Angie Katsanevas Is Bravo’s Most Chaotic, Garlic-Loving Housewife

Who is Angie Katsanevas? It’s a question I keep asking myself every week while watching Season 4 of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and one that is never met with a concrete answer. The more evidence I’m supplied with, the less I truly know.

Is the new full-time cast member—who was formerly a friend-of last season—planted by the Tourism Board of Greece to promote travel to a country with a perennially chaotic economy? Is she a child’s drawing of Nicki Minaj, done from memory, come to life after being scribbled onto a piece of paper at the request of a particularly funky Montessori school teacher? Does she even exist at all, and can anyone besides me and the other Housewives see her?

With each passing week, the answers to these questions seem further and further out of reach. I’ve been left with no choice but to take matters into my own hands and try to ascertain just who Angie Katsanevas (or Angie K., as she is still known on the show, despite the only other Angie being let go, like a balloon floating into the ozone) really is. For this quest, I’ll consider three main points: fashion, behavior, and comedy. These three things are the foundation of a good Housewife, but to be a good Housewife, you don’t necessarily have to be good at these three things. You must do fashion and comedy with your own brazen confidence and behave outrageously when the situation calls for it. With those tentpoles in mind, let’s evaluate Angie K. and determine if she is, indeed, a real human being.

Fashion

This is the easiest category of the three to assess, as Angie is absolutely killing it in the fashion game! No, I’m just kidding. Can you imagine if I was serious? You’d immediately leave and read something else—and we’re in a click-based economy, baby.

Angie stomped (and I mean stomped) into her first scene this season wearing a light pink faux-fur coat, a hot pink Versace logo-patterned shirt with a giant pussy bow, pleather leggings, and a pair of massive, magenta-colored shield sunglasses. It would already take some serious chutzpah to pull off this outfit, and when her castmate Monica Garcia comments on the size of the glasses Angie immediately shows her hand; she makes a joke about needing windshield wipers just to clean them. If you’re going to go big, you’ve got to own it, but Angie caves instantly. When she removes her glasses, she chuckles and says, “All the better to see you with!” Her half-quoting the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t exactly impede my suspicion that she is three children, standing on each other’s shoulders, squeezed into a Versace top.

Let’s run through a few more of Angie’s bold decisions. There’s the red sequined turtleneck in her confessional, which she’s chosen to wear with an equally bold red lip and a high, tight pony. It sort of makes her look like a composite of every stop-motion character from James and the Giant Peach. On the cast trip to Palm Springs, Angie picks out a flowing dress with a plunging neckline in a color that can only be described as “toilet water brown,” which I believe to be incredibly courageous. Later in the trip, the cast decides to do drag-inspired looks, and Angie emerges in a metallic pink two-piece suit and an electric green wig, looking like she’s clad in Betty Spaghetty couture.

For fashion, Angie gets high marks. She does not have style, just the ability to select items of clothing. But for her, that’s enough! I wouldn’t call any of the women in Salt Lake City particularly well-dressed; that high altitude must be affecting the decision-making process every time they hit up Dillard’s.

Behavior

What I genuinely love about Angie already is that she is wholly unpredictable. We’ve already established that we have no idea what this woman is going to show up wearing at any given moment, but we also have no clue what she’s going to do when she arrives. She’s a loose cannon, a ticking time bomb, a lit powder keg—any clichéd metaphor that Sia would use for a song, that’s Angie.

Angie just has an incredibly anarchic energy about her, and frankly, I adore it. She’s the kind of Housewife that Leah McSweeney was trying to be on RHONY, before they had to reboot the entire thing altogether, except Angie understands that you can’t just say you’re erratic, you have to act like it. Our devoted Angie K. did this the second that she invited herself on Meredith Marks’ trip to Palm Springs at Whitney Rose’s behest. And not only did she invite herself, but she also had the gall to show up early alongside Whitney before the host of the trip even arrived. To greet your mortal enemy face to face with a smile is a move that I can only respect.

But her place as Season 4’s most mercurial cast member was really solidified in the second episode. In a scene with her family, Angie is making a little lunch for her husband, Shawn, and her daughter, Elektra. (I am going to assume that Angie named her daughter after Jennifer Garner’s short-lived Marvel character, which also scores her some points.) The camera focuses on Angie, wielding a measuring cup like a military-grade weapon. “I’m really going to put a lot of garlic in this,” she says before dumping an entire metric cup of minced garlic into a food processor.

I gagged. It’s absolutely vile. I know that the Greeks love their garlic, and I’m no stranger to a little allium myself. But that is simply too much garlic! Poor, beautiful Shawn agreed with me, trying to stop her. “Don’t put too much [garlic] in, though,” he says. In response, Angie taps the cup on the rim of the device, freeing any remaining cloves while locked in a death stare with her beloved husband.

On