Scott Dunlop: 'You can hate The Real Housewives but you can't ignore it'
The Real Housewives of Orange Country (l-r): Vicki Gunvalson, Jeana Keough, Johanna de la Rosa, Lauri Peterson and Kimberly Bryant. Photograph: Chris McPherson
Elizabeth Day
The Observer, Sunday 16 February 2014
The Guardian
Scott Dunlop was at a party with wealthy neighbours when he first had the idea for The Real Housewives. What is it that has turned the franchise into a worldwide TV phenomenon?
Scott Dunlop is remarkably relaxed for a man who has been accused of hastening the decline of western civilisation. When he first came up with the idea for a reality television programme that would become the ubiquitous Real Housewives franchise, he received death threats. As the franchise grew bigger, hoovering up millions of viewers around the world, he was accused of everything from misrepresentation to misogyny. A reporter once asked him what it felt like to be "a catalyst" for the ruin of cultured society.
"People might criticise you for watching it," says Dunlop, speaking from his home in Orange County, California. He has a likable telephone manner that hovers constantly between breeziness and bemusement. "You can love the show, you can hate the show but you really can't ignore it."
The Real Housewives is a broadcasting phenomenon. The show, which started in America, has a simple enough premise: a fly-on-the-wall camera crew follows the lives of a group of affluent women living in the same city, in interlapping social circles. The day-to-day "reality" of glamorous parties, charity fundraisers, yachting trips or race meetings is interspersed with retrospective interviews featuring each of the cast members recalling key moments in their own words. The women fall out and make up, laugh and cry, support and backstab one another with dramatic regularity. Its secret, according to the New York Times, is "a sense of vérité mixed with a dash of humour".
Since Dunlop came up with the idea in 2004 and sold it to the US cable TV channel Bravo, it has spawned franchises in six US cities - Orange County, New York, Beverley Hills, Atlanta, New Jersey, Miami. After 43 series, The Real Housewives still attracts more than 3 million viewers in the States and has spawned imitations in Canada, France, Spain, Australia and Greece. Naomi Campbell watches it. So does actor Jonah Hill. Beyoncé loved the Atlanta version so much she quoted one of its cast members after her 2013 Superbowl performance, saying it was "Gone With the Wind fabulous". The rapper P Diddy is such an addict he has admitted visiting fan internet chatrooms.
The Real Housewives is the mother lode of so-called "structured reality" - a television strand based on real-life relationships where producers will occasionally shape or encourage certain storylines for dramatic effect (think: The Only Way Is Essex or Made in Chelsea). As a result, it has attracted criticism for its perceived fakery (strongly denied by producers) and a certain superficiality in tone, where one could be forgiven for thinking that a woman's worth is valued solely according to the pneumatic enhancement of her breasts or the comparative richness of her spouse.
Scott Dunlop responds to this by pointing out that "Housewife" is an ironic term and, in fact, most of the women featured run their own businesses - the Atlanta series, for instance, features a lawyer, a Grammy-award-winning songwriter and a model agency boss. "We turned 'Housewife' into a verb," he says, only half-joking.
Scott Dunlop at home in Orange County, 2014. Portrait by John Gilhooley/Riviera Magazine
The programme has also spilled over dramatically into real life. Businessman Russell Armstrong, who was married to one of the Real Housewives of Beverley Hills, killed himself in 2011 following allegations made on-air that he had physically abused his wife. The Real Housewives of DC was cancelled after one series after cast member Michaele Salahi and her then-husband, Tareq, were filmed gatecrashing Barak Obama's first state dinner as president. The couple, who told producers they had an invitation, later became the subject of a secret service investigation.
None of this has been bad for business. Over here, ITV2 has started buying up all the Real Housewives back catalogue for its daytime schedule, where it regularly attracts around 500,000 viewers - a feat practically unheard of for daytime TV. It is, says Sasha Breslau, ITV's head of acquired series, "one of the most popular series we've ever aired for this segment of our viewers".
Its popularity has also spread by word of mouth, fuelled by the Sky box "record series" button and social network hype. Increasingly, The Real Housewives is the guilty pleasure no one will admit to watching but everyone secretly does.
As Dunlop says: you can't ignore it.
Dunlop first came up with the idea 10 years ago, when he was bored at a dinner party. He was living in Coto de Caza, an affluent, suburban gated community 65 miles south of Los Angeles and it struck him, sitting at this dinner party talking about the unreliability of domestic staff and the necessity of finding the right Ivy League college for one's children, that his neighbours only ever spoke about how wonderful everything was. He wanted to do an observational documentary that "held a mirror up" to their lives, that didn't satirise them exactly but that would be "tongue-in-cheek".
"Everyone looked at me and asked 'Why would you want to do that?' I said: 'Because everyone in this room is going to be dead,'" Dunlop recalls. "I said I wanted to do something that would be interesting and entertaining. 'It'll be about you.' As soon as I said the word 'you', then they said 'Oh, that's interesting.'"
Dunlop put together a "sizzle tape" featuring his own neighbours (including a woman called Vicki Gunvalson who worked as an insurance agent and who is still in the series which has gone on to track the ups and downs of her divorce, her plastic surgery, her daughter's cancer scare and her son-in-law's tour of duty in Afghanistan).
