By Emma Chance | TV | January 21, 2025 |
Somewhere in the Hamptons right now, Bethenny Frankel is shaking her fist at the sky, because her former nemesis, Dorinda Medley, is achieving the fame she so desperately craves. Notebooks out and pencils at the ready, students. Allow me to educate you.
The setting: Manhattan.
The year: 2015.
The show: The Real Housewives of New York City.
Dorinda enters a reality show that has already established itself as the upper-class version of the existing Housewives brand. The women of New York live in townhomes and highrises and refer to themselves as “The 1%.” Their personal drivers take them from 5th Avenue to Soho and back to the Upper East Side. You’ve got a Countess by marriage, a Morgan family divorcée, and a Radziwill. What does a no-name like Dorinda Medley have to offer to such a stacked cast? A sassy haircut, a maximally decorated mansion in the Berkshires, and a penchant for drunken one-liners. In other words, she’s a star.
It takes no time at all for Dorinda to fit in with her castmates. She’s a widow, so she’s got that in common with Carole Radziwill. Her late husband, Richard Medley, was British, so she’s got the European connection with Countess Luann de Lesseps, whose ex-husband was a French count. (They’re already divorced when Dorinda gets there, but Luann has never let that stop her.) She’s downtown enough to keep up with the likes of Bethenny Frankel and Heather Thompson, two self-made entrepreneurs, but also uptown enough to earn the respect of Sonja Morgan and The Devil’s Mistress Ramona Singer, the evil stepsisters of the cast (there is no Cinderella—these stepsisters terrorize everyone). And I cannot emphasize this enough: she has a big mansion a few hours away where the whole cast can go for a girl’s trip (basically) every season.
Bluestone Manor is perhaps the best way to get to know Dorinda. Picture your neighborhood HomeGoods if it were merchandized to literally live in, and then add a bunch of sculptures that would be questionable even in a HomeGoods. That’s Dorinda’s decorating style. No, actually—picture the Scottish castle where The Traitors is set. That’s Dorinda’s decorating style. It really represents her essence: quirky, expensive, loud, and maybe in on the joke at some point but not anymore.
A weekend trip to Bluestone Manor is where Dorinda delivered her most famous quip when her guests fought instead of enjoying the dinner she’d made for them: “I cooked, I cleaned, I made it nice!” These one-liners are the other way to get to know her because she has a lot of them. There was the time she was drunk and wanted someone to stop talking, so she went, “Clip! Clip!” and made a little, well, clipping motion, I guess, with her hands. There was the time she was drunk and someone she didn’t like asked her how she’d been doing and she said, “Not well, bitch!” But don’t worry, she’s clever when she’s sober, too. Some of her confessionals are the best in the business. She’s a storyteller, and that’s why she makes excellent television.
So imagine my delight when she was cast on season three of The Traitors. This is a woman who has no problem looking a socialite in the eye and saying, “Why don’t you stop getting vaginal rejuvenation and put an ezpass on that vagina with your Holland Tunnel.” It’s for that same reason, however, that I knew she would be a terrible Traitor and wouldn’t last long as a Faithful, because subtlety is not in her vocabulary.
Lamentably, I was right. Dorinda was the very first to go; murdered by the Traitors who have a serious Housewives prejudice, but we don’t have time for all of my thoughts about that. Maybe the castle reminded her too much of home, because she made herself comfortable right away, and Dorinda when she’s comfortable is like the rest of us when we’re uncomfortable, which is to say, super loud and confrontational. Bob the Drag Queen knew there was only room for one confrontational queen in that castle.
But that will not be the last you see of Dorinda Medley, mark my words. Her star is just starting to rise. The original RHONY getting canceled and recast was the best thing that could have happened to her because now she can get drunk on her own time when there aren’t any cameras there to capture it, so when she appears on these game shows and talk shows, she seems like a normal, lovely lady of a certain age, and we remember why we love her. She might even get her own show, if there is indeed a God.
She’s grown her hair out just enough so that it’s trendy and whatever injections she’s getting in her face are helping her to look her age but also healthy. Her whole “says exactly what’s on her mind” thing works better when she’s not in the spotlight, but just off to the side. She’s like the guy in the corner of the late-night talk show set, occasionally cracking jokes with the host. Dorinda isn’t the main character, she’s the snappy sidekick, and she’s making it work. Dare I even say…nice?