“I remember the headspace I was in,” she says now, speaking over Zoom from her home office in Los Angeles. She’s in a chocolate-colored turtleneck, warm and easy to talk to. Behind her is a painting of her own side profile, edged in gold. Occasionally, she’ll stop to sip from a wine glass full of water using a straw, which gives me flashbacks to the show’s infamous talk-to-camera “confessionals.” “I was coming out of such a dark time. It felt like I’d been holding it together. And then I was just like… fuck it. So that was what you saw.” Once the episode aired, people in droves started sending her the clip. She was surprised, but she embraced it. “It’s fascinating, because you realize how something can resonate with so many people, and I would have never expected a moment like that would have,” she says. “Seeing the I don’t give a fuck. I really learnt to appreciate the humor and also the power.”
It’s been 18 years since the first-ever episode of Housewives (first came Orange County, then New York, and then, in 2010, Bravo launched Beverly Hills). In the years since, it’s become a reality TV behemoth, with RHOBH its crowning jewel (last season’s debut drew in 2.5 million viewers). But to anyone unfamiliar with the franchise—which follows the lives of wealthy socialite women—it can be hard to explain its longstanding allure. I often think of Susan Sontag’s seminal 1964 text “Notes on Camp,” in which she describes “pure camp” as follows: “The essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.” To enjoy Housewives, then, is to enjoy camp in its purest form. A screaming match in the back of a Sprinter. A car-window cigarette in Beverly Hills. Immortal lines like: “At least I wasn’t doing crystal meth all night long in the bathroom, bitch.”
But reality television has changed exponentially since the 2000s and early 2010s. Its biggest stars are now a lot more savvy and self-aware, making those messy, authentic moments harder to come by. It’s something Dorit herself has thought about. “I find that if you try to give what [you think] the audience wants, you’re going to find yourself in a pickle,” she says. “I’ve never been driven by that. I don’t research and look at Twitter and see what they want… I know that some people do.” But also, she points out, reality stars face a huge amount of scrutiny. The internet can be vicious, unforgiving in a way it wasn’t always. “You feel more afraid; you have reservations about being totally free and open because every tiny thing can be misconstrued and twisted or judged. [But] I reached a point where I didn’t give a shit. It’s the best way to do a show like this.”
