It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Real Housewives series is the most colossally batshit show on television, and that Real Housewives of Melbourne is absolutely the best instalment. I’m telling you this not as a matter of opinion, but as scientific fact. Even American critics concede this:
I empathize with Bernie bc my presidential platform (Real Housewives of Melbourne = best franchise) is also too revolutionary for America
— Caity Weaver (@caityweaver) July 31, 2016
Well, it has competition from across the pond: Real Housewives of Auckland is currently embroiled in a scandal thanks to the fact that one of the titular rich housewives called another rich housewife – who is black – the N-word.
You’d think that maybe you wouldn’t do that on TV, but there you go. Things work differently over in New Zealand. Julia Sloane, while off-camera, called out to fellow star Gilda Kirkpatrick: “Gilda! Don’t let Michelle be your boat n******” She was referring to co-star Michelle Blanchard, who is black. Uh.
She tried to clarify in a later onscreen interview, dropping what is perhaps the worst excuse for a racial slur ever uttered in human history. “Michelle was helping Gilda on the sunlounger when I made a terrible joke,” Sloane said, according to NZ site The Spinoff. “I said something to Gilda about Michelle not being her boat n*****, but it came out wrong.
“It’s an old boating term. I should never have said it.”
An old boating term. That’s my new excuse for anything offensive I say off the cuff. Ah, you wouldn’t know why I just said that slur, because unlike me, you are not a steamboat captain in America’s antebellum South.
For the record, Blanchard didn’t accept that. “I know a lot of boating people and they do not use that term,” she said. A representative for the show told New Zealand’s Herald apologised for the “deeply regrettable incident”, and The Guardian reports that MediaWorks, the company who owns channel Bravo, is braced for complaints to New Zealand’s Human Rights Commission.
C’mon.
Source: The Guardian.
Photo: MediaWorks / Real Housewives of Auckland.
