In case you’ve missed this wonderful show, VH1’s Basketball Wives (Sundays, 10 pm EST) is a delicious Real Housewives-type adventure of the bloodthirsty girlfriends, wives, and ex-wives of famous basketball stars. Shaunie O’Neal, Shaq’s estranged wife, is the fabulous method behind this madness. She produces and offers dead-on narration, commentary, and advice during each show. She looks on knowingly as the other women struggle with the special burdens of being basketball wives.
They bring much of the troubles to each other with acts of misplaced anger. They are neck-rolling, judgmental, spoiled grade-A biatches who snatch at each others’ jugular when they meet and secretly drain the life blood of their peers behind their back. One thing you’ll learn from this show, in case you didn’t know before, is that basketball players cheat. Always. That’s the reason these girls are so high-octane grumpy and bitter: their knights in shining armor who buy them bling and houses have also been humping on every “model” who gives them VIP bottle service. It’s a kind of disjointed reality, where women seem to be lured into promises of love, luxury and faithfulness, but much almost inevitably face the fact that their husbands/boyfriends are not just sitting in their hotel rooms when they travel for games.
The one everyone agrees to hate, Royce Reed is a former professional basketball dancer who also has exotic dancing experience and started her own burlesque company, Fantashique. To the other women she is the embodiment of everything that snatches away their fairytale dreams: a temptress with unbridled sexuality who lures their men into the fantasy world of pleasure and away from the more subdued joys of monogamous domestic bliss.
Royce spreads the love by spreading her legs and “twerking” her lady parts on the dance floor while the other women clutch their pearls in disgust. What’s great about Royce is that she never fails. If there’s a party going on, she will be demonstrating her skills, Fantashique-style.
Here she is twerking at a Ludacris party in the first episode:
What do you think, is Royce Reed really the enemy? Or is she just a business woman making money off of her particular talent?
