Occasionally and rarer than perhaps the titles suggests, The Real Housewives franchise does get quite real. There’s Karen Huger opening up about her sexual assault and insisting her daughter take a self defense class before heading off to college. Or Carole Radziwill retrieving her dead husband's ashes. Or Teresa Giudice returning home from prison. But perhaps the most resonant moment for many is Vicki Gunvalson receiving the phone call that her mother had died. Each of these moments seemed to permeate the gloss that often is applied to this show either by edit, by filter or filler, and reveal some kind of universal truth that many of us experience, either through our own relation to the event depicted or our own fears of it happening to us.
Another of those such events occurred during a startling scene captured in the final moments of this week’s Real Housewives of Salt Lake when Mary M. Cosby finally decided to confront her son with her concerns about his behavior.
Some are calling the resulting scene “incredibly brave,” “vulnerable” and “one the of the rawest and realest moments across the franchise,” while others, notably Jill Zarin’s daughter Ally Shapiro, are speaking out in opposition. “While it was a powerful moment between a mom and her son, it's a moment I think should have been shared off camera, or after he was healthy,” she shared in an Instagram post.
For the uninitiated, Mary M. Cosby is what we’d categorically note as a problematic Housewife in the same canon as Ramona Singer or Vicki Gunvalson. She’s great television, but is often depicted as an awful person. This was evidenced from her first entry on the show, when she told her castmate Jen Shah that she “smelled like hospital.” She’s apologized for one racist comment and then made another, remarking that her castmember Jenny Nguyen, who is Asian, has “slanted eyes.” Of another castmember, Heather Gay, she told her (to her face) that she looks inbred. The Salt Lake Tribune labeled Mary “rude, obnoxious, occasionally racist and prone to saying really dumb things.”
Let’s review and unpack the moment in an attempt to weigh what was ultimately a very affecting scene despite its lack of resolve.