When Reality-TV Empires Collide: Kyle and Mauricio Are Having a Separation-Off

“Because everything that happened with this — I’m going to call it a ‘scandal,’” explains Kyle Richards, star of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, at the dinner table of her Aspen vacation home, where her husband and four daughters are gathered. “If something goes on in our lives like this, they’re going to obviously shoot that even though we’re wrapped.”

What is the scandal? In July 2023, when this scene was filmed, a bombshell report claimed that Richards and her husband, real estate entrepreneur Mauricio Umansky, were separating after 27 years together. “It felt different this time,” said their daughter Sophia, explaining that her phone was “blowing up” with messages. And it was — because this time, the reports were not entirely untrue. The couple did end up separating.

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But the bigger scandal here, in the eyes of many fans, is that this pivotal scene didn’t air on RHOBH — the show that made both Richards and Umansky reality TV household names. No, these moments were captured by Netflix for the brand new season of Buying Beverly Hills — a real estate show starring Umansky and his employees at The Agency, the business that he founded in 2011, where the couple’s three eldest children now work.

Sure, fans had already heard bits and pieces about the dissolution of their relationship on RHOBH from Richards, but the incredible amount of access and details given on Buying Beverly Hills felt strangely uneven compared to the Bravo giant.

Watching two sides of a marital separation unfold on different reality shows, where each parent is the star, has led to a bizarre collision between their respective TV platforms. On RHOBH, Richards has been frustratingly tight-lipped about the reasons for the separation. But on Umansky’s show, it seems like he has given fans more candor — both in terms of the number of scenes filmed, and the personal details discussed within them. This has drawn the ire of some Bravo fans, who have higher expectations of Richards and RHOBH after investing in the show for thirteen seasons. I wonder, is their anger justified?

I’ve watched RHOBH since its first season, where Richards faced off with Camille Grammar (ex-wife of Kelsey) and, in the back of a limousine, branded her sister Kim Richards “sick and an alcoholic!” I’ve seen her deal with tabloid rumors that her husband was being unfaithful and being kicked out of Lisa Vanderpump’s house, wearing an unsightly felt hat, as Ken Dodd screamed, “GOODBYE KYLE!” More recently, we’ve seen the breakdown (and reconciliation) of her relationship with her eldest sister, Kathy Hilton (mother of Paris Hilton), while Richards has explored a new lifestyle based on health and sobriety.

As more clips from Buying Beverly Hills have appeared online, fans have noticed a pattern: Netflix’s show is giving them the level of detail (and dirt) they felt entitled to from the latest season of RHOBH, which, despite becoming the highest-rated season of a Housewives show in a decade, left them wanting more. It’s not just about the separation, either. On the Netflix show, Umansky has shared his side of the story about the famously strained familial relations between Kathy and her husband, Rick Hilton, who had previously employed him at the real estate firm Hilton & Hyland. On RHOBH, the precise reasons for the feud were kept fairly vague for years, but on season two of Buying Beverly Hills, Umansky put it all out there. He claimed that Hilton turned down his request to be made partner at the firm despite bringing in over $100 million in business — a rejection which prompted him to start his own company. (His public retelling of events provoked a clapback from Paris Hilton on Instagram.)

It seems like there is a gulf in transparency between the footage captured by Netflix and Bravo. On RHOBH, Richards has been deliberately light on details and has alluded to “things that happened” that made her “lose her trust” in her husband. She denied that he had been unfaithful and, like Umansky, blamed their busy work schedules. Richards has also avoided giving a clear and conclusive answer on her rumored romance with country singer Morgan Wade. (She says they’re friends right now but won’t rule out a romance because she doesn’t know what the future holds. Hmm.)

It was inevitable that the split would feature as a storyline on Buying Beverly Hills — after all, he and his daughters are the focus, so it would be strange not to mention it. But I was not anticipating to see Richards actually appearing in so many scenes on her now-estranged husband’s Netflix show. (She did not appear once in Season One.) However, episode nine saw a detailed conversation between Umansky and Richards about their separation in the kitchen, followed by the family dinner scene where Richards personally apologized for the tabloid attention and for keeping their marital issues from the children. (A separate scene was filmed for RHOBH when the family returned to their Encino home, but it felt more creaky by comparison.)

