screener of the season premiere. I poured myself a big glass of wine and excitedly nestled in to laugh and scoff at Bravo’s funniest and most dramatic Housewives, not realizing that, of course, the episode would center on Robert Jr.’s death, how it shook the cast, and how they rallied around Mary.
I say this as a PSA: It is a devastating episode. I wept. Be prepared. (Bateman thanked me for the warning; not having seen the episode in advance and unaware of the content, she had been planning what would have been quite the tone-deaf premiere viewing party.)
The episode is sensitively and touchingly done, though it’s obviously a departure from what fans are used to.
The show has become wildly popular not just with Bravoholics and reality TV fans, but with a mainstream audience that snatches up copies of Us Weekly with its stars on the cover and even infiltrates politics: the iconic “Receipts! Proof! Timeline! Screenshots!” moment was quoted at a congressional hearing. At Monday night’s Emmy Awards, Last Week Tonight host John Oliver was asked what series he was rooting for and answered, “Best drama and best comedy should go to The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.”
How does a show known for that kind of outrageous entertainment produce an episode about the death of a mother’s son? Moreover, how does this cast, several of whom weren’t even on speaking terms when production began, come together to rise to the occasion?
“It’s one of those things where it’s not a question, right?” Rose said. “You have to put the petty down and see the bigger picture that we are a sisterhood. Not very many people know what it’s like to live your life on camera. To have a friend lose their child right as we’re starting to film, I was so proud of everyone. It unified us, and we came together. You have to. There’s no choice.”
Robert Jr. is the son of Mary Cosby, an original RHOSLC cast member who made headlines in Season 1 for leading a controversial church, marrying her step-grandfather, and being aloof compared to the rest of the cast. After taking a hiatus from the series, she returned with a new attitude toward filming, quickly becoming a fan favorite and earning the rest of the women’s adoration.
Cosby and Robert Jr.’s openness about his struggle with addiction, which they spoke candidly about on camera, struck a chord with viewers, who became invested in the young man’s journey to heal and Cosby’s unwavering support in his efforts to do so. His death was a shattering shock.
“The night Mary called me, I was sitting in my daughter’s room on the side of her bed,” Katsanevas said. “And I just looked at my daughter, and I had my hand on her knee, and I just wept because I couldn’t imagine the loss that Mary was dealing with.”
Cameras had just gone up when news broke that Robert Jr. died; it was Rose’s first day of shooting—she was sitting in her glam chair—when she found out. Filming immediately paused following Robert Jr.’s death on Feb. 23 to give Cosby space and privacy, and picked up in early March with Cosby deciding later that month that she’d return to the show in order to regain a sense of normalcy.
The main cast—Gay, Rose, Barlow, Katsanevas, Meredith Marks, and Bronwyn Newport—reunited for the first time at Katsanevas’ house, a heavy, intense, and occasionally awkward reintroduction to filming. Each woman is a mother and is visibly broken over what Cosby is going through. Yet a tornado of undealt discord and drama swirls around them, waiting to be addressed but needing to be ignored for the sake of grace and propriety.
“Instead of everyone, like, gearing up for the season, we just put all of the show aside and focused on the reality of what Mary was going through,” Gay said. “We were at the high point of conflict when we left Greece [where the Season 6 finale filmed]. It was not good. I think we were all kind of coming in with guns blazing, a lot of unresolved conflict. When everything happened with Mary, it just put everything in perspective. We had to sit in a room together, and it just made us be accountable for how fragile these relationships are and what really matters.”
It wasn’t just Season 5 finale drama that the cast had to rise above. In the weeks before production on Season 7 started, Rose was filmed at a fan event insulting Barlow and Marks. Barlow had been filming the now-airing season of Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip, which featured cameos by Gay, Rose, Katasanevas, and Newport gossiping to the show’s elder stateswoman of Bravo that everyone hated Barlow and Marks. (Cosby was also there, but appears to have come off innocent.)
It was admirable that the cast managed to put those issues aside to film a first episode that was all in support of Cosby—and it must be said, not every reality TV cast would be capable or compassionate enough to pull that off. But it remained that the show, a hit Real Housewives show, at that, would have to go on. That means returning to the outlandish: the partying, the fighting, and the humor that was tastefully, but temporarily, paused.
After such an emotional time with Cosby, attending Robert Jr.’s funeral and showing up for her privately without cameras, the cast wasn’t sure they were up for doing it. Let alone whether it would be appropriate.
“It was a little bit of a struggle for a few weeks to get into the mindset of, like, we have to pick back up and film this show,” Katsanevas said.
Cosby was key to getting everyone back into the groove.
“We tried to take our cues from Mary,” Gay said. “It was Mary who we wanted to lead and say, ‘Listen, we have a show to film, and we have things to resolve.’ She showed leadership and was so strong and so inspirational. Just saying, ‘I want to be with you guys. I want to be distracted. I want you to be normal.’ She would say, ‘Don’t have sad eyes around me.’ She really put us back into an active role of, like, we can move on: to talk and fight about things.”
From there, it was off to the races, with each person, it seems, on their own terms.
“I think all of us—well, most of us; I don’t think everybody was—were cognizant of what Mary was going through,” Barlow said. “For me, it was important to be there for her, but also be true to myself, which Mary likes. Mary wants us to be true to ourselves. I don’t think she hindered us in any way of doing things we needed to do in a friend group to either move forward or fall out.”
Every woman I talked to seemed to breathe a sigh of relief when I told them the first two episodes managed to walk the fine line they were nervous about. The premiere is beautiful. Then Episode 2? To say the drama returns is an understatement, but it also doesn’t seem out of place.
“That’s what makes Salt Lake unique,” Rose said. “We do have some petty, petty, petty fights. We get in costumes. We do a lot of campy things. Our drama’s outrageous. We’ve caught major life-changing moments on camera, from arrests to divorces, all of the things. Everyone goes through loss and grief, and it’s just amazing to see in Salt Lake City that we can come together. Like, we’re still bonded in that way. The beaches of Bermuda really changed us, you know?”
This is the first of a series of features on the new season of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.
