Gizelle Bryant Has Officially Mastered the Art of Real Housewife-ing

Believe it or not, there is a fine art to being a great Real Housewives cast member.

As Housewives blogger Tamara Tattles often puts it, the one and only goal of a cast member on Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise is to get picked up for the next season of Real Housewives. To accomplish this requires a battery of skills. You must be interesting to watch, but not so much that you distract from the other women. You must start and propel drama with your castmates, but not to the point where it goes too far. You must appear elegant and wealthy, even if you actually aren’t. And you must do all of this while spitting out iconic quotes that will be used in GIFs on Twitter for the rest of time.

In the established cities and shows of the Bravo-verse, these stars are well-known: Bethenny Frankel of New York City, Tamra Judge of Orange County, Kenya Moore of Atlanta, and so on. Some on the newer Housewives franchises have also managed to break through, most notably LeeAnne Locken on Dallas.

But over on the Potomac, which debuts its fourth season on Sunday night, there’s one star who doesn’t get nearly enough credit for having mastered the art of being a Real Housewife in near-record time. That woman is Gizelle Bryant.

The defining quality that makes Bryant the perfect Housewife is that she’s willing to engage in drama, but is not herself drama. She will happily start all kinds of shit, from talking badly about a new Housewife in her very first episode (as she did with Monique Samuels in Season 2) to wearing a T-shirt calling out her friend Karen Huger’s husband’s tax issues. Keep in mind that the latter happened at a “press conference” Huger hosted, in which she confronted the other women about their tweets.

It’s that latter relationship that makes Real Housewives of Potomac the best. Without Bryant and Huger, Potomac might otherwise be dragged down by endless scenes of lesser Housewives on their duller travails. (Sorry Ashley Darby, if I wanted to watch a Housewife try and open a restaurant, I’d watch Kandi Burruss opening OLG in Atlanta Season 9.) But the two core Housewives of this series are the show’s engine, constantly pushing the action forward with further dramatics. It’s kind of a marvel to watch.

What separates the two, though, is that while Huger holds a grudge, Bryant doesn’t let the drama fester. She’ll apologize quickly, even if she’s still talking smack in her confessionals. She’ll even apologize again when her friend is still mad weeks later. She knows she needs to keep on good terms with the other women, else risk them refusing to film with her and possibly endanger her spot on the show. In short, Bryant’s a pro at shit-stirring.

And quotability? Please. She’s given us “If I take a shot, I don’t miss” (Omar Little found shaking!) She’s given us “Go on, chihuahua.” In the trailer for the new season, she follows up the insistence that no one should be mean to the now-pregnant Samuels with an unflinching, “F*ck Monique.” And of course, there are her taglines from the first three seasons, in which she repeatedly insisted she is the word on the street.

My favorite Gizelle Bryant moment of all, though, is when she and Karen Huger’s confrontation over lunch was interrupted by a mime. The moment is absurd enough on its own, but what really makes it for me is how easily Bryant breaks out of the scene she’s in. Huger takes a little more time, annoyed by the mime’s presence. Bryant immediately starts joking about it, insisting that he’s in the conversation and they should acknowledge him.

The way Bryant responds to being called a clown by Huger — to point at the mime and say “No, that’s a clown” — is the kind of comic timing comedians dream of having. It’s what makes her so damn good at this: She can turn on a dime, keep things fresh, and never get too hung up on any given slight or controversy. She is a masterful Housewife, and even if Potomac weren’t worth watching anyway (it very much is), Gizelle Bryant could do the job on her own.

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Kevin O'Keeffe is a writer, host, and RuPaul's Drag Race herstorian living in Los Angeles.