I've been thinking a ton about the Real Housewives franchise recently, since covering it, or at least the DC iteration, has suddenly become part of my day job. And so I think it's interesting, but not surprising, that the show is going international. In its own melodramatic, class-insensitive, shallow way, Real Housewives speaks to very real anxieties about balancing family and work life—and has some reasonably challenging ideas undergirding it.
This is a show where the term that distinguishes the franchise, "housewife," is pretty much stripped of all meaning. You don't have to be married to be a Real Housewife. You don't even have to be dating anyone particularly seriously. And you're almost certainly not simply a stay-at-home wife or mom if you've been found interesting enough to be on the show. You're running a business, or a charity, or at the very least, stirring up a hell of a lot of trouble semi-professionally. Being an American wife doesn't mean anything in particular these days. That definitional void might be scary, but it's also an opportunity to fill it up with something valuable and interesting and varied.
I'd imagine that international versions of the show might be different, but that'll be useful to see, too. Not to say that pop culture is a substitute for sociology, but shows like Real Housewives do reflect what people want to see and want to think about social roles, even in a limited way. And hey, if Catherine Ommaney decides Washington, DC doesn't work out for her, this means she can move back to the UK and transfer over to The Real Housewives of Sandbanks. Jill Zarin could make aliyah and teach the Real Housewives in Israel how to stir the pot. The possibilities are endless.