Fixing 'Real Friends of WeHo'

Mistakes were made

I’m not going to lie, I bought the cart before the horse here. I watched every episode of the highly controversial Real Friends of WeHo thinking I could surely make content out of it, but now I’m not sure that’s true. I’m in an Iron Chef situation where the secret ingredient is trash TV, and I have to make a Michelin-star dish. 

Man, Iron Chef is a way better show. 

Regardless, I’m nothing if not resourceful. After consulting my subscribers, I’ve decided to discuss the ways I would fix Real Friends to make it more yaaaass and slay for people like me, the average American voter. 

If you don’t know what Real Friends of WeHo is, it’s basically MTV trying to do a Real Housewives with six gay men in West Hollywood. The show was met with immediate blowback for casting the infamous Todrick Hall (doesn’t pay dancers, is generally irritating) and for allegedly cutting into Drag Race’s 90-minute run time. 

This is bad, because gay people love Drag Race and hate gay guys on TV who aren’t wearing wigs or doing splits. Real Friends was more or less doomed from the jump, fated to be buried next to its trashy gay TV predecessors like The A-List and Fire Island (if the gays even left a corpse to be buried). The show has one star on IMDB, and there’s a popular petition to cancel it. 

I’m going to say something controversial yet brave: it’s nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be. Sure, it’s vapid and mindless, but those are things I enjoy in my garbage television. Its problem, if anything, is that it hasn’t been lobotomized enough. Someone needs to go back in with an icepick and finish the job.

Sometimes a piece of pop culture becomes a piñata, and the discourse eats it, digests it, and shits it back out in such a state that it no longer resembles its original form. It was fun and popular to whack Real Friends with a stick, beating retweets and internet points out of it. That’s just the circle of life in the digital jungle. But when I watched the show, I actually found many redeeming qualities about it, along with, of course, things I disliked, which I’ll get to. 

I like, for example, that several of the cast members elected not to wear pants for their confessionals. I think that’s fun. I liked the ridiculousness of the forced fights, like influencer Joey Zauzig accosting skincare CEO Dorión Renaud for having rancid vibes at his 40s-themed party, which was when World War II happened. I watched one episode high out of my mind, and when Todrick Hall said “the Femuline World Tour is my love letter to the queer community” I laughed so hard I thought I was going to throw up. I really enjoyed that. 

Alright, now for the things I disliked, and how I would fix them. Consider this my love letter back to Todrick Hall, expressing my gratitude for the Femuline World Tour. 

Let Me Believe 

The first episode is rough. The cast immediately breaks the fourth wall, using their confessionals to talk about why they chose to be on the show, why the show is important, and how being on the show might affect their careers. They talk to the cameramen and the producers about how this is a show. It takes forever for us to get to a scene where these people talk to each other.

It turns out, when it comes to storytelling, the fourth wall is often a load-bearing wall, so the whole first episode is sort of like a “meet the queens” trailer for Drag Race if Drag Race hadn’t been invented yet and the drag queens were wearing normal clothes from Nordstrom Rack. 

I don’t know what “this show” is. I believe it is your job to manipulate my gay little rat brain into forgetting I’m watching a show at all. I know you’re not actually friends. I know the drama will be fabricated out of thin air. I know that I should be spending my time doing anything but watching Real Friends of WeHo right now, which is why you must dazzle me into thinking about other things.

We should start the first episode with one of those famous little “Los Angeles outdoor salad lunches” with some of the cast. One should jump right in and accuse Todrick of a crime within the first minute. I do not care how hard you fought to accept yourself enough to be openly gay on TV. I came here to watch you earn a paycheck by trying to smack each other offscreen like Smash Bros. Make an effort!

Ease Up on the Activism

Look, I get it. There’s a reason Drag Race spends precious minutes of its (truncated) runtime on a queen opening up about their trauma while doing their makeup in the mirror every single episode. My mom was actually addicted to eating makeup and every time I bought makeup she would eat it. This kept me from being beautiful for many years. I still love her. But it’s a battle every single day I’m here, because sometimes I also want to eat my lipstick.

That’s where the Emmys come from. 

But I don’t think you’re doing yourself any favors by pretending like watching Real Friends of WeHo is an act of support for the gay community writ large. Watching Todrick allude to not paying his rent on a house in a podcast didn’t feel like Stonewall to me, not that I would know. 

This is a problem affecting a lot of gay media. It all needs to be important and representation and validating. But I don’t need any of that out of reality TV. I need someone throwing their prosthetic leg at their enemies.

Aviva Drescher threw the first leg at Stonewall. 