All of this is a fascinating insight into how the reality TV sausage is made — and a rare case study in what can happen when two shows capture the same story. It makes you wonder why Richards kept so many details private, whereas Umansky has seemed more keen to share his side of things. Did Umansky worry that RHOBH would make him out to be the bad guy? Does Richards have something to hide, or is she merely protecting her family?

Whatever the truth here, the end result is the trustworthiness of Bravo and Richards, personally, as narrators of this story being called into question. Many fans are disappointed at having to watch a whole other show (a far less entertaining one, let’s be honest) to get the inside scoop that they were expecting from RHOBH. This taps into that age-old ethical question of how much privacy reality stars deserve or the level of access we should have from them in difficult moments. When people have shared their lives with us (and profited handsomely from it) for so many years, we feel entitled to the gory details of a story like this — even if we know that’s an ethically questionable standpoint.

Something similar happened last year to Real Housewives of Potomac star Robyn Dixon. In January 2023, she revealed that her husband, Juan Dixon, had communicated “inappropriately” with a woman online several months prior. Dixon had not shared this information on Season Seven of RHOP, which had just wrapped filming. In fact, the season ended with Dixon and her husband joyfully tying the knot. Dixon chose to reveal these details not on the show but in an episode of her podcast, which was kept behind a Patreon paywall. Fans and Dixon’s co-stars fumed that she had hidden her “real” life from the show only to monetize the story elsewhere. She was labeled a “fraud,” and #FireRobyn started trending at the time.

With reality stars now able to profit from sharing their lives on so many different platforms, clashes like this are inevitable. For long-time reality stars like Richards, there is an expectation of more transparency. But reality stars often become more guarded the longer they’ve been on TV — perhaps because they have more to lose, feel like they’ve shared enough already, or now have the agency to put clearer boundaries in place than when they first started out. This can make fans feel cheated — like they’re reneging on their side of the deal.

One thing that is clear from watching both shows is that, toward the end, Richards and Umansky had communication issues in their marriage. This might explain why it feels like there is a disconnect between the level of sharing on each show. (And why, if I was a Bravo producer, I’d be pissed and envious about some of Netflix’s footage.) Rather than teasing fans or leaving them wanting more, the second season of Buying Beverly Hills opens with a tearful heart-to-heart between Umansky, Farrah, Sophia, and Alexia, where he explains to them that Richards has asked for a separation. Watching this, it was impossible not to think back to the very first season of RHOBH, way back in 2010, when vape-puffing medium Allison Dubois predicted that the couple would have nothing in common once their kids got older. “He will never emotionally fulfill you!” she told Richards with a manic glint in her eye.

After thirteen years as a Real Housewife, it looks like Richards might be tired of sharing her life on TV. When she mentioned she was resuming filming for RHOBH at the dinner in Aspen, the rest of her family seemed less than pleased. And, in a promo interview for Buying Beverly Hills, Richards’s eldest daughter Farah awkwardly said, “The other show is the issue,” making a clear differentiation between Buying Beverly Hills and the “drama” of Bravo. (Even if, sorry, Farrah, you wouldn’t have your own show without RHOBH.)

The difficulty with reality TV stardom is that the line between a request for privacy and being perceived as “having your cake and eating it too” is very thin and subjective. Once you’ve started a monetized sharing of your life, it’s pretty difficult to get the proverbial toothpaste back in the tube. The fans want more. In a clash of two reality TV empires, we’ve seen that if Richards doesn’t use her TV platform to tell her side of the story, it will only end up being told elsewhere — and fans might end up siding with whoever is most willing to “go there” on camera. It must be difficult when personal heartache becomes a TV storyline, but that is the business Richards is in. I can’t blame RHOBH fans — and I suspect her bosses at Bravo, too — for feeling aggrieved.

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