Can repeated Botox use lead to brain damage?
There’s no medical evidence, but Bravo’s “Game of Crowns” makes a compelling case.
The new “docu-series” (subsequent episodes will air for a full hour Sundays at 9 p.m.) takes a “Real Housewives” approach to a group of Connecticut and Rhode Island women who regularly compete in beauty contests.
The women are not without their own accomplishments. Lynne Diamante, with her eye surgeon husband, is founder and CEO of a luxury sunglass and eyeglass retailer. Vanassa Sebastian is a certified registered nurse anesthetist.
“What other beauty queen can say they pass gas for a living?” she says.
The women seem likable, and their expensive quests for cheap tiaras seem like a benign hobby.
Oh, don’t you fall for it.
The deeper you wade into this series, the more it feels like a Lifetime film crossed with the “Saw” franchise.
While to each other the women beam friendly, if frozen faces, behind each other’s backs, they rip each other down to levels that would make some of the “Real Housewives” recoil. The level of mud slung in the first two episodes could fill a quarry.
Pageant veteran Vanassa and relative newcomer Susanna Paliotta clash over wearing the same outfit on a plane to the Mrs. America contest in Arizona. Susanna tells Vanassa to get her breasts fixed, a harsh insult to sling at a breast cancer survivor.
That’s just a warm-up.
Leha Guilmette, a Cranston, R.I., resident and “Mrs. Rhode Island America,” is married to police officer Nick, her sixth-grade sweetheart, and they have two children. She recently dropped 70 pounds to get into pageant shape, and this weight loss prompts some of the most cutting and cruel comments from the others. There’s a gross discussion about her seemingly masculine features. One terms her a “manvestite.”
In the July 20 episode, four of the women make a cruel bet about how low Leha and another “friend” will place in the Arizona contest.
Unfortunately for them, Nick happens to hear them crowing when Leha places out of the finals, and he becomes furious.
The women go on the defensive in the most vile way, alleging abuse and death threats, the sort of smears that could wreck a police officer’s career. They even try to pressure Leha to turn against her own husband.
“Game of Crowns” proves beauty pageants are ugly business. These women are horrid.