The Real Housewives of London Recap: The Gloss Is Half-Full

The Real Housewives of London
Betrayals and Body Tapping
Season 1 Episode 2
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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The best moment of this episode comes near the end, when Amanda Cronin, bored by a ridiculous argument, decides to reapply her lip gloss using her knife as a mirror. It’s everything we want out of Housewives: unrehearsed, natural, iconic, luxe, unperturbed. It is the opposite of Panthea Parker. Panthea claims that she is allergic to liars and to people pretending to be something they’re not. We find out this comes from marrying a man who had multiple wives and got his ex-wife pregnant when Panthea had just given birth to their son. Okay, I get it. That would make me hate liars, too, but there are liars and then there are liars. There are those of us who fib to make people feel better, who elide over the truth for convenience, who bolster the details of our stories so that they’re more interesting. Then there are fraudsters, compulsive fabricators, and people who misrepresent themselves in major ways. I can see hating that latter class, but if you’re going to hate all liars, then, honey, your battle is more lost than a teen with a dead phone trying to take the bus.

While Panthea purports to be real, it was her scene at home that seemed the fakest one of all. Her mother is coming over for a family lunch, and Panthea loudly points out to her children that she has a set of plates that once belonged to Buckingham Palace. She says she stole five of them herself. What does she have? Scooby-Doo’s bag that opens to a pocket universe and is capable of storing an infinite amount of things, including refrigerators, giant sandwiches, and entire sets of flatware that belonged to the late queen? Just like last episode, when she said she would be sure to try to get a selfie with King Charles, this is not the flex she thinks it is. Yes, she is someone who is invited to Buckingham Palace, but someone who truly belongs there knows you can’t get a selfie and that you shouldn’t pilfer the plates. (Some toilet roll from the loo? A bit of hand soap? A fork? Sure. But six plates?) 

Does this make Panthea fake? Does this make her a liar? I don’t know. I do think she’s authentic; this is who she really is, but she is also playing a version of herself. It’s like making sure she talked about the plates, making sure that her mother comes over and the cameras capture how [jazz hands] wacky! she is, making sure she mentions that her son goes to the same school as the Princes Harry and William did but not mentioning it by name. What, you’ll steal from the palace, but now it’s déclassé to say “Eton” out loud?

Meeting Panthea’s mother, Shala, shows that she comes by it honestly. Shala, who forced her daughter to call her Shala Joon rather than Mom growing up because she didn’t want people to think she’s old enough to have a child, is definitely a colorful character. She’s not interested in her child’s or her grandchildren’s accomplishments; she’s scolding her daughter for having fake lashes and terrible knives. She doesn’t feel like she’s playing it up or putting on a show. But here is Panthea, the spotlight finally on her after it was on her mother for all of these years, and she is making a meal out of it, like the Deliveroo drivers (that’s the English version of Seamless) are just queued up in front of her house. 

That’s not to say that Juliet isn’t performative. She showed up at the London Book Fair (which was held in the same convention center where I got my COVID shots, so seeing it gave me PTSD) dressed as a dinosaur because Nessie has a dinosaur-themed cookbook for children. This is like wearing a band’s merch right after you bought it at the concert but somehow exponentially worse. Juliet also has a run-in with her old friend Caroline Stanbury, the former Lady of London and Real Housewife of Dubai, who desperately needs to return to American-English reality television. But for as much of a performer as Juliet is, they manage to say absolutely nothing of interest despite spending hours shopping at Jimmy Choo in Mayfair. 

The group is divided on if they’re Team Panthea or Team Juliet in this argument over the stupid dentist. When Nessie, Amanda, and Karen go to Katie’s “wellness exercise class,” where they grunt strange noises and smack parts of their bodies like a pack of marmosets on a coke bender, Karen is defending Panthea while Amanda and Nessie think she came on too strong and that talking about Juliet borrowing clothes was just “bitchy.” Nessie decides she’ll take Panthea out to lunch and get to the bottom of it, and she tells her that how she acted at Amanda’s party last episode was “toxic.” She says, “You can’t leave a trail of destruction.” This is realness. Nessie tells her exactly what she thinks without trying to have a moment, without gobbling it down like the all-you-can-eat buffet is closing in five minutes. 

