Andy Cohen Made All the Real Housewives Cry

You watch enough episodes of the Real Housewives, and you become familiar with a strange experience: Wait, why am I crying?

The show has a sly way of sneaking up on you. You think you’re there for table-flipping and drink-tossing, but then the cast starts to get real—really real—about their lives, the kind of high-stakes stuff that we know in our day-to-day, and the way they talk about it moves you.

It’s been, incomprehensibly, 20 years since the first episode of The Real Housewives of Orange County aired, kicking off a phenomenon that fundamentally changed reality television, infiltrated how we talk and judge and meme, and birthed a new relationship between fans and TV content that has been both revolutionary and, occasionally, concerning.

These women are my best friends. They are strangers (most of them; through my job, over the years, there are a handful I’ve gotten to know pretty well). But they are strangers who feel like my best friends—and yours, too—which is why we’re so emotionally attached, in ways that are rational and unhinged, to what they’re going through in life.

So as much as we tune in to laugh and scoff and, let’s be honest, shame, we are also there to relate. And through that, we get a lil’ weepy.

I bring all this up because I attended the premiere event for The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip: Roaring 20th in New York City, and, as much fun as it was to mingle with a dizzying number of Real Housewives in attendance, the height of the event was tinged with so much emotion.

Specifically, when Andy Cohen made everyone cry.