As Will Smith once said, parents just don’t understand. No. Wait! Wrong song. As Will Smith once said, welcome to Miami, and I couldn’t be happier to be back. Some of these shows are a little too dark, some are a little too boring, and some have you whiplashing back and forth about who on the cast you love and who you hate. Never Miami. It’s always just right. It’s 78 degrees and sunny. It’s stupid fights among stupid people in houses that are so slick it’s like trying to turn a doorknob when your hand is still a little bit lubey from having sex with one of those stupid people who is also stupid hot. Miami is fun, it is always exciting, and while things get contentious, no one ever has to call the cops. God, I love this show.
And we waste no time getting into it during this supersize episode. This season is starting out with some beef. Everyone is beefing. The beef is so meaty that Lisa throws a birthday party for her boyfriend, Jody, and they are doing tequila shots out of a giant bone so that it tastes like marrow. The beef is so meaty, there is a neon sign on the photo wall that says, “The Meat Made Me Do It.” Are we sure this is a straight man’s birthday party and not a Gay Pride event brought to you by Burger King and hosted by Kiki Barth in her absolutely perfect pink polka-dotted one-piece?
Let us visit each beef in turn, starting with the biggest beef of all: Alexia and Todd’s divorce. We get the story in a scattershot manner because the episode starts the opposite way many Bravo shows do these days, with production picking up cameras early because there is drama they can’t miss. Alexia is sobbing to Marysol and Julia that on a Friday night, she and Todd went out for an amazing dinner and had great sex, and he was telling her what a great woman she was. The next morning, he scuttered her out of the house and moved himself and his daughter into an apartment he had secretly rented a month earlier. The kicker: He did it all in front of Alexia’s son Frankie, as if Frankie, who has special needs, isn’t even a person at all. Man, that is cold.
Two days later, Alexia is crying on the phone about it while talking to her friend Teresa Giudice, who knows a thing or two about no-good men. It was quite amazing to see these two share a screen together, even over the telephone. It’s kind of like seeing Miley Stewart and Hannah Montana at the same time because they’re literally the same person in a different wig. Then Alexia is crying to the assembled ladies, telling them they had no idea that this was coming.
This happened four months before filming truly began, and by the time they started, Alexia and Todd were kind of back together. If you’ve been following this story as we have here at the Real Housewives Institute, you know that they have finalized their divorce, but they’re still very much together and were photographed sucking face on a beach just a couple of months ago. Even the ladies are exasperated with Alexia’s flip-flop on Todd, with Marysol saying, “What is right for the hole is not right for the soul.” Print that motto out right now. Put it on pillows, T-shirts, pop sockets, greeting cards, and Grindr ads. I know three dozen people who need this merch immediately. Seriously, though, I think I’m going to have a hard time following this story line all season. Why? I think it’s fake. Not the story, but the divorce. I am usually the last one to say that any story lines on these shows are manufactured, but something here is not adding up.
My theory hinges on something Alexia told Teresa. “He said I would be happy he did this,” she says. This is nothing but speculation, but I think Todd may have had some financial problems, as Adriana rumored last season. Todd divorces Alexia without telling her that he was doing it or why. I believe Alexia’s tears and disappointment when she spoke to the women were genuine, mostly because we’ve seen enough Housewives try to fake it that we know they can never pull it off. Once Todd explained he was trying to shield Alexia from the financial harm that might be coming her way, they decided to pick back up again and continue on as a couple but formalized their divorce just to keep Alexia safe financially. I have no idea if this is true or not; I have no insider information. I’m just saying that’s what it looks like to me. If that’s the case and we have to suffer through a whole season of this, I think it might become a little bit tedious.
Luckily, we have other beefs to get to, so let us turn our attention to Julia and Guerdy. Julia has adopted two young brothers, and Guerdy has gone through six surgeries, four rounds of chemo, and 20 rounds of radiation to treat her breast cancer and is now cancer-free. You think they would both be loving life and basking in joy, but instead, Julia is mad that Guerdy didn’t make her group Zoom announcement about adopting the boys. Guerdy says that Julia was late and she had to go to an appointment, and when she followed up with Julia, she brushed her off. This seems like a stupid fight that is going to get blown way out of proportion, and that is really Miami’s stock in trade, so I am here for it. What’s most interesting is that, in the absence of Dr. Nicole this season, Julia seems to be shifting from the Nicole-Guerdy-Adriana axis to the third wheel in the Alexia-Marysol dynamic.
