Was Giving Vicki Gunvalson Back Her Orange a Mistake?

This column originally appeared in Brian Moylan’s newsletter, The Housewives Institute Bulletin. Sign up here to be the first to read the next edition.

I must admit that I was genuinely touched when Andy Cohen shocked Victoria Denise Gunvalson Jr. by giving her orange back live onstage at BravoCon. How could you celebrate the 20th season of a franchise without one of the women who indisputably made it what it is today? She also definitely deserved her berth on Ultimate Girls Trip: Roaring 20th. If you’re assembling the Avengers of OGs, how can you not have the OG of the OC? But with Girls Trip in the rearview and this season of RHOC trundling to a close (not nearly fast enough for many tastes), it’s time to take a good, hard look at Vicki’s return and ask: How is she doing? In the immortal words of Dorinda Medley, “Not well, bitch.”

I think the moment the shine fully wore off of Vicki’s return is when Emily Simpson called her a “Debbie Downer” on RHOC and Vicki wouldn’t let it go, possibly because the label described exactly how she was behaving on both of the shows, which aired simultaneously. I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but Vicki’s personality has calcified into someone who works all the time and doesn’t like anything. Her workaholism has been part of her brand from the beginning, but when she’s pulling her laptop out on the Sprinter van during UGT, she’s actively working against the premise of the show. Vicki’s job isn’t just emailing about insurance, it’s also being a reality-television personality, and if you could do that with your nose buried in a MacBook all day, I would have the world’s most lucrative television career. Back in the day, Vicki would leave events early or show up late because of her job and it was fine because it didn’t impede the action, but here she is gumming up the works and looking down on anyone who doesn’t behave like she does.

That’s Vicki’s other problem. She seems to think that because she started Housewives, she knows how to do it best. However, the game has changed around her and she can’t admit it. The first generation of Housewives — like Vicki, Ramona Singer, and Teresa Giudice — never had to do anything other than show up and be themselves, and that is what made them all so great at their job. They couldn’t act like Real Housewives because Real Housewives didn’t exist before them. Now you have the RHORI and RHOSLC crews, who were fans of the genre and show up with a kind of high-octane, drama-driven approach that Vicki can’t embrace. While Vicki has receipts for her expense account, she wouldn’t know proof, timeline, or screenshots if they bought a policy from her.

But for all Vicki’s faults, this season of RHOC is also doing her no favors. She walked into a situation that is basically the same as she left it, with Shannon Beador, Tamra Judge, Gina Kirschenheiter, and Emily in the cast, with the added bonus of her longtime co-star Heather Dubrow also kicking around. This return meant there was nothing new for Vicki to engage with, no new bonds to forge, no new stories to find. Instead, she and Tamra are still arguing about the fallout from the Brooks Ayers scandal that happened more than a decade ago, and she’s trying to once again repair the Tres Amigas. What is this, The Golden Life?

This is why I have never been a fan of bringing back Housewives once their tenure is over; the show’s future is not in the past. However, I have been wrong a few times recently. Carole Radziwill’s return to RHONY has been phenomenal, but she’s facing a very different set of circumstances. No one on the show was there the last time she was on, and she’s in a new phase of her life and freshly back in the Zeitgeist thanks to Love Story and (gulp) the Epstein files. She’s also out from under Bethenny Frankel’s shadow. It feels like we’re getting to see a side of Carole we never explored before, and while she is a link to the glory days of RHONY, she rarely mentions it because there is no one there to reminisce with her. Monique Samuels also delivered a master class in cast comebacks last season on RHOP. While she knew more of her castmates than Carole does, she quickly apologized to those she had wronged, forged relationships with the new cast, and showed off how much she changed in the intervening years. It seems like Robyn Dixon is taking a page out of that playbook with her return, though it’s still very early in the season, but just the fact that she’s not playing Gizelle Bryant’s lackey is a huge change for her that bodes well for the future.

Vicki, however, was never capable of making such a change, though I feel like there’s a way that she could have come back that would have been successful. Maybe if she was just on UGT and we didn’t get tired of her shtick. Maybe if RHOC itself was in a different and healthier place. Maybe if she got her knee surgery before taping these two projects back-to-back and wasn’t in pain the whole time she was filming. Maybe. She deserves her place as a respected and revered pioneer. But after this season, it’s clear that RHOC is no longer serving Vicki, and it’s going to take a lot more than one OG to save a sinking franchise.