Following Bravo‘s reboot of “The Real Housewives of New York City” last year, the network has announced that all six cast members are set to return for its upcoming Season 15. Yes, that includes even the ostensibly elusive, seemingly reluctant Jenna Lyons, who came into the show’s 14th season as the cast’s only famous person, and revealed herself over the course of the show to be a shy, charming oddball — and who, since the season premiered in July of last year, has been the subject of endless rumors speculating that she would not care to repeat the experience.
Yet Lyons is in fact coming back to “RHONY” full time — which is good, because fans have nicknamed her Jenna Fucking Lyons, and that shouldn’t go to waste — along with Brynn Whitfield, Erin Lichy, Sai De Silva, Jessel Taank and Ubah Hassan. Bravo and Shed Media, which produces the show, have already begun production.
The rehiring of the entire cast signifies Bravo’s endorsement that its risky experiment to start over fully with “The Real Housewives of New York City,” as first reported in Variety in March 2022, has been deemed a success by the network. After a disastrous, unlucky Season 13 of “RHONY,” Bravo went back to the drawing board, wanting to bring in a new cast that would be, as “Real Housewives” executive producer Andy Cohen put it in an interview at the time, “a multicultural group of friends who really best reflect the most exciting city in the country.”
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Anecdotally — judging by social media reactions, recaps and the output from the prolific content creators who fuel the conversation around Bravo shows — viewers seeemed mostly to embrace the new cast, to varying extents. The Bravo fandom is never entirely happy, and as the season wore on, some grew tired of the repetitive, unkind intrusions into Taank’s marriage to frequent-flyer-miles obsessive Pavit Randhawa. One hopes that during the show’s hiatus that those who overly fixated on such things will have let them go.
As for reports on the internet about two new women joining the group, Bravo isn’t commenting on potential new cast members.
