My wife and I would start texting, excited, around noon: HANDMAIDS & HOUSEWIVES.
The far extremes of television entertainment, these two.
But there has been something extra-special, horrifically necessary, about Handmaids & Housewives in 2018.
Credit: George Kraychyk/Hulu; Bravo
The double bill ends Wednesday night with theHandmaidsseason 2 finale.
(RHONYruns on, inevitably, toward a long-promised climactic boat trip.)
RHONYin season 10 (!)
has an ensemble of basically all single ladies, age-ranging 40-to-60something.
It is a peculiarly modern form of entertainment, aspirationalandparodic.
Still, you worry about making an easy moral judgment.
Unmarried hilarious women drink like frat boys.
And one of them is a kamillionaire entrepreneur on a new activist kick.
In dystopian Gilead, womanhood itself has been splintered into the most old-fashioned archetypes.
Green-dressed wives make the home.
Aproned Marthas work the house.
Crimson-robed Handmaids are assaulted toward childbirth.
The Handmaids & Housewives relationship is a wild two-hour block.
The wives led glossy house-party assemblies, honoring new births, staging one gala or another.
TheHousewivesbrand has developed a kind of droll good humor, peace treaties prologuing drunken dramatics.
The week that Bethenny took Dorinda to Puerto Rico,Handmaidsairedone of its most despairing episodes.
June (Elizabeth Moss) was bleeding an apparent miscarriage, which given recent events augured doom.
In the radioactive colonies, Emily (Alexis Bledel), was losing her teeth.
It was one of the episodes that got people talking about this season as luscious depression porn.
I get the argument, but disagree.
In the gulag, Emily watched two women get married, one of them halfway to death.
A stunning moment, sentimental and primal as silent cinema.
Theres a quality of endurance poweringHandmaids Tale.
Its cathartic in the most cleansing sense.
Its a fantasy that happens to be sort of real a common description, more pessimistically, ofHandmaids Tale.
The same week onRHONY, the gang gathered for the annual Berzerkshires trip, yearly sight of yuletide follies.
In 2018 were right there, between the Handmaids and the Housewives.
