I Desperately Need Eva to Save This Season of ‘Real Housewives of Atlanta’

I love The Real Housewives of Atlanta. If it weren’t for a hometown affiliation for New York City and a longstanding Stockholm Syndrome with LuAnn DeLesseps, Atlanta might rank as my favorite Housewives city. It’s given us so so much, from “Tardy for the Party” to She By Sheree to NeNe Leakes cashing Trump checks (making her one of the rare independent contractors to have been paid by Trump) to providing us with the single best gif to use when you’re wondering who said that:

The issue with RHOA as it rolls out into season 11 is that the current main cast members are starting to feel more than a little stale. I will never say a word about the queen Kandi Burruss, and if she wants to stay as the main focal point and audience surrogate for the show, she can open as many old-lady restaurants and go to as many dinners celebrating her success as a songwriter as she wants to. But we have long since reached the end of the line of what NeNe can provide as a catalyst for conflict. The other women are too wise to her ways by now, and they largely know how to sidestep her. Cynthia Bailey has been touting herself as the grande dame of the modeling world for easily six seasons now, and she’s been re-booting her love life for at least half that time, and not a single minute of it has been all that interesting (save for every single costume party, at which Cynthia consistently turns it out). When we’re begging for more of the Bailey Agency? It’s a dire affair. And Porsha Williams has almost certainly bumped up against the bottom of her bag of tricks by now. The willingness to mix it up despite coming out on the losing end of every single feud she’s ever been in has been admirable, but we’ve truly seen it all before.

This show needs an injection of new talent. And as much as we TRULY stan hard for the husky-voiced social climbing of one Marlo Hampton — the all-time greatest friend-of-the-Housewives (FOH) ever — she is anything but new blood.

And intrigued as I am by fellow newbie Shamari DeVoe jumping in feet-first this season, I am putting all my trust in Eva Marcille, enjoying her first season as a series regular, to whip this season into frothy, dramatic meringue.

She’s already well on her way. Like any good student of the game, Eva showed up last season as a FOH and did exactly the smart thing. She made nice with all the regulars except one, and when she came for Cynthia — who at the time was dating a man who Eva knew was lying about his past/present relationships — she did it in a way where she could always say she had good intentions. In the end, Cynthia looked defensive, while Eva looked ready to play. She saved her more overt shade for fellow FOH Shamea, who made the mistake of coming for Eva (bringing up the longstanding lesbian rumors about her) while leaving herself open for Eva to take the moral upper hand.

This season, Eva has been saddled with a potentially loser storyline: planning her own wedding. It’s a no-win situation, because it keeps all the other women at a distance (the only possible conflicts for Eva are her fiance and the wedding planner) and it takes up a huge chunk of the season. No worries, though, because Eva is still holding on to that ill will towards Shamea, and it’s making the other wives look at her with crossed eyes, like she’s someone to be challenged. Good! She needs to be challenged! That’s how we get the drama. Already, Kandi, Cynthia, Marlo, and NeNe seem to be on the road to calling her out.

Eva is good at this. She won the third season of America’s Next Top Model, one of the most dramatic seasons of that incredibly dramatic show, playing her Eva the Diva routine to the hilt. A season that saw passive-aggressive notes carved into brownies, passive-aggressive t-shirt messages in Portuguese, fights over missing crystals, and a seemingly indestructible friendship — Eva and Ann — busted up by season’s end was ultimately dominated by a short, feisty girl who never saw a fight she didn’t want to jump into. Through it all, Eva kept a superb sense of maintaining her own drama.

“First of all, I didn’t even know you were a bitch” is a line destined for the hall of fame, and Eva knew it. She’s one of the most natural reality TV performers in recent history. Even on a seemingly throwaway show like VH1’s Scared Famous, Eva managed to make sure she was at the center of the drama as much as possible. Watch how she manages to get her face into the middle of this argument between Sky and New York.

She even ends up with the last interview in the scene. She’s so good at this game. Let’s just get her past this wedding so she can really mix it up.

Where to stream The Real Housewives of Atlanta