Photo: Gilles Mingasson/Hulu
Filene’s Basement Jax Taylor is doing my head in. Yes, I’m talking about Marciano, one of the worst reality-television characters I’ve had occasion to meet, and I watched the first season of The Real Housewives of Sydney. The difference between him and Jax, however, is that Jax knows, on some level, what he’s doing. He knows he’s a liar. He knows he’s full of shit. He knows he’s a horrible person. He just doesn’t want to change it. Marciano is under the mistaken impression that he’s a good guy who does bad things. Oh, honey. I’m going to need to wake you up from this Rip Van Winkle–size dream of yours.
The episode starts with Grace freaking out on Marciano. He doesn’t care that much and goes back to hang out with the guests. As Grace is moaning to Hannah about her ex-boyfriend, he’s still giving out shots at the bachelorette party and making out with one of the guests named Gayle. I mean, it seemed like a short and sloppy kiss, but Gabriella saw it and couldn’t wait to run to Hannah to spill them beans. Hannah says, “Am I being set up right now?” I love that her knee-jerk reaction is not to knee that jerk but that the girls are fucking with her. Why would they lie? Can she be surprised that the guy she dumped because he cheated on her was making out with another girl?
Telly’s reaction is pretty spot-on, and for the first time all season I agree with her: “I know people in the world can be dumb, but there is a new level of dumb, and that is him.” Did he think no one would see it? Did he not think Hannah would be upset? Hannah says that he makes her feel like a piece of dirt on the floor, but at this point, I’m sorry, it’s a little bit her fault for trusting this guy who has proven himself to be untrustworthy before they ever walked past the plastic shrubs to the entrance of Villa Rosabelle.
I will give Hannah credit for one thing. In the morning, she has to serve breakfast to Gayle and the other guests, and she says she doesn’t blame Gayle for what happened, she blames Marciano. Thank the sweet Catholic Jesus. So many times on reality shows, we see girl-on-girl crime because some asshole guy cheated. I’m not saying blame all men, but, in these instances, blame all men.
During breakfast, they get their comment cards, and Brett, the toxic gay guest, says that the staff was hanging out with them too much and made it about them. This Ava Max superfan invited the staff to play a game where they talked shit about each other. What did he think was going to happen? The poppers and creatine addict started this. The guests also didn’t like that the staff was fighting.
This leads me to a fundamental question about this series: Do the guests want to hang out with these people? Can’t this be more like Below Deck, where the staff is there to serve and maybe play a little game or two, but mostly leaves the guests alone? Or is this what the guests want? When the next group arrives, a group of sexy, single gentlemen, are they told that making out with the servers and housekeepers is a possibility? Is this what they want? I can’t figure out if this is a bug or a feature. But I know if I was at a secluded villa in the south of France with a hot staff, I would want to ogle them and flirt with them at dinner, but mostly, I would want to be left alone to enjoy myself.
The next morning, as the guests depart, Marciano is still asleep, marinating his body in the heady aroma of his tequila farts. When Lisa reads about the fighting on the comment card, she calls Andre, the only adult in the whole house, including Ken Todd, the ghost of the Scarlet Pimpernel. She asks him about what happened, and he basically tells her that Marciano sucks, started everything, and all the staff hates him.
At a group meeting, Lisa forces him to get up and apologize to everyone like he’s a second-grader that just ate the entire classroom’s paste. He gets up and says he’s deeply ashamed and blah, blah, blah, and then says, “I promise it won’t happen again.” Oh, Marciano, do not make promises you know you can’t keep. This will definitely happen again. This will happen again and again until Marciano is divorced from his third wife and hasn’t paid a cent of child support in five years. It will always happen again because this is who Marciano is. Lisa then calls him into his office and says that if they were back in the U.S. she would have fired him already, but she can’t do that here because there is a dearth of English-speaking staff with rippling abs in the area, so she suspends him and forces him to work doing dishes for the whole “charter.”
The next guests who arrive are Chizi and his friends, a bunch of hot single dudes. Marciano doesn’t want to be around that because he doesn’t want to watch Hannah flirt with guys who are hotter, saner, and better employed than he is. Also, after talking all that shit about the chef, he now has to do every single dish in the kitchen, which is the best thing I have ever heard since that lady who threw her burrito at a Chipotle employee was forced to work in fast food by a judge.
Since there are a bunch of sexy guys showing up at the villa, the girls are getting into their best push-up bras with the hope of making out with one of them. Again, I ask, do the guests really want to hang out with these people? And is Lisa basically operating a brothel? Is this the French countryside version of Westworld where the guests can just fuck any of the staff robots they want?
The girls play a game of boules (which is English for bocce) with the guys, and the losers have to jump into the pool. However, when it’s time to do their penance, they take off all their clothes and dive in wearing swimsuits or undies. This isn’t a punishment; this is a good time!
Initially, everyone, including Hannah, is attracted to the hottest guy in the bunch, Dan. Well, that’s what I wrote in my notes. It could be anything because this nondescript hottie with a square jaw and a haircut right off the barbershop wall could be a Rob, a Chris, a Ryan, a Colin, a Justin. He could be anything. Maybe that’s why Hannah gets bored with him so quickly, because he has nothing but hotness to fall back on. Once Hannah disses him, he turns his light on Gabriella, who is much more ready to receive it. Even though she’s spent all episode flirting with Andre and even giving him a pedicure, she figures she can have the guest slip one in right before she takes the plunge with her crush-object-slash-coworker. But at least we have a story focused on someone other than Marciano or Hannah. At least we have something to add a little bit of interest that isn’t the saddest form of reality-television drama that Lisa Vanderpump has peddled in across a constellation of series. If there’s one thing this series could use, it’s a little bit of variety.
