At a glance

  • Season / episode: Season 2, Episode 1 (season premiere)
  • Title: “Best of Frenemies”
  • Aired: 12 September 2021, on Bravo
  • Main cast: Lisa Barlow, Mary Cosby, Heather Gay, Meredith Marks, Whitney Rose, Jen Shah, Jennie Nguyen

Episode photo: Bravo.

What happens

The premiere opens at the end of the story. The women are gathered in the Beauty Lab + Laser parking lot, boarding transport for a cast trip, when Jen Shah takes a phone call from her husband Sharrieff. She asks Whitney Rose to turn her microphone off, tells the group a family emergency has come up, and leaves. Minutes later — twelve, by Reality Tea’s recap — federal agents swarm the production looking for her. In confessionals filmed afterwards, the women absorb the news that Jen has been charged in connection with an alleged nationwide telemarketing scheme said to have defrauded hundreds of mostly elderly victims, and a producer asks each of them the same two questions: what do you know that you’re not saying, and who tipped the feds off?

Then the episode rewinds two months. Jen is showing Lisa Barlow around a new Shah Chalet, and Lisa is nearly the only castmate still speaking to her. Jen confides that her marriage nearly ended — Sharrieff filed for divorce after the reunion, by her account — and the two plot her route back into Meredith Marks’s good graces. She ends the conversation with a joke that lands differently after the cold open, as the recap records it: she’ll go to jail for Lisa; she hasn’t gone to jail yet.

The group has split into camps. Heather Gay, Whitney, Meredith and Mary Cosby lunch in a socially distanced igloo in Park City, where Meredith tearfully reveals her father has died. Heather hasn’t spoken to Lisa or Jen since the reunion — Jen has been calling her a racist on social media, Heather says — and admits she wants to apologise to Lisa. Meredith’s grievance is specific: Jen spent the off-season liking and reposting disparaging comments about her son Brooks, and Meredith is done disengaging.

The home threads run lighter. Whitney rebrands her skincare line as Wild Rose Beauty and throws a birthday bash for one of her stepsons, dropping his cake in front of the guests. Heather prepares her daughter Ashley for college. Mary, her church still closed by the pandemic and Robert Sr. away in Florida, starts a podcast.

The premiere also introduces Jennie Nguyen, Lisa’s friend of ten years, whose sons are friends too. Born in Vietnam, Jennie tells the cameras her family fled the country when she was seven; they were captured by Thai pirates and spent three years in a refugee camp before a Christian church sponsored their move to the United States. She grew up in Long Beach, California, and came to Utah through her marriage to Duy.

It closes with the Markses hosting the Barlows for Shabbat in honour of Meredith’s father. Over challah, Lisa and Meredith have the heart-to-heart the episode is named for: ten years of friendship, strained by Lisa’s peacemaking between Meredith and her archenemy. Meredith won’t budge. They settle for a pact — Jen Shah will not be allowed to come between them.

How it originated

Season 2 was filming when, on 30 March 2021, Shah was arrested and charged with federal fraud offences arising from the alleged telemarketing scheme. She pleaded not guilty and maintained her innocence. Cameras were rolling at the Beauty Lab lot that day, which is why the season could open with its own climax: the premiere runs a supersized 75 minutes, per the episode guide, and spends its first act on footage shot months after the scenes that follow it.

Jennie’s casting ran through a real friendship rather than an audition story — a decade of knowing Lisa, with teenage sons who are best friends — which the episode uses as her passport into a group that otherwise meets in armed camps.

Her run lasted one season. In January 2022, with this season still airing, Facebook posts Nguyen had shared in 2020 resurfaced — memes disparaging the Black Lives Matter movement and mocking protesters, per contemporary reporting. She apologised, saying she had thought she was speaking out against violence and had since learned how offensive the posts were; her castmates condemned them publicly. On 25 January 2022, Bravo announced it had ceased filming with her and that she would no longer be a cast member, acknowledging it had failed to act when the posts first came to its attention. Scenes she had already shot for season three were dropped. It is a record this series returns to as the season’s own storyline unfolds — because across it, Nguyen repeatedly charges Mary Cosby with racism, while the posts that would end her time on the show were already sitting in her past.

The human interaction (Analysis)

The arrest reorders every relationship in the episode, even in scenes filmed before it happened — because the audience watches them backwards. Lisa’s peacemaking stops looking like friendliness and starts looking like a job: she holds the only open channel to Jen, and both camps bill her for it. Meredith’s refusal is just as structural. Her line isn’t drawn over the court case; it’s drawn over her son, and over a currency the group still trades in while a federal case looms — likes, reposts, who said what about whom online.

Jen, in the flashback scenes, performs ordinary life at full volume: a new house, big plans, jokes about jail. Nobody on screen knows what the audience knows. The season’s engine is that gap.

What people made of it

The numbers say the gamble worked. On IMDb’s data, mirrored by EpisodeHive, the premiere holds 8.7 out of 10 from 67 votes — the site ranks it the season’s number-one fan favourite, from a small, self-selected sample. Nielsen counted 0.81 million live viewers, per Showbuzz Daily, a strong figure for this show.

The recap press was close to rapturous. Reality Tea framed the hour as Bravo history unfolding, called the arrest preview the moment fans had been waiting for since March, and was cooler only on the new taglines — a mixed bag, it judged, with Mary’s and Lisa’s the standouts. Bravo’s own Daily Dish podcast called the opening scene chilling and singled out Jennie’s introduction, and the story of how her family came to Utah, as the premiere’s other weight.

The camps, such as they were, formed around appetite rather than disagreement: most of the sampled reaction treated the cold open as a franchise landmark and Jennie as a welcome arrival, while Reality Tea’s recap voiced the sceptical note — Jen showing off a new chalet on camera sat oddly, it observed, beside the no-assets picture painted at her first court hearing. The episode’s Reddit discussion thread and the comments under Bravo’s official clips could not be retrieved, so this survey rests on the ratings, the viewership and the recap-and-podcast record.

Sources

  1. TVMaze — episode guide (title, air date, 75-minute runtime, official synopsis): https://www.tvmaze.com/shows/49980/the-real-housewives-of-salt-lake-city/episodeguide
  2. Reality Tea — “Real Housewives Of Salt Lake City Season 2 Premiere Recap: Get Ready To Witness Bravo Herstory” (13 September 2021): https://www.realitytea.com/2021/09/13/real-housewives-of-salt-lake-city-season-2-premiere-recap/
  3. Wikipedia — List of RHOSLC episodes (0.81 million U.S. viewers, Nielsen via Showbuzz Daily): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Real_Housewives_of_Salt_Lake_City_episodes
  4. EpisodeHive — IMDb episode ratings mirror, season 2 (8.7/10, 67 votes): https://episodehive.com/tv-shows/the-real-housewives-of-salt-lake-city/season-2
  5. Everand — Bravo TV’s The Daily Dish podcast, bonus episode on the season 2 premiere (13 September 2021): https://www.everand.com/podcast/524891046/BONUS-The-RHOSLC-Season-2-Premiere-Opened-With-a-Chilling-Scene-Teasing-the-Rollercoaster-to-Come
  6. TheWrap — “Jennie Nguyen Dropped From ‘Real Housewives of Salt Lake City'” (25 January 2022): https://www.thewrap.com/jennie-nguyen-dropped-from-real-housewives-of-salt-lake-city/

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