TV review: ‘Housewives’ will make America hate Dallas all over again

For fans of Bravo’s “The Real Housewives” franchise, it’s not so much whether any new edition of the series is good — that’s one four-letter word that’s probably best left out of the discussion of any of them — but whether it lives up, or more accurately down, to what has come before.

The explosive Atlanta and New Jersey versions — where table-flipping and wig-pulling are the order of the day and at least one Housewife and two spouses have gone to jail for financial flimflams — as well as the original Orange County show are the standards by which all their spawn are measured. Some, like Miami and Washington, D.C., don’t make the cut and get canceled.

Sadly, judging from the first two episodes, The Real Housewives of Dallas may be joining them.

These five women may be good people, but that doesn’t yet make them good reality TV, even if one of them is a former Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader, another appeared in soft-core porn, and another’s tag line is “I’m the girl next door, if you live in a big ol’ mansion.”

The one everybody is supposed to love to loathe is the former carny kid LeeAnne Locken, the queen bee of the group, the dishy doyenne of the Dallas charity scene, and the one Bravo would like us to believe is engineered to spark Twitter outrage.

But this self-proclaimed “mouth of the South” who says, “We are far from a hick town and I am far from a Southern belle,” isn’t as commandingly outrageous as she might think. She has a long way to go to catch up with Atlanta’s Nene or OC’s Vicki.

Locken immediately locks horns with Brandi Redmond (the former cheerleader) and Brandi’s friend Stephanie Hollman (the “girl next door”) over their juvenile behavior. They certainly do like their “Jesus juice” (wine) and scatalogical humor (Hollman can pass gas on command), so Locken has a point. Seething with disgust at their antics, Locken digs deep into her diva Dallas soul and snorts, “It’s a little Plano in here.”

Falling somewhere in between are Tiffany Hendra (the former soft-porn actress), who’s now married to a struggling Aussie musician, and Cary Deuber, a nurse who assists her plastic surgeon husband.

Taken altogether, they fulfill every vapid, Dallas shop-till-you-drop expectation while inhabiting a constricted, largely white city that only seems to include Highland Park, Uptown, Lakewood and Las Colinas.

That’s not a shock considering that Bravo is a network that leaves no cultural stereotype unturned, but it outdoes itself wheeling out the Texas clichés for RHOD. There are interstitial shots of a cowboy, longhorns, the Fort Worth Herd and Cattlemen’s Steak House so, in case you forgot, they’re in Texas. (But, psst, don’t tell them that none of these things is actually in Dallas).

None of this would be bad if the show were funny, compelling or interesting, even as a TV trainwreck. But it’s not.

At one point, Hendra’s husband, Aaron, is wavering on whether the two of them — who had been living in L.A. — should commit to Texas by buying a house. He says, “I don’t even know if I like Dallas.”

After this show, much of America might agree with him.

This story was originally published April 8, 2016 at 7:02 AM with the headline "TV review: ‘Housewives’ will make America hate Dallas all over again."