McMansion Tele

The reality television star Jennifer Shah, before she moved into a women’s prison in Texas, having been sentenced to six and a half years for her role in a telemarketing scheme that defrauded thousands, lived in a home she called the “Shah ski chalet.” The 9,420-square-foot imitation Swiss lodge, with its hot tub, fireplaces, exposed beams, soaring ceilings, and colossal entrance hall, became a fixture on The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. Shah’s mansion, which played host to various altercations and at least one rather fabulous party, helped bolster an image of wealth that later became a liability. Her arrest was shocking. But among the most shocking morsels that emerged in the fallout: The chalet was a rental. The New York Post reported in 2021 that the home was actually owned by a Texas-based LLC.

Shah responded to the rental revelation on Instagram at the time, writing, “Is this what everyone is getting their g-string up their a** about bcuz their irrelevant? Or is it bcuz they wish they could afford to pay the rent plus own 4 other homes and have an apt in NYC?” (Though initially she claimed on-screen that “the only thing I’m guilty of is being Shahmazing,” she has since pled out and apologized to the victims of her scam; in December, she was moved out of prison to spend the rest of her sentence in a community program.)

Shah has not always been truthful. But she is correct that fans of reality shows get a “g-string up their a** about” real estate. As much as the outfits and the pull-asides and the catchphrases, it’s the houses that make the Housewives franchise. As Jack Balderrama Morley writes in their new survey of prominent American reality homes, Dream Facades: The Cruel Architecture of Reality TV, “some of the shows’ deepest beefs and longest feuds start with the suggestion that one housewife rents her home or is still paying it off.” The culture of homeownership is endemic to the Bravoverse, ineluctably bound up, as it is for the rest of us, with status, striving, and taste. (Andy Cohen, the impresario of the Housewives empire, fosters this fixation: “I don’t understand the concept of renting at all,” Cohen told Forbes in 2019. “It’s just throwing money away.”)

Viewers form relationships with on-screen houses, which become important sites of brand development and parasocial attachment. These properties are aspirational, surely, to some viewers. But Morley emphasizes that part of the draw for many fans is that the spaces make them feel superior. I would never live in that tacky monstrosity, they might think—nice marble countertop, though. Gawking at the shiplap stretches and gold finishings, they argue, “reinforces a sense that we are safe at the top of the ladder by virtue of our aesthetic tastes.” Still, the homes on reality shows, for all their Botox-smooth surfaces and supersized kitchen islands, represent a sense of security and safety out of reach for the masses who tune in. Reality TV’s VRBO villas and monochrome modern farmhouses, Morley writes, offer “viewers of all stripes relatively guiltless ways of enjoying some of the most conservative fantasies in American culture.”

THE REAL HOUSEWIVES formula is simple but profound. Each of the women wants five things: nice home, strong marriage, good kids, lots of money, career. No one woman on the show can have all of these things at once. Thus the engine that propels the conflict—the champagne-throwing brawls, sotto voce confessionals, and precision-timed character assassinations—is each woman envying in others what she herself does not have. One with a thriving career is jealous of one with a happy family; one with a lavish home envies one with a successful marriage; and so on. That fortunes rise and fall on the show—parenting dilemmas, financial woes, divorce, renovations—means there can be endless permutations of the above configurations and therefore endless drama.

The homes on these shows are theaters for snarking, jealousies, and feuds. Who could forget the grand unveiling of Alex and Simon’s half-finished Cobble Hill townhome, in which the other ladies pick apart the bordello interiors and bristle at having to schlep to Brooklyn? Teresa Guidice’s dream New Jersey kitchen—so many burners atop that range!—becomes an albatross when the recession hits. Shereé Whitfield, having focused the renovation of her “Château Shereé” on, in her words, the necessities—ballroom, gym, massage room, DJ booth, theater—ridicules the location of her Real Housewives of Atlanta foil Kenya Moore’s “Moore Manor”—“in the gully where the ogres live. Did she ask Shrek about me?” The life-size horse statue in Kelly Killoren Bensimon’s SoHo loft was amazing while she lasted on the show. Apparently Lisa Vanderpump has a moat? I am not a Housewives completist, but googling assures me that luminaries across the Bravoverse outfit their houses in wild and expressive ways.