It all comes to a head at Karen’s dinner party. On the way there, Amanda tells Juliet that Panthea is “not acting in a way that is conducive to being in a group of elegant women.” Exactly! She proves that at dinner when talking to Amanda about her previous marriage. She just blurts out that she heard a rumor that Amanda was “so clever” to have her ex-husband adopt her daughter because he had no children or heirs. Earlier in the episode, we saw Amanda talking to her stepdaughter, Sophia (not to be confused with her daughter Sofia), so we know that’s not true. Amanda just tells Panthea that she heard wrong and that she hates gossip. 

Panthea would say that she’s being so real that she has to just tell her that she heard the gossip like everyone else. But be a little fake. Why not ask, “Did you and your ex have children?” Then wait for Amanda to say “no” and mention that she has a daughter and two stepchildren from the husband that she’s still close to. That will prove to Panthea that everything she heard was wrong and she doesn’t know nearly as much as she thinks she does. (I have a feeling that the things that Panthea thinks she knows but doesn’t could fill Harrods, Selfridges, Harvey Nichols, John Lewis, and Liberty.) Also, asking questions doesn’t contain remarks about Amanda being “clever,” like she went into the marriage looking for a payout, an insinuation that is basically calling her a gold digger. In confessional, Panthea says that gossip isn’t always right, but “where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and with Amanda, there is lots of smoke.” But she just proved your smoke is all bullshit, so is that true? 

Amanda says that the way Panthea behaves at the dinner is “chavvy,” which is the English equivalent of Aviva Drescher showing up in St. Barts and telling both Ramona Singer and Sonja Morgan they’re “both white trash, frankly.” That’s a word so loaded with class and socioeconomic connotations that it would take all the king’s horses and all the king’s men to unravel it. However, I will say that Panthea is entirely uncouth. She is without tact, social graces, or subtlety, all things that a person at the level of society Panthea purports to be in would have. Does that make her fake? Does that make her not real? Does that make her a liar? I don’t know. It does make her annoying. 

Eventually, it’s time at dinner for her to address things with Juliet, who tells us that this thing with the dentist isn’t two years old, like I thought it was last episode — it is six years old. It has teethed, potty-trained, watched a million clips of Ms. Rachel, given up its favorite stuffie, and is on its way to first grade. That is how old this incident is. Panthea says she just couldn’t be fake, but you can say hello to someone, tell them they look great, and wait about five minutes before launching into a screed. As Nessie showed at lunch, being real does not necessarily include being rude. Juliet tells Panthea she thought the issue was resolved, but Panthea interrupts her, and Juliet stands her ground so that she can try to explain herself.

Panthea tells Juliet that she riled her up at the party, calling her “sweetie” and “darling.” Oh, so it’s Juliet’s fault that she went off the rails? Then they go back to fighting about borrowing clothes again, as if anyone cares. Then Panthea accuses Juliet of buying her Instagram likes, of being a liar and fabricator when we haven’t seen her lying, fabricating, or getting Instagram likes from faceless profiles yet. Okay, we’ve seen some acting, but the others we have not. Panthea thinks she knows how to play this game but, once again, we’re going to a London department store to find another one of the things that Panthea thinks she knows but doesn’t. If the audience hasn’t seen it, we don’t care. We don’t want to follow her judgment; we want to make our own. Panthea needs to let Juliet make these mistakes on-camera so when she says that she’s a liar, we can see that she has lied. Because she hasn’t, that makes us think that Panthea is a liar or a tryhard or a combination of the two. 

Juliet, who stays calm and composed, gets the best lick in. “I am really struggling with how you would like to put this right when all you are doing is not putting this to rest,” she says. That’s when Panthea just drops it all and decides that she wants to focus on the “best bits” of Juliet and be friends again. She dances over and gives Juliet a big hug just minutes after eviscerating her and everything she stands for in front of a group of co-workers. That is so fake it looks like the plastic meals in front of a Tokyo restaurant. At this point, I’m just like Amanda, bored and reapplying my makeup. I’m hoisting that knife in front of me, not only for an even application, but also so that maybe Panthea will catch a glimpse of the other side of the knife and, in the reflective surface, see that the things that she hates the most are the same things she is.