“Don’t Be All, Like, Uncool”: How ‘The White Lotus’ Echoes ‘The Real Housewives of New York’

The trio of blonde friends vacationing at The White Lotus this season may feel a tad familiar to Bravo fans. Jaclyn, Laurie, and Kate—played by Michelle Monaghan, Carrie Coon, and Leslie Bibb, respectively—are longtime pals on a good old-fashioned girls trip to Thailand. Their dynamic is tricky from the start: At every opportunity, two of the women will split off to gossip about the third. Things take an even more dramatic turn in the show’s most recent episode, when Jaclyn—a married television actress who has spent the trip trying to convince Laurie, a recent divorcée, to have a fling with handsome, flirty hotel worker Valentin (Arnas Fedaravicius)—winds up hooking up with Valentin herself.

If a group of middle-aged women partying at a resort and causing chaos by bringing men back to their hotel rooms feels a bit like déjà vu, that’s because this very same plot is a hallmark of another TV series: The Real Housewives of New York City. And since White Lotus creator Mike White is an avowed fan of the Housewives franchise—“You watch stuff like The Real Housewives and you start to think, ‘We’re all so vacuous! Is there any nobility to any of these people?’” he told The New York Times in 2011—looking back at the most notorious Housewives field trips may help us predict where Jaclyn, Laurie, and Kate’s storyline is going.

Girls’ trips in exotic locales happen on every iteration of The Real Housewives; we’ve seen casts travel everywhere from Amsterdam to Cartagena. But Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie’s Thailand trip bears the closest resemblance to two specific trips undertaken on the original Real Housewives of New York City, which ran from 2008 to 2022 before being rebooted with a brand new cast. (The less said about the new RHONY, the better).

The first came during the fifth season, when the show’s main cast—then comprised of Heather Thomson, Carole Radziwill, Sonja Morgan, Ramona Singer, Aviva Drescher, and ex-countess Luann de Lesseps—takes a girls trip to St. Barts. (In typical Aviva fashion, she shows up late, with her husband in tow.) In the 13th episode of that season, “Pirate Booty Call,” the ladies hit the hottest club in St. Barts: Le Ti. At the club, much fuss is made over handsome Tomas Ribiero, a maitre d’ and “artistic director” who naturally is dressed up like a pirate.

“It’s Johnny Depp,” says de Lesseps. (Being compared to Depp was considered a compliment at that time.) “You might as well surround yourself with fabulous looking guys, why not?” But in a confessional interview, Morgan is quick to point out that she was the one who saw Tomas first, implying a bit of competition for the pirate’s attention. Soon enough, the RHONY ladies, led by Luann, are dancing on tables in pirate outfits provided by the Frenchmen. “I’m not just any pirate woman,” Luann says to Tomas, flirtingly.

The scene bears a striking resemblance to a scene that occurs in episode five of The White Lotus season three. Jaclyn, Laurie, and Kate go out to a full moon party with Valentin and his Russian friends, drinking and clubbing like there’s no tomorrow. Jaclyn—still reeling from being made to feel like an old lady earlier in the day—dances with abandon, flirting with the younger men—specifically Valentin, who bears an uncanny resemblance not only to Johnny Depp but also to Tomas the pirate. (They even have the same goatee!)

The Jaclyn and Luann parallels don’t end there. The day after the party, the RHONY ladies reveal that Luann stayed out later than the rest of the group. Luann claims that she eventually came back to the house with a group of Italian friends she ran into on the island. The ladies, though, have other ideas. “I was awoken in the middle of the night by two male voices. One was Luann’s, and one was the voice of a young French boy,” says Radziwill. While Luann claims that nothing happened with the pirate, the rest of the ladies are extremely suspicious she may have had “a pirate booty call” à la Jaclyn and Valentin.

Luann has plenty of reason to deny what may or may not have gone down with the pirate. Just like Jaclyn, at the time, Luann had a younger lover at home in New York—the exceedingly French Jacques. (She clearly has a type!) While Luann continues peddling her “Italian friends” story to the group, she calls a friend and coworker of Tomas’s and says the following in fluent French: “He cannot say he was here last night with me…. I never change.” (She must have forgotten about subtitles). The drama plays out for the rest of the season on RHONY. To this day, Luann maintains that she did not hook up with Tomas the pirate in St. Barts. “I didn’t have sex with the pirate,” she told People in 2023. “I’m telling you, if I did the pirate, I would wear it like a badge of honor!”

But there’s no grey area as to whether Jaclyn hooked up with Valentin on The White Lotus. As of now, the biggest question is whether or not Jaclyn and Valentin will get caught. In Mike White’s bizarro RHONY girls trip, the ersatz Luann gets her wish fulfillment—but it’s unclear at what cost.

Just two seasons after the alleged booty call, RHONY stars de Lesseps, Radziwill, Morgan, Singer, Thompson, Bethenny Frankel, Kristen Taekman, and Dorinda Medley took a trip to Turks and Caicos where a similar type of chaos ensues. In episode 15 of season seven, the now single Luann is in the hot seat after she and Ramona stay out later than the rest of the group and bring two men back to their villa. Somehow, one of the men winds up sleeping in Bethenny’s vacant bed (she left the trip early) and is discovered the next morning, butt naked, by a hysterical Heather. Heather demands answers as to why there is a naked man in the house. In response, Luann delivers one of the more iconic Housewives lines of all time: “Don’t be all, like, uncool.”