Originally, Dunlop called it "Behind the Gates" and recorded interviews with both men and women. Then Bravo expressed an interest. At the time, Desperate Housewives was one of the most popular programmes on television and the channel executives decided to repackage Dunlop's idea accordingly, focusing on the stories of the women and changing the title.
"It was a stroke of genius," Dunlop says now. "Bravo grew the brand and tested it… It evolved into something bigger." Dunlop looked on as The Real Housewives became a multi-headed TV hydra from the comfort of his home in Coto de Caza where he still lives. His name still appears at the end of each opening credit. Has it made him rich?
"I'm very comfortable," he says, laughing.
At its best, The Real Housewives is a compelling mix of aspirational glitz and relatable humanity. Whatever their net worth, the women in question face similar problems to the rest of us: tensions within friendship groups, business worries, marital issues or financial insecurity.
According to Lisa Vanderpump, a British restaurateur who now lives in America and is a long-standing cast member of The Real Housewives of Beverley Hills: "Normally people identify with one character… They say 'In my friendship group, I'm the Lisa' or 'I'm the Kyle [Richards, aunt of socialite Paris Hilton and a fellow housewife]'. People used to be fascinated by soaps and reality took its place because it provided real-life situations people could get involved in."
Many of the women who have appeared on Real Housewives have used the franchise as a platform for individual success: NeNe Leakes, who made her debut on The Real Housewives of Atlanta (notable for being one of the first primetime reality shows to feature a predominantly black cast), has gone on to become a sitcom actor, appearing in Glee and gathering 1.45 million Twitter followers along the way. Bethenny Frankel (New York) built a multimillion-dollar health business off the back of the franchise and is now a daytime chatshow host. Brandi Glanville (Beverley Hills) wrote a New York Times bestselling memoir. Several others have diversified into clothing lines, skincare ranges and alcohol brands.
But there are less positive experiences too. Simon van Kempen appeared on the first four series of The Real Housewives of New York City along with his wife, Alex McCord. The couple were initially portrayed as pretentious wannabes, desperate to get places at private school for their precocious young sons, Johan and Francois, and were roundly ridiculed by viewers.
"I think we filmed 5,053 minutes in season one," Van Kempen says over Skype from his Brooklyn home. "That was for seven or eight episodes. If over those episodes we had 61 minutes of screentime, that means they took 1.7% of video footage of us and that's what they chose to air."
As a result, Van Kempen says, it was easy for the network to cut and paste their own narrative together. There was no script, claims Van Kempen, but producers would "meddle" behind the scenes to create certain dramatic scenarios that would result in conflict on screen.
"Imagine a friend is always late and you don't say anything," explains Lisa Vanderpump. "They [the producers] say, 'OK, don't just say what you're thinking to us, say it to your friend.' And then that becomes something that ignites a situation."
But the fallout can be more serious than a tiff between friends. Catherine Ommanney was a British expat married to a White House photographer and author of a tell-all memoir when she agreed to take part in The Real Housewives of DC in 2010. She enjoyed filming and took it all with a large pinch of salt. But there was one occasion, she alleges, when the programme-makers edited her footage to make her appear racist. On screen, Ommanney was shown visiting the family of Stacie, a black cast member. That footage was interspersed with a later interview of Ommanney saying she "felt uncomfortable".
The only problem was that Ommanney claims she had actually been talking about getting a pedicure - "because I hate people touching my feet. They took that out of context and the average American thought I was a racist".
The rumour spread "like wildfire" and Ommanney started receiving hate mail. The pressure was such that Ommanney says she confronted one of the editors at a drinks party while the series was airing.
"I said: 'I cannot believe what you've done to me,' and they said: 'Cat, I'm so sorry. You get ripped apart the first four episodes but then it turns around and everyone ends up loving you.' That's the way they keep it interesting," says Ommanney phlegmatically.
And yet most of the "housewives" keep coming back for more. Partly, it's the exposure and the money - Van Kempen says that, by the fourth series, his wife was being paid $275,000 per season. The impressive fee is conditional upon signing a watertight contract which runs to several pages and contains a nondisclosure agreement. Participants agree to the possibility that their "appearance, depiction, and portrayal… may be disparaging, defamatory, embarrassing or of an otherwise unfavourable nature, may expose me to public ridicule, humiliation or condemnation, and may portray me in a false light". They also agree to the recording of telephone conversations in "areas in which a person under other circumstances might have a reasonable expectation of privacy".
But the desire to keep filming is also driven by the cast themselves, who become competitive with other franchises. "As you spin the project up, all the girls will watch the other shows and look at what makes a good story," says Scott Dunlop. "Conflict has to exist to drive the story forward."
The more screentime a cast member gets and the more conflict they provoke, the more likely they are to be asked back to film a new season. "To a large extent, we were fairly willing participants," concedes Van Kempen. "Anyone who is foolish enough to put themselves out there on reality TV has to have a competitive spirit."
And what matters, arguably, is not whether something is truly real or not - audiences are generally willing to forsake authenticity for entertainment. The key to The Real Housewives's continuing success is not that it depicts the unvarnished truth - it's that it is just real enough to keep things interesting.
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A couple more pics at the source