NEW YORK — Fans of “Real Housewives of New York” continue to blame Eboni K. Williams for the decline in ratings — but Eboni says it’s not up to the newbies to carry the show.
“From my experience in television, any expectation to carry ratings around a program will go to the veteran talent. So I think it’s nonsense to correlate the ratings performance of a 13-year series to a freshman talent,” Eboni told the Insider. “I just don’t buy it.”
Eboni also says that people just aren’t watching television the way that they used to.
“People are not watching appointment television the way they used to two or even three years ago. That’s the reality,” she shared. “The other reality is RHONY’s ratings were disproportionately up last season because the series premiered in April of 2020, which was literally the inauguration, like the kickoff of the lockdown of a national and global lockdown. People literally had nowhere else to go.”
Viewers are reportedly turned off by Eboni’s talks about race. They claim the attorney is too “preachy” and that the show has become too “woke.”
Eboni admits that she may be “preachy,” but it is a label she is comfortable with. She says the cast isn’t so put off when it comes to white history.
“Sonja Morgan took everybody to Philadelphia to go to the Morgan library and hear the history of John P. Morgan [and the] family legacy, which is great, that’s considered interesting,” Eboni stated. “So it’s only when … it’s accompanied by this Black American education, now the event becomes boring. [That] tells me what you’re bored by is the learning and education of Black American life.”
Which is a valid point.
While the overall perception might be that the white franchises are classier than those led by a Black-majority cast, “RHONY” is probably the most ratchet of all of the Housewives shows. The ladies are used to getting drunk, (at times) having casual sex (usually with Harry) and yelling at each other on yachts.
And that’s the behavior their fans tune in for.
