RHONY: In Defense of Pavit
The Points Guy.
Bonus post this week! And there are ongoing chats about Beckham, RHONY, Morning Show, and Love Is Blind in the Substack app.
Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise is a trenchant examination of female friendship: the way the wrong look from a woman you talk to everyday can feel immobilizing, the way nothing is richer than a group of women cackling in concert. It is also, frequently, a really delicious melodrama. When I curated a Juneteenth collection of movies and TV shows for Apple TV earlier this year, a three-part Real Housewives of Atlanta reunion was at the top of my list to include. The drama! The heartbreak! The monologues! The camera making a perfectly timed cut to something worse than a withering eye roll: a bored, unaffected stare.
While the Real Housewives of New York reboot has devolved into an oppression-off — is one broken family worse than another’s? These women will bicker until you decide — the fashion publicist-turned-housewife Jessel Taank is classically Bravo. Jessel is frequently out of touch (she called her son “socially inept” on his Montessori school application, a school she wants her kids to go to on the off-chance they meet alum Suri Cruise and the father who infamously does not see her) and more frequently rude without realizing it (“Judith…🤢?”). It is not in God’s will for Real Housewives to actually be “real” or “relatable.” They are to be eccentric, self-absorbed, materialistic, and, when the mood calls for it, two-faced.
Central to Jessel’s storyline this season has been her husband, Pavit Randhawa. Pavit will, either next week or in a few weeks or in some future week1, make a single-night trip to Vietnam for a first class flight and a bánh mì. This, to me, this sounds very extra, or at least a little strange. To RHONY-ers Sai De Silva and Erin Lichy, this sounds like an affair — Pavit will be flying around the world for one night of sex.
Sai and Erin are ill-intentioned, obsessed with Jessel and Pavit’s sex life for no other reason than to avoid having an actual life-and/or-storyline. But they don’t know Pavit the same way I do, after I spent many hours embedded in his Instagram. This man loves his points. He loves his bánh mì. And he loves a first class flight.
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