THE NEW GOLDEN GIRLS

These Reality TV Legends Are Back—And More Unhinged Than Ever

An interview with everyone’s favorite Real Housewives, who finally reunite on the new show “The Golden Life.”

It can be an unsettling, unmooring experience: the surprise of seeing people you know from one context and place in a completely different arena. It’s like seeing your teacher at the grocery store as a child, or your coworker on a dating app. Wait, what are you doing here? Like a polar bear in a desert, it’s the destabilization of seeing something that doesn’t belong.

That should, in theory, be the experience of watching The Golden Life, the new E! channel reality series in which the veteran cast of The Real Housewives of New York City, women as much a part of the fabric of the Big Apple as yellow taxi cabs, sarcasm, and Gen Z transplants waiting in line for $15 frozen yogurt, are living and filming in Palm Beach.

These women? In Florida?? Moreover, on E! instead of Bravo???

The Golden Life, which a few friends have snarkily branded “Real Housewives Does Golden Girls,” finds former RHONY friends/frenemies decamping to Palm Beach to soak up the sun and this new stage of life now that their marriages are over, their children are grown, and their lives are unburdened.

Ramona Singer, 69; Sonja Morgan, 62; and Kelly Bensimon, 58, already lived there, at least part time. Dorinda Medley, 61, and Luann de Lesseps, 61, who has a colorful history with Palm Beach—she was arrested there in 2017—traveled down for the reunion, five years after Bravo decided to stop filming with the original RHONY cast.

After watching the show and interviewing the rambunctious women—either they were extremely caffeinated, or I need to get in on that Florida lifestyle—it becomes clear that, for both the cast and the audiences who’ve missed them, living the golden years in the Sunshine State is a great fit.

“At one point, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’d ever really wear Lilly Pulitzer,” Medley says. “Then I’m like at that store twice a week. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I love that print!’ I never wore so much pink, yellow, and lime green in my life.”

What works about the series is how naturally the cast’s RHONY dynamic translates to Palm Beach, where Singer fancies herself a Queen Bee, and being untethered from New York obligations lets the lunacy really fly free.

The women are lighter, wiser, and have perfected their beauty-procedure regimens. In many ways, they are also, refreshingly, exactly the same.

Wrangling the energies of Morgan and Singer remains, entertainingly, the reality-TV equivalent of herding cats. Singer still has no qualms about her brusque way of taking control, no matter who may be offended; at one point, she kicks attendees’ friends out of a party because they weren’t on her RSVP list and they’ve never had lunch together.

“Well, I don’t take walk-ins! I don’t!” Singer tells me. “I like to curate things, you know? I’m a control freak. I curate. It’s like a floral arrangement.”

The Golden Life viewers can also expect the women’s trademark candor on everything from public decorum to their sex lives. De Lesseps may make history as the first woman to talk about her prowess for “squirting” during intercourse on reality TV. “Listen, you know, I have no shame,” she says, tossing me a sort-of sultry grin.

When I ask the women what living the Golden Life means to them, they toss off maxims that read as a cross between excerpts from an AI-generated self-help book and an inspirational throw pillow one might purchase at HomeGoods.

“The Golden Life is about appreciating where you’ve come from, who you are, and where you’re going,” Bensimon says.

“Freedom,” Medley says. “This idea to be financially free is the most valuable thing a woman could have.”

As someone who has interviewed these women countless times over the last 15 years, watched them run amok in the wild in New York, and seen their antics on TV, I can’t deny they seem much lighter.

“If you told me when I was 35 that in my sixties, I’d feel this way, I’d go, ‘You’re crazy,’” Singer says. “I hope that we inspire women that we are living our best lives. I feel sexier than ever. In my mind, I look better than ever. I have the time now to enjoy my life. We’ve been married. We had the children. We created our empires with our work.”

The Golden Life is a comeback for these women. Bravo rebooted RHONY in 2021 after a string of what audiences considered disastrous outings for what had been the standard-bearer of Real Housewives franchises. By then, Bensimon had long left the series, and Medley, one year prior, had, in what has become Bravoverse lore, been put on “pause.”

