This Is (Seriously) the Wildest Real Housewives There’s Ever Been

When it comes to the reality-TV clothes line, never has the dirty laundry been aired so quickly.

Swingers, polyamory, the woman who’s married to the man who once dated her sister, and multiple affairs: On The Real Housewives of Rhode Island, it’s all brought up immediately…and, wildly, all about different cast members.

The show’s launch on Thursday also corresponds to the 20th anniversary of the Real Housewives phenomenon; it’s been two decades since histrionic friends with a wardrobe overflowing with jewel-toned Sky Tops melted down about being sent a “family van.”

“It really harkens back to early seasons of Housewives,” Andy Cohen, the revered overlord of all things table flipping and “making it nice,” told me about why he’s earnestly, no-bull stoked for everyone to see the Rhode Island Housewives.

I’ve screened the first two episodes and agree: Bravo fans, hold on to your clam waders.

“It’s very family-focused,” he said. “The women seem very untouched by the Housewives world around them. They’re very much themselves. It’s the perfect launch for us in our 20th year.”

We were chatting at the premiere party for the show in New York, where a West Chelsea event space was transformed into a “coastal glam” soiree.

Every few minutes, a handsome man accosted you, offering to shuck you a fresh oyster from the bucket strapped to his shoulders. The hit passed appetizer of the night was “caviar wieners”—basically, hot dogs, but classy AF. Next to an expansive raw bar, Real Housewives of New Jersey and The Traitors star Dolores Catania, who appears as a “friend of” on RHORI, posed for photos with a prop of a giant pearl.

As he toasted the cast and the crowd who had just screened the first two (bonkers) episodes, Cohen said, “We don’t bring out a new group unless we are really sure. And, boy, were we sure when we met these incredible ladies.”

Having watched the first episodes of the show and then meeting them at the premiere, I’ll echo that these ladies are a trip.

The level of casualness they have with jaw-dropping details in their lives being publicized is awe-inducing, given that even the least scandalous detail on the show would be enough to make most other Housewives walk off set and threaten never to film again.

The first pair of cast members I chat with are Jo-Ellen Tiberi, who is open about her and her husband’s threesomes but draws the line at accusations of being swingers, and Kelsey Swanson, the self-proclaimed “sugarbaby” whose husband spends half the year in Miami with his other girlfriend—which is fine by her, considering she has another boyfriend, too.

“Are you just talking about us?” Jo-Ellen laughs when I start listing, with astonishment, the scroll of salacious plot points that unfurl in the first two episodes.

It’s one thing, after two decades of Real Housewives, to suspect that your secrets will be brought up on TV. But it’s another thing to experience it in real time, as cameras film the whole thing. But they, kind of fabulously, shrug it off.

“We knew it was coming out either way. We didn’t have a choice,” Kelsey said. “I’d rather tell my story than have somebody else tell it for me,” Jo-Ellen adds.

There’s no such thing as oversharing in Rhode Island, apparently. It’s roughly 20 minutes into the premiere that audiences learn who in the group has or hasn’t had butt sex.

To that point, cast member Rosie DiMare implored me to clarify: In the episode, she says she has done it, but only likes doing it with “skinny wieners.” But what was cut out from the episode, she says, is that she told the group that she and her husband don’t do that because “he has such a big Italian sausage.”

“I want it to be on record,” she said. Accuracy is important.

What Cohen was talking about in terms of the show feeling like classic Housewives is that these women, like, know know each other.

They’re not social friends, or introduced only because they were cast together on the show. You would need one of those FBI bulletin boards with thumbtacks and string to illustrate the myriad ways these women are connected. They don’t just go back to kindergarten. They know each other’s partners and husbands; in fact, some of them have dated another cast member’s spouse.

“There’s potentially more shared history here than any other cast we’ve had in Housewives,” Frances Berwick, Chairman of Bravo and Peacock Unscripted, told me. “So it felt like it was going someplace that we hadn’t gone before.”

That explains why cast member Ashley Iaconetti is treated, essentially, like some leper who just stumbled upon a secluded village in the woods when she enters the friend group. Best known for her time in Bachelor Nation—she met her husband while filming Bachelor in Paradise—she’s the only cast member who is not a born-and-bred Rhode Islander.

There’s an iconic line in the trailer for the series, spoken by Alicia Carmody, and directed at Ashley: “Welcome to Rhode Island, b---h. This is how we roll.” (For the full effect of this The Godfather-meets-The O.C. line, you have to imagine it spoken in the singular Rhode Island accent, as if Long Island and Boston accents were put into a cement mixer.)

“I felt that in my soul,” Alicia told me. “I hope you guys feel it when I say it. She wasn’t from Rhode Island originally. I want her to know how we really are.”

Don’t worry: While things may have been difficult with other cast members, Ashley assures me that, at the very least, she found a refuge in Rosie: “She is my friend I’ve been looking for for so long.” They’ll go to Chuck E. Cheese with her kids and eat Taco Bell on the couch together. I’m just pointing that out to reassure readers that there is, in fact, wholesomeness to be found in this series.

Real Housewives of Rhode Island is nothing if not a unique entry in the Bravoverse. For one, as many have joked, the women look so much alike that I stared at cast photos quizzing myself on who was who before the premiere, like someone would before meeting a boyfriend’s family for the first time. Dolores and her friend Liz McGraw, who truly look like twins, confessed that they had gone to the same plastic surgeon, which explains their resemblance.

The women scoff at the idea, but sanely, Cohen agrees. “It’s a lot of brunettes,” he said. “On Salt Lake City, it was Meredith [Marks] and Lisa [Barlow] who looked so similar. But this is something else.”

But trust: By the time you’re done watching the whirlwind first episode, you’ll be more than primed to tell the ladies apart.

It’s a raucous, raunchy, and refreshing launch to a new Real Housewives franchise. And Cohen summed up its potential impact perfectly.

“From the get-go, you just delivered,” he told the women at the premiere. “You’re funny. You’re aspirational. I want to visit Rhoda Island. The governor of Rhode Island is gonna be kissing your a--, man.”