*Very Mariah Carey voice* It’s tiiiiiime! And by time, I mean time to analyze two hotly anticipated trailers that dropped this week. Over the weekend, at BravoCon, Peacock unveiled the first trailer for the fourth (formerly fifth) season of the Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip, a multiverse of madness-style series that folds the Real Housewives franchises together for a compressed week of antics, tears and instantly iconic quotes (Dorinda’s "How about if your son died?” an early favorite). And then on Wednesday morning, Paramount Pictures released the trailer for Mean Girls, a film adaptation of the hit-ish 2017 Broadway musical based off of the 2004 original film.
Let’s start with Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip (RHUGT). The season was originally announced in March 2022. “Our loyal fans have spoken as to what they want to see and what they don’t want to see — and we’ve taken that all into account, and this is a series where you’re going to expect to see fan-favorites from the show’s great history,” Cohen said at the time. “It’s organic, you know? They were in each other’s lives, and they are in each other’s lives. We’re looking at people who are beloved by fans.”
Though many were clamoring for the return of original castmembers like Jill Zarin, Alex McCord and, of course, Bethenny Frankel, the result is more of a hodgepodge with two original castmembers (Luann de Lesseps and the controversy-laden Ramona Singer), two mid-stage, long-tenured ones (Sonja Morgan and Dorinda Medley), a memorable but short-lived one (Kelly Bensimon) and an out-of-left-field one (Kristen Taekman).
It’s an exciting cast, but the missing pieces feel outsized.