Medley reacts viscerally to the word. “We were never on pause,” she says, leaning forward and pointing a finger in a somewhat lecturing pose. “People forget, and I think it’s very important that people hear this: This is one of these things we do.”

What follows is a rundown of both her and de Lesseps résumés from the last several years: starring on other reality series like Ultimate Girls Trip, The Traitors, and Welcome to Crappie Lake; hosting a radio show; DJ’ing; touring a cabaret; writing a book for Simon and Schuster; performing at a couple’s wedding in North Carolina; “working with caviar.”

“I get frustrated when people box us into that one thing,” Medley says. “By the time I started Housewives, I was 50. I already baked my cake. These things, they just put a little frosting on it. I change the frosting when I DJ. She changes the frosting when she cabarets. We just keep changing it up.”

“Because our life is always changing, you know?” de Lesseps adds. “I always say, if you think you’re ripe, you’re already rotten.”

Believe it or not, there’s something poignant about the Palm Beach three-ring circus that follows these women wherever they go, setting up its tent at whatever luncheon or yacht hosts their kooky shenanigans. It’s no secret that television, as with many aspects of society, discounts or renders invisible women when they reach a certain age.

When older women are represented, they’re dowdy grandmas teetering under the weight of their oversized cardigans and billowing culottes. Never forget that most of the cast of The Golden Girls were the same age as Demi Moore and Vanessa Williams are now when the show began; Rue McClanahan, who played Blanche, was younger than the Holy Trinity of Jennifers: Aniston, Garner, and Lopez.

The Golden Life cast veritably explodes with vivaciousness in each episode, showering the city with their unapologetic confidence, glamour, and, yes, horniness. With every mention of “at this age…” and “at this stage of my life…” (there are many such mentions; for the sake of your liver, don’t turn them into a drinking game), it becomes clear that there is something meaningful about watching these women live out their lives in that way on camera.

Bensimon is visibly moved by the suggestion: “It’s so powerful. I feel so grateful.”

Singer argues that it’s important to keep being an example of how to live at this stage because people are living longer.

“I hope to live and look almost as good as I do now at 100 and die at my peak,” she says. “I’m on hormones. I work out regularly. I do some things to keep myself…with lasers. There’s no reason not to look good in your sixties or seventies or eighties and onward. We’re poster girls that getting older isn’t something to dread. It’s something to embrace, and our life is just beginning.”

Morgan follows up that sentiment with a story about an Uber driver in Washington, D.C., who recognized her and thanked her for being an inspiration. She felt invisible and “like an old hag,” but, thanks to a Sonja-Morgan-powered change in attitude, she, according to Morgan, had a guy come over to fix her vacuum cleaner, and they had sex. “I was like, ‘Go, girl!’” Morgan says, concluding the anecdote. Bensimon blinks in disbelief.

“Being famous now, I noticed if people know who I am, they’re kissing my ass. If they don’t know who I am, I’m just another invisible older woman,” she continues.

“I’m never invisible,” Ramona interrupts, winking.

When I bring up the topic with Medley and de Lesseps, Medley says, “I’m not just saying this because of the show, and I think you feel the same way, Lu: This may be one of the happiest periods of my life.” De Lesseps fervently nods in agreement.

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I ask the pair, now that they’re promoting yet another series adventure, what advice they would give themselves back when they were first thinking about starting the adventure of being on reality TV.

“Don’t take it too seriously,” Medley says. “Leave it on the field. Consider yourself an NFL player. When the game’s over, leave it on the field. Because otherwise it’ll eat you up, and you won’t have longevity, because you’ve got to leave it on the field and move on.”

“I say, I love who I want to and cry when I have to,” de Lesseps says. “And lead your life with things you love to do.”

Medley remembers one time during her run on Real Housewives when she was so upset she couldn’t move past the anger. Then it hit her: No one will care next week; only you do.

“We live in a world where news moves so fast,” Medley says. De Lesseps jumps in: “Well, hopefully we will never be old news.”

If The Golden Life demonstrates anything, it’s that these women will never be old news.

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Kevin FallonEditor-at-Large, Obsessed

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