Add One Woman

Hear me out, boys.

There’s something about the title “real friends” that always struck me as homophobic in a corporate way. I can imagine the MTV emails going back and forth until arriving here. You just know someone pitched Real Queens of WeHo or something a bit sassier before some exec with a wife and kids intervened. “Real friends” feels like I’m visiting my homophobic family for Thanksgiving with my “roommate.” 

My family is very loving and accepting, actually. I would never win Drag Race an Emmy. 

Anyway, there’s no law saying a woman can’t be a friend. I think it would be funny if it was one straight woman putting up with these antics. I think that would really offer a relatable POV character for the majority of Drag Race viewers, who I’m pretty sure are straight women. It would remind them of everything they have to suffer through for the gays in their own lives.

I can just picture her wearing huge sunglasses and carrying a Starbucks beverage on her way to clock into her job dealing with her chaotic sissies. She doesn’t have to be a straight woman, mind you, but it would be fun. It would be a little treat for me. Some people might get mad, but everyone is already mad, which gives you the freedom to pursue the important work of tickling me, specifically, with your choices. 

Do Some Recasting

It’s time for me to be brave once again: we’re keeping Todrick Hall.

Yes, I actually like him on this show. I like that he’s kind of a ticking time bomb. For every episode that he’s normal, you wonder, “are people wrong about him, is he playing the game, or is he just waiting to explode?” I like the suspense, and I like that he stirs up conversation by just sort of being there. We need that.

Joey Zauzig is also showing up for work. He has the exact right level of delusion for reality TV, and he’s more than willing to spill the piping hot tea miss mama but that doesn’t mean he’s a messy bitch who lives for drama house down boots he’s still an entrepreneur honey etc. Good. Good for gay television. Good for me. Shantay you stay, Joey Zauzig. 

As for everyone else… well, we can free up some slots, let’s say that.

I think Jaymes Vaughan is just the cutest little thing. I would absolutely woof him on Scruff. But “I live in the shadow of my celebrity husband, Jonathan Bennett” is not the most compelling storyline I’ve ever heard, and he doesn’t seem to be having a good time in general. Let’s let him go.

Dorión is relatable in that he’s doing what I believe I would do if I were on Real Friends of WeHo: awkwardly standing around on screen until it’s time for his confessionals, wherein he says he hates his fellow cast members and doesn’t know why he’s even here. I get that. I feel that way in most situations. 

I wouldn’t be opposed to keeping him for the acid in the Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat of it all. But I wouldn’t mind replacing him either. For his own safety, he might want to consider exiting. When he brought a security detail to Joey’s party, I wondered who was trying to assassinate him. More exposure might not be the move. People are hunting him.

Brad is fine. I like him as the mother hen figure. Curtis Hamilton is hot, so it’s impossible to say if he should stay or go. I would say, though, that Real Friends of WeHo is not where you should be working through your “coming out” experience. There are way better places to do that, like The Rainforest Cafe or a seedy AOL chat room. 

We should replace him with a Ru girl. This seems really obvious, and I’m shocked we didn’t get a single drag queen on the show. Todrick Hall does not count. I’m utterly positive MTV reached out to Monét X Change or Willam, but, like, girl. Just try the tier underneath them. You mean to tell me there wasn’t a single Drag Race queen in WeHo willing to bite the bullet? I don’t believe you. 

That’s All I’ve Got

I know most people would say, “there’s no saving this show. Just cancel it.” 

And you know, I understand. I get it. It’s not a very good show. But I’m sad about it because I really do want a reality TV show with gays in it where they are the focus and not accessories to a Real Housewife. I really do want to get excited for a show where gays are being messy with each other in a way that rings true to the way that I am messy with the hated and beloved homosexuals in my life.

But it seems like there’s something difficult about making it happen. I don’t know exactly what it is. At my most optimistic, I want to believe there’s something unruly about us that doesn’t really fit into the mold of these shows. I’m reminded of the Finding Prince Charming fiasco, which was meant to be The Bachelor for gays, but it all went to shit because the contestants just ended up boinking each other. 

Realistically speaking, and I do hate to hand it to ‘em, but there really is something to the notion that gay guys don’t like seeing other gay guys on TV. We can’t help but puff up like a threatened owl when confronted with anything that looks too much like us when we’re not wearing wigs. I’m not sure why it is, and I hope something comes along to break the mold, but it does feel true.

Either way, we will likely need something a little more potent than Real Friends to prove that theory wrong. In the interim, we have Real Housewives to scratch that perennial itch for delusional wackadoodles who dabble in music and occasionally commit federal crimes. That’s representation too, in a way.