Kelly Dodd Has Zero Regrets, Which Is Either Admirable or the Whole Problem

Kelly Dodd walks into Jamie Kennedy’s studio, announces that the shoes she is wearing are not her shoes, and within forty seconds someone is discussing how much money she could make stepping on fruit for the internet. This is not a detour. This is the show.

Dodd is one of those people television was clearly invented to contain, and clearly failed to. She got fired from Real Housewives of Orange County after five seasons, fined sixteen thousand dollars by Bravo for wearing a ‘Drunk Wives Matter’ hat during the height of the BLM summer, and cancelled so thoroughly that she considers it a personality trait now. She also, she admits midway through this episode, eventually got the COVID vaccine on a billionaire’s mega-yacht, which causes Kennedy to react as if she has confessed to a crime.

I caved because I was traveling. I figured it was like the flu shot. I figured I didn’t know it was going to be a pathway of myocarditis, Bell’s palsy.

Kennedy, to his credit, does not let her off the hook. ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ he says. ‘I thought you were pure.’ The whole exchange is genuinely funny and also kind of revealing: Dodd’s actual ideology is less a coherent philosophy than a set of strong reactions to things that have personally happened to her. She describes herself as a libertarian, socially liberal and fiscally conservative, and she means it when she says it. She also keeps calling a doctor who made a viral video about her ‘the Indian doctor’ despite Kennedy telling her, with increasing exasperation, to just say ‘the doctor.‘

Reactionary Is the Word She Uses for Herself

The throughline of Dodd’s grievances is a genuine sense that she gets baited into saying something, blows up in exactly the way her antagonists hoped, and then becomes the story. She knows this. She says it out loud. She keeps doing it anyway. Kennedy watches her light up about the doctor who made the video, calls her highly intelligent, tells Dodd she got served, and Dodd responds with a string of insults that would absolutely be turned into a supercut by morning. The self-awareness is real. The self-control is not.

I’m so tired of trying to convince people. And by the way, she’s racist. She went and she called a lady an audacious Caucasian. I think that’s racist.

There is a more genuinely affecting thread underneath all the noise. Her daughter is studying in Paris, has politically diverged from her mother, and is currently not speaking to her. Dodd traces it to the socialism of the French university system and to her own strict parenting. ‘I hate laziness,’ she says, and you believe her completely. Kennedy talks about parents he knows who have lost relationships with their kids over ideology. It is the one moment in ninety minutes where Dodd sounds less like a woman scoring points and more like a mother who is genuinely confused about where things went wrong.

Andy Cohen, Crystal Kung Minkoff, and the Bravo Cold War

The Bravo section of this conversation is where Dodd is most comfortable and most entertaining. She claims to be the first person to say the c-word on national reality television, says she has no idea why Heather Dubrow is still on an Orange County show when she lives in Beverly Hills, and describes her firing as the direct result of Andy Cohen’s political opinions. She is probably not wrong that politics played a role. She is definitely not going to stop saying things that make it easy for people to fire her.

I feel like I am getting politically discriminated against and then they’re the ones who call those that group calls you the racist.

Crystal Kung Minkoff, a fellow member of the extended social circle around Jeff Lewis, apparently responded to the doctor situation by publicly taking the doctor’s side, which Dodd experienced as a betrayal. Jeff Lewis asked Crystal to reach out. Crystal’s apology was, by Dodd’s account, half-assed. Dodd wrote back that people can be friends across political lines. Then two minutes later she says she now understands why someone went after Crystal at a party. Kennedy throws up his hands. It is hard to argue with him.

What makes this episode work, weirdly, is Kennedy. He is genuinely fond of her, he pushes back without lecturing, and he keeps trying to coach her toward a version of herself that would be harder to dismiss. She ignores almost all of it. The woman who says she has zero regrets about anything is also clearly someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about exactly what went wrong and who is to blame. Those two things are in tension for the full ninety minutes. She never resolves it. She just keeps going.