Season / episode: Season 1, Episode 7 Episode title: “Fashion Faux Pas” Original air date: 23 December 2020 Network: Bravo Main cast: Lisa Barlow, Mary Cosby, Heather Gay, Meredith Marks, Whitney Rose, Jen Shah

Episode photo: Bravo.

A catwalk of nearly identical tracksuits

Park City Fashion Week closes out the Sundance stretch, and the runway is practically a cast event. Whitney walks in the show. Meredith presents her jewelry line. The front row is Heather, Jen and Mary, with Jen seated beside Mary and thawing not one degree.

The finale belongs to Brooks Marks: his first collection, shown as designer and model. It is, look after look, black tracksuits with his name on them. The women applaud. Nobody says what several are plainly thinking.

Afterwards, Meredith and Brooks FaceTime Seth, who missed his son’s debut for work. Instead of asking how it went, he cracks jokes about their hair and makeup. When Brooks says he is hurt, Seth pleads a bad connection and suggests a letter instead. Meredith says the separation is landing on the kids.

Everything gets said somewhere else

At Cucina Toscana, Meredith dines with Jen and Heather and gives them almost nothing. Her marriage is off-limits in detail — fewer facts in circulation, less gossip — though she allows communication is the core problem between her and Seth. Jen listens like someone holding a fuller file.

She opens it at Whitney’s, during a pole-dancing lesson: if Meredith isn’t getting what she needs at home, maybe she’s getting it elsewhere. Asked whether that’s an affair accusation, Jen moves it to the confessional — on a recent New York trip, she says, she met a man who spoke of marrying Meredith one day and walked her up to her room at night’s end.

The Barlows negotiate in the open. Family night ends with goal-setting for the boys, after which John presses Lisa to work less. The official synopsis says she promises, and that he isn’t buying it. Watching her sketch a five-year plan to make Vida Tequila a billion-dollar brand, you see his point.

The conversations nobody staged for cameras

Whitney and Heather get facials at Beauty Lab and talk about the faith they were raised in. Whitney’s name for life around the Church is living “under the thumb of Mormonism.” Heather explains its arithmetic: you’re in or you’re out, and out comes with judgment.

At home, Heather sits her three daughters down, cries, and tells them about the shame she has carried since her divorce — and about the life she wants: a drink, a date with a man outside the faith.

Jen says the quiet part too, though only to the confessional: anxiety, depression, medication, lashing out, and a marriage that nearly didn’t survive it. Sharrieff’s first instinct, she says, was prayer. Elsewhere, per the episode’s official synopsis, Whitney’s father tells her he is ready to move on from the treatment center, and it frightens her.

How this episode was put together

Season 1 was produced by InventTV, with Andy Cohen among its executive producers. The fashion week was television built to order: billed in the previous episode’s synopsis as the city’s very first, it put two cast businesses in the show and a third cast member on the runway.

One seat explains the season’s odd shape. Mary appears here only in that front row. A week later, Reality Tea reported that the season had changed production companies mid-shoot — the original company out, Shed Media in — and that Mary had first been cast as a “friend of” before being upgraded to full-time, its explanation for why she filmed so little of the back half. Bravo has not confirmed that account; the season’s credits name InventTV.

Analysis: presence is the currency

Every storyline prices the same thing. Seth offers his son a screen instead of a seat. John asks Lisa for time and gets a business plan. Meredith withholds herself from her friends’ questions, and the vacuum fills within the hour — Jen’s New York story is what rushes in. Privacy, in this group, doesn’t protect a marriage; it just outsources the narration.

Heather runs the opposite trade: total disclosure to her daughters, on her own terms first. Jen discloses too, but her hardest truths go to the confessional camera or to Whitney — never to Meredith, the person they concern. Confession as intimacy and confession as ammunition look identical on screen. They are not the same act.

What people made of it

The measurable verdict was cold. The episode drew 0.56 million U.S. viewers, and IMDb users rate it 6.3 out of 10 from 56 votes — the series’ lowest score. EpisodeHive’s worst-episodes ranking puts it at No. 1.

The recappers were kinder to the pieces than to the whole. Reality Tea called Heather’s talk with her daughters the most moving scene of the week and Heather something close to universally beloved for a first-season Housewife. The recap podcast Kiki and Kibbitz, in its Christmas Day instalment, praised a level of honesty it called rare for the franchise.

Brooks’s collection was the consensus punchline. Reality Tea dismissed it as tracksuits with a name taped on; the podcast’s summary asked, “one tracksuit — ten models?” Seth drew the sharpest judgment: Reality Tea laid his absence squarely on him, separation or not. And Jen’s closing insinuation split viewers along the exact line Reality Tea put to its readers — was she telling the truth about Meredith, or planting a story where a friendship used to be?

Sources

  1. TVMaze — episode guide — https://www.tvmaze.com/shows/49980/the-real-housewives-of-salt-lake-city/episodeguide
  2. Reality Tea — “Under The Mormon Thumb” recap — https://www.realitytea.com/2020/12/24/real-housewives-of-salt-lake-city-recap-mormon-thumb/
  3. Wikipedia — RHOSLC season 1 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real_Housewives_of_Salt_Lake_City_season_1
  4. EpisodeHive — episode ratings — https://episodehive.com/tv-shows/the-real-housewives-of-salt-lake-city/all
  5. EpisodeHive — worst episodes ranking — https://episodehive.com/tv-shows/the-real-housewives-of-salt-lake-city/worst-episodes
  6. Reality Tea — “Hot Tubs And Cool Riders” recap — https://www.realitytea.com/2020/12/31/real-housewives-of-salt-lake-city-recap-hot-tubs-cool-riders/
  7. Kiki and Kibbitz podcast — https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/kikiandkibbitz

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