The Housewives’ homes, like the glossy minimalist farmhouses of the Kardashian-Jenner crew, are nominally lived-in domestic spaces. The ones on Selling Sunset are staged for sales. Other reality show interiors are true sets: The Real World loft, for example, is an artificial environment, constructed for social spectacle. The same goes for the villas of Love Island and its spinoffs and for the Bachelor mansion. In their book, Morley, a trained architect who now works at Dwell, uses these variously mediated spaces as case studies in the history of homeownership and housing policy. The Real World loft at 565 Broadway is an opportunity to revisit the history of “raw space” conversions in postindustrial SoHo. Villa de la Vina, a Mediterranean Revival McMansion built in Agoura Hills, California, in 2005 and the primary filming location of The Bachelor since 2007, lets the author cook on California’s long love affair with Spanish-style architecture. (Or is it Tuscan? And what cultural anxieties would cause someone to call it one or the other?) The Kardashians’ gate-guarded community of Hidden Hills prompts discussion of the history of homesteading and the back-to-the-land fantasies of post-Depression Los Angeles. Kenya Moore’s foreclosure fixer-upper provokes a detour into the dismantling of public housing in Atlanta, and the show Fire Island, which I had never heard of and Morley says they didn’t like, is a chance to measure the dream of queer utopia against the ledger of pink capitalism.

I’m all for the interplay of high and low—the book jacket promotes Dream Facades as being “for fans of Jia Tolentino,” an astute writer on mass culture—but Morley sometimes struggles to convincingly connect the frothy docusoaps of their study with these weightier matters. It’s true that the women on The Real Housewives of Atlanta are Black and that they live in Atlanta, but it wasn’t clear to me that the show has much to illuminate about the impact of HOPE VI redevelopment grants in the city, or vice versa. At another point, Morley juxtaposes passages from Saint Augustine with snippets from home improvement shows like Trading Spaces, implying that both rely on the notion “that something in life will become better than it was before.” They follow a quick look at the Bachelor mansion with a lengthy disquisition on Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 ranchero romance Ramona, then segue into a jaunty if malapropos telling of the life and times of the gentleman designer and bon vivant Addison Mizner (who worked in South Florida, not Southern California).

I was surprised by how little time Morley spent reveling in the visual details of these spaces. This is a missed opportunity, both because the houses are fun to look at and because Morley hits their snarky stride when they allow themselves to indulge in the mass-market kitsch of their subject matter. Of the “heebie-jeebies”-inducing Bachelor mansion, they write, “the stone flooring of the grand entry court where every contestant arrives one-by-one nocturnally is wet and glistening every evening despite the dry California climate.” The house, they continue, is “less Henry James and more Phantom of the Opera—a stage reinterpretation of European glamor for American masses who may never make it to Paris.”

Morley’s reflections on homeownership as a concept in American life can border on the morose. “Americans live in cruel homes,” they write, invoking literary theorist Lauren Berlant’s idea of “cruel optimism.” The author elaborates: “People think that owning a home will transform them, but cruel homes make people feel lacking—in security, company, stability, love—even while promising to provide these things, a cycle leading to people feeling hollowed out, scraped to the point of feeling separated from themselves, not feeling real.” In another representative section, about the Bachelor franchise, Morley advances, “American homes keep people feeling lacking while promising to fill the voids they create, and the holes go deeper than pits of wealth, down to love and marriage and very deep emotional senses of being.” That bone-deep disappointment, they argue, is what is driving us to ogle over the homes we see on-screen, allowing them to warp our sense of what’s real and neuter us politically. Americans “pretend they’re in heaven as they turn Earth into hell.” Morley condemns home improvement shows for not encouraging solutions to civic problems, for triggering emotional responses without “actually encouraging the audience to pursue change outside the show. There are no how-to reclamation tips, no DIY decolonization of the home.” Which is, of course, true.

THE RICH PEOPLE on reality shows are generally contributing directly or indirectly to the world being worse (yes, Morley mentions RuPaul’s fracking ranch). Among their sins is deception. As part of Shah’s defense, her lawyers said that her show was a “semi-scripted, heavily edited facsimile of ‘reality’ intentionally manipulated to maximize ratings.” Morley writes that the homes of reality television are “real places swollen with the fantasies projected onto them. These are lurid houses of intrigue and deception.” But there they stand, casting shadows over us all.

Throughout the book, Morley hints that there are better ways forward. And in the final chapter they conclude, after nodding toward solutions like tenant protections and rent stabilization, that the answer is to “chuck the whole thing out,” to “embrace better ways of living with each other and the land.” It is in this final chapter, which focuses on the movement to repatriate land to Native Americans, that they note that they wrote much of this book during the Los Angeles fires. This was a helpful detail for me, illuminating the profound despair and nihilism that runs through the pages of a book that is also meaningfully about fizzy entertainment. The author was watching the city they call home, the city where so many of these shows are made, turn into hell on earth.