A Brilliant Throwback to the Franchises Best Cast

The holidays have come early for fans of Bravo’s best Real Housewives franchise. Sorry to my beloved Real Housewives of Atlanta and Season 2 of Real Housewives of New Jersey; you are merely my forgotten stepchildren when it comes to the original Real Housewives of New York. The first 13 seasons (well… let’s be honest here: the first 12 seasons) of RHONY were a constant masterclass in reality television, with each season somehow one-upping the last in terms of petty drama and earth-leveling fights. It’s only fitting that the spinoff series, The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip: RHONY Legacy, now on Peacock, dusts off some of that inimitable magic.

Though RHONY as we once knew it has been retooled with an entirely new cast, fans still hold the original franchise near and dear to their hearts. I stand firm in my assertion that no other series on television has so deftly captured the inner lives and untapped profundity of a certain demographic of older white women. But after documenting the highs and lows of their lives for over a decade, there was only one thing that the stars of the original RHONY hadn’t properly revealed: how they’ve dealt with living their lives after the cameras went down.

While Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip: Ex-Wives Club tackles a similar predicament by gathering Housewives who had all bid their fame-making franchise adieu under one roof, RHONY Legacy is a bit different. These women don’t just have the same job title on their resumes—they worked together. They have history. They have beef. They have unfinished business. Furthermore, for all but two of the RHONY Legacy cast members, the ax wound from Bravo giving their franchise the chop is still fresh. All of these factors come into play in the season’s first three episodes, and create a delectable mixture of hilarity and tension that will delight RHONY fans old and new.

Unlike past seasons of RHUGT, the editors take no time at all to rush these women to their tropical locale in Legacy. There’s not too much time spent establishing what everyone has been up to or how they feel about coming on this trip; they know that the magic starts when these women get into their televised pressure cooker. Besides, Housewives fans have seen half the cast recently, anyway. Luann de Lesseps and Ramona Singer were both in RHUGT Season 1, while Dorinda Medley helmed RHUGT Season 2. And then there’s Sonja Morgan, who starred in this summer’s Luann and Sonja: Welcome to Crappie Lake alongside de Lesseps. But, cleverly, the producers made sure to cast two wildcards who have been off television—and absent from the original RHONY—for a minute.

Kristen Taekman and Kelly Killoren Bensimon both made names for themselves in RHONY history, the former on Seasons 6 and 7 and the latter making Seasons 2-4 must-see TV. Bensimon’s name is practically synonymous with “Scary Island,” the nickname given by fans to the Season 3 cast trip, where she became the subject of a group attack from the other Housewives after a wealth of strange behavior during the days prior. Taekman, on the other hand, more than held her own during her time on the show, getting under Singer’s skin so efficiently that she got a bloody lip for it.

RHONY Legacy ships Luann, Kristen, Dorinda, Sonja, Kelly, and Ramona off to the same St. Barths villa where Luann may or may not have shtupped “The Pirate”—a lascivious man dressed like Jack Sparrow—back in Season 5. There’s plenty of talk of the Pirate as the women get settled, and plenty of discussion over which woman will get which bedroom in their five-star accommodations. Ramona, defying expectations, throws her hands up and declares that she doesn’t care what room she’s in. It’s a far cry from the grabby Ramona that fans know, but even the Singer Stinger knows she has to ingratiate herself to her fellow cast members before she goes off the rails.

That takes all of about 10 seconds. Before long, all of the drama that we’ve come into this series praying for starts to bubble up, though tensions are no doubt heightened by Ramona screaming through the hallways for everyone to come to the dining table. Their first group lunch highlights exactly why it’s so fascinating to see all of these women come back together—and sets the scene for the complicated feelings that they’ll be working through for the remainder of the season. When Dorinda asks a seemingly simple question (“Is everyone excited about being here?”), it tips over an overflowing basin of ex-Housewife insecurities that spills out all over the St. Barths beaches.

Ramona has become so trapped in her perennial party host mode that she accidentally got third-degree burns giving a toast at a Hamptons dinner soiree; Sonja has retreated into her townhouse and stopped taking wellness check calls from her fellow castmates; and Dorinda is rife with anxiety about coming back to another RHUGT season, where she’ll no doubt be asked about her knotty relationship with leaving Housewives proper. When Dorinda tries to expand on this fear by talking about how she was put “on pause,” Kristen immediately responds, “Here we go!” Kristen’s response is giddy, not judgemental. She’s a fan of the franchise, and she knows all the details of Dorinda’s former meltdowns. But Dorinda doesn’t take to it kindly, immediately meeting Kristen on the battlefield. “Well, you got fired!” Dorinda says, launching a barb right back.

Kristen is a smart cookie. (She told us as much in her Season 7 tagline.) She knows that RHONY Legacy is her audition. Sure, she may currently live in LA, but there’s a precedent for a cross-country return to the series: Former RHOBH star Taylor Armstrong just came back to the Housewives after a successful stint on RHUGT Season 2. There’s no reason Kristen couldn’t rent a little pied-à-terre in New York and fit right in with the brand new cast of RHONY if she proves herself worthy. And, truthfully, she absolutely does. Anyone who thought that Kristen would be the odd one out among a group far more tenured than her will be surprised by how quickly she’s willing to get into it with her costars. By the end of Episode 3, a fight between Kristen and Kelly proves to us that, despite all of our years following these women on television, we still can’t predict how they’ll perform on camera.

In that respect, Kelly is far more level-headed than fans once knew her to be in the early seasons of RHONY. On Legacy, she’s witty, with it, and unexpectedly vulnerable. The Kelly that seemed so flighty well over a decade ago was a single mom raising two children, fresh from a divorce, and trying to navigate a franchise that was still very much a new phenomenon. It makes sense that her behavior was somewhat erratic. Luckily, shades of the Kelly that we still get in her surrealist TikToks rear their head on this trip as well, especially in a spat with Luann about tickets to New York Rangers games that ends more confusing than it begins.

RHONY Legacy is a vast improvement upon the last season of RHUGT, and firm proof that the most successful seasons of this spinoff need to have Housewives with some level of common ground. Watching as the former New York Housewives slice and dice the history of their most iconic moments—and the public’s reaction to them that, in turn, made the women stars—is consistently intriguing. As New Yorkers, these women all understand how to take an opportunity and make the absolute most out of it with what little resources they have. And on top of that, they’re just damn good television.

Dorinda encapsulates this best when Kristen crosses her at another dinner. “Eagles don’t fly with pigeons, so go get your bread crumbs and get back to me” she says, delivering another piece of meme history completely off the cuff. The RHONY OGs are the franchise’s eagles, soaring to majestic new heights each time. No one can do it quite like them.

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