The penultimate episode of Dark Side of Reality TV‘s inaugural season is tackling one of the genre’s most massive franchises ever: the Real Housewives. On Tuesday’s (October 29) episode, the show featured testimonials from some of the most senior members of the Housewives crew, including The Real Housewives of Orange County stars Vicki Gunvalson and Jeana Keough, The Real Housewives of Atlanta‘s Cynthia Bailey, and The Real Housewives of New York City star Aviva Drescher.
In the episode, the Housewives alums all reflected on some of their most iconic moments from the show and how they feel about it all in retrospect, and at least one of them has a grudge that might never go away.
Gunvalson, who starred on RHOC for 16 seasons, revealed in the episode that she will forever harbor a grudge against the network for airing a particularly sensitive part of her life: the moment she found out her mother died.
In the episode, she looked back on the moment, remembering, “We were playing Bunko at Shannon [Beador‘s house], and my brother, my sister, my daughter, and my son were trying to call me, and my phone was not working, so they called production. Briana had been calling and calling and calling and calling and calling, and they kept telling her, ‘Well she’s filming right now, blah blah blah blah,’ and she was like, ‘I need to talk to my mom right now.’ And they were like, ‘Okay, we’re going to have her call you from Shannon’s wrapping paper room.’ They had set up lights and a cameraman, and I’m like, ‘What’s going on?!’”
As her costars came into the room and discovered her devastation, the cameras recorded her screams of agony as the other women embraced her.
“I was really upset that production knew for an hour, and they didn’t tell me. They were out of line, and I think they should’ve taken me aside and said, ‘Your mother’s passed. Talk to your daughter off-camera.’ If I was a producer, that’s what I would’ve done. Let me scream and cry on my own and be mad. It was very, very traumatic. I will never forgive Bravo for that.”
Elsewhere in the episode, Gunvalson revealed that she was paid nothing for her first season on the show and only made $5,000 for Season 2.
Dark Side of Reality TV, Tuesdays, 9/8c, Vice TV