The other hilarious thing about this is that at Lisa’s party for Lenny, both Julia and Martina give her a chilly reception, and when Guerdy sits down on the couch with the group, she complains to Martina that she’s on the outs. Martina gets up to get a drink, leaving Guerdy alone on the couch next to Adriana and her new boyfriend, Amaury, and they are conjoined at the face like they’re trying to do an impersonation of the Human Centipede but got the orifices wrong.
Yes, Adriana is beefing with appropriateness and can’t keep her hands off her new beau. We call him a beau because he is French and a marquis. Honestly, if my man looked like Amaury, I would be dry-humping him on Lisa’s sectional as well. Good for Adriana, and good for Bravo. They’ve had a Countess, they’ve had a Princess, but they’ve yet to have a marquis. Pretty soon, they’ll have the whole royal flush.
The biggest, baddest beef of all, however, is between Lisa and Larsa, two lumps of plastic from the exact same factory. Seriously, they are the same selfish, narcissistic, obtuse person. They each accuse the other of being a bad friend, misunderstand each other’s arguments, and accuse the other of lying. Yes. Of course. They are exactly the same. I have no clue what these two talk about when they hang out. Do they just take turns pretending to listen to the other as she drones on about herself? It’s befuddling.
The fight is all about Marcus Jordan, whom Larsa says she has broken up with for good. Apparently, Lisa and Jody were out for drinks, and Marcus showed up with “all of Jody’s friends.” Lisa says that she greeted Marcus, but when the friend invited them out for dinner, Lisa declined out of loyalty to Larsa, and Jody went along. Jody and Marcus then posted a photo of themselves together on social media, and that pissed Larsa off. Larsa feels, I must say justifiably, that Lisa doesn’t have her back.
In this argument, they both make some valid points. Lisa says she wasn’t sure what to do because Larsa and Marcus broke up so many times and then got back together that she didn’t want to unfollow him and snub him because if they once again rekindled, she’d look like an asshole to her bestie’s BF. Larsa says that if Lisa knew about all the negative things Marcus was saying about her and the threatening texts he was sending, both Lisa and Jody would want nothing to do with him. Lisa says she didn’t know about those, but Larsa says she would have if she ever bothered to answer her phone. It’s like they’re both right, but they’re both wrong, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. Neither of them seems to have the empathy or selflessness to truly care for a friend, so of course, they’re both terrible to each other because they are — sorry to the good city of Miami — terrible people.
We see this in the fight they have during the party with the whole group assembled. Larsa says that she always had Lisa’s back in her divorce from Lenny (which is true), and she would like Lisa to have her back now (which she should). However, Lisa says their situations were different because she was stuck with two young kids, and Larsa chose to leave her first husband. When Larsa discusses her most recent breakup, she is referring to her most recent bust-up, not the last one. Then Larsa says that Lisa chose to have other girls in the hot tub with her and Lenny, insinuating that led to her divorce. Then Lisa says that Larsa’s sex life is all over the internet, meaning her OnlyFans, and she doesn’t judge her for that. That is what the fight is like between the two of them, back and forth, back and forth, like the heads of the crowd watching a tennis match. It’s deuce, and Horrible is serving Horrible for all of eternity, and no one wins except the viewers.
It devolves when Lisa says that when Larsa broke up with Marcus for the first time, “We left a real party for your fake breakup.” Larsa, however, misinterprets that to mean that the current breakup is fake. Larsa totally misses that Lisa only means the first breakup. Larsa then calls her a “fake bitch,” and Lisa throws her out of the house. After a brief interlude in the bathroom where Kiki tries to set things straight, Larsa sits down, calls Lisa “stupid,” and then Lisa kicks her out again. This could have been a fight easily settled, like the Miami ladies do all the time, but Marysol is right: Kicking Larsa out is humiliating, and Lisa just cemented that we’re going to be arguing about this for the next umpteen episodes.
Outside, Larsa and her pushed-up boobs waited for her Uber Black to come get her and drive her from one indistinct Miami luxury tower to another. She looked down the road, empty and expansive, as the streetlights made the hot summer night look like an AI prompt for tropical desolation. She looked back up at Lisa’s apartment, still aglow with the party, still stinking of all that beef, and wanted to be back up there. She wanted everything right with her friend, she wanted everything right with her ex, she wanted the cozy embrace of warm hearts in a warm climate. She wanted Miami. When her shoes scuffed themselves on the curb, and a black SUV settled to an idle in front of her, she didn’t know that was just what she was getting.
Larsa and Lisa’s fight is so stupid and perfect, and that is exactly why we watch this show.
