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This post contains spoilers for season 2 of Buying Beverly Hills.
It’s two days after bombshell news of her separation from longtime husband Mauricio Umansky has hit the press, and a cowboy-hat-wearing Kyle Richards is biking. She ambles down an Aspen road with a pair of capacious, bright-orange Hermès shopping bags on either arm before scurrying inside to hide the evidence of her spree. Umansky begins preparing dinner. After Richards joins him in the kitchen, she grabs a red apron. “That’s mine,” he tells his wife with strained levity. “I’m getting that in the divorce.”
This intensely watchable scene plays out not on Bravo, where the couple has appeared on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills since 2010, but on Netflix’s Buying Beverly Hills, the second season of which is now streaming. The latter show ostensibly focuses on The Agency, Umansky’s luxury real estate brokerage, which counts three of the couple’s four daughters as employees: Farrah Aldjufrie (Richards’s daughter from her first marriage), Alexia Umansky, and Sophia Umansky. But by virtue of timing and the sheer number of Umanskys in the cast, this season has veered into deeply personal territory—as evidenced in the first clip from season two released this February.
In that sneak peak, Umansky explains the details of his separation to his three eldest daughters as they wipe away tears. He speaks candidly about the split, striking a stark contrast from Richards—who spent much of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season 13, which finished its run on Bravo earlier this month, trying to dodge that very subject. “Why the fuck is this playing out on a Netflix series and not on RHOBH,” asked one fan in response to the clip on X (formerly Twitter). “I know Bravo is PISSED right now.” Added another, “And just like that, #BuyingBeverlyHills just became must-watch TV.”
The schadenfreude factor makes things complicated, says Buying Beverly Hills executive producer Liz Fine. “Listen, we make shows for people to watch. So, when people get excited, we’re very excited,” she tells Vanity Fair. “But it is always still a family at the heart of it. So, when that enthusiasm is coming from a place of something that is going wrong in the family, of course it’s hard.”
Filming for the sophomore season of Buying Beverly Hills commenced in May 2022, around the time that RHOBH season 13 wrapped. It concluded by the end of July—weeks after news of Richards and Umansky’s split first broke. Richards was then summoned back to Housewives to film additional material about the breakup. She shot the season’s reunion the following January. Meanwhile, Buying Beverly Hills pickup filming continued sporadically through December.
Although production keeps close tabs on cast members through means as simple as following their Instagram Stories, Fine says that prior to shooting season two, no one was privy to what was happening behind closed doors between Richards and Umansky. “Oh, there was no awareness of any issues in pre-production,” she says. “We received the news that there was any issue with their relationship the same time that the world received the news.”
Signs that not all was rosy between the couple, who wed in 1996, were littered throughout the latest season of RHOBH. Richard’s scenes with Umansky feel noticeably chilly—they bicker about schedules, he warns her against getting more Tattoos, and at one point, she even shrugs off his attempt to kiss her. But even though Richards has faced conflict head-on throughout her tenure on the show, when pressed about “her marriage” on season 13, she largely ignored the speculation. She explained her rationale during the season’s reunion: she and Umansky intended to break the news of their split both to their daughters and to the public during the six-month period between when RHOBH was filmed and when it aired. But their plans changed when People announced their separation on July 3. RHOBH had, in fact, finished filming season 13—but Netflix’s cameras were there, poised to capture the fallout.
The breakup story was published just as Buying Beverly Hills was preparing a cast trip to Aspen. “Part of that trip, July 5th, was going to be a family day with just the Umansky family, including Kyle. That was always the plan,” explains Fine. “Then on the 6th, the cast was going to come in, and we were going to do the tour of the town, where the Umansky family always loves to go. The news broke on July 3rd, and we were like, ‘What are we going to do?’ So, then we had to recalibrate.”
Fine didn’t comment about speculation that someone involved with production could’ve leaked the story of Richards and Umansky’s split. But she denied that anyone from her show went looking for a theoretical leaker. Fine also insists that the Umansky family never asked production to halt filming, even as news of the separation was breaking. “We would’ve respected if that were a request, but no, they continued to film the cast trip,” she says. “And everyone had as good of a time as they could have with everything that was going on.”
The Umanskys’ decade-plus on TV means that they understand the complexity of excavating their personal lives for public consumption. “I think it’s important to say that there really were not any [boundaries set] by the family,” Fine says. “They said, ‘This is very, very delicate, but you’re here, and it would be very awkward for us to not address this in the moment. And we can film. We’ll sit down, and we’ll do the scene.’ They didn’t put any parameters on it at all. They cooked dinner together, as they do, and they had this very real conversation, and we just didn’t interfere with it.”
Buying Beverly Hills. (L to R) Kyle Richards, Mauricio Umansky in episode 201 of Buying Beverly Hills. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024COURTESY OF NETFLIX
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