Warning! The following contains spoilers for the Season 12 premiere of The Real Housewives Of New York. Read at your own risk!
Not wanting to avoid the elephant in the room, Season 12 of The Real Housewives Of New York jumped right out the gate addressing the big news of the offseason. Longtime castmember Bethenny Frankel quit the series days before filming, and the show wasted little time finding a new woman to replace her. Apparently, Bravo did a pretty good job with the casting, because fans were all over Leah McSweeney in the premiere and seemingly forgot about Bethenny by the time the night was over.
Leah McSweeney is New York born and raised, and her clothing line Married To The Mob has made her into a successful entrepreneur. It didn't take long for McSweeney to throw herself into the drama with all the other women, and after her first episode, The Real Housewives of New York fandom thought she held her own pretty damn well.
Typically, newcomers don't try to make waves and inject themselves into the drama right away. That wasn't the case with Leah McSweeney, who didn't let the fact that she was new to The Real Housewives Of New York get in the way of speaking out in support of Tinsley Mortimer when she and Dorinda Medley were in a spat. Granted, it wasn't much more than calling Dorinda "crazy" and trying to take some heat off Tinsley, but it's more than others tried to do!
This is the type of fire The Real Housewives Of New York fans like to see, and while the tweets at the top of the episode featured a lot of Bethenny Frankel memorializing, everyone had all but forgotten her towards the end of the Season 12 premiere and were all abuzz about Leah McSweeney.
Trying to start a beef with Dorinda Medley was only one of the things that Leah McSweeney did that The Real Housewives Of New York fans were in love with. There were also plenty of people that loved her talk with Luann De Lesseps, in which the two of them bonded over the fact they were arrested for assaulting a police officer. Many are familiar with Luann's story, and learned McSweeney got in a bout at age 20 that ultimately cost her her teeth.
McSweeney has no regrets about her past, however, and used the money she got from the lawsuit against the NYPD to launch her successful business. Leah's an open book, and it sounds like that's going to make up for whatever void was left when Bethenny Frankel up and left.
Granted Leah McSweeney is only one episode into Season 12, and has a long way to go before the season is up. That's plenty of time for The Real Housewives Of New York fandom to change their opinion, or see if she's up to the task of keeping the same energy she had in the premiere over the course of a season.
If she can pull off the latter, there's already a community who thinks she could become an iconic castmember of the entire Real Housewives franchise. She's got the style, grace, and attitude to make it happen, and people more than willing to put a crown on her before she actually proves she can walk the walk.
What more does Leah McSweeney need? My guess is for the rest of Season 12 of The Real Housewives Of New York to give her just as strong of an edit as she got in her opening episode. The look ahead trailer showed that could be the case, though Leah's wild side she teased in the premiere does look to come out at some point in the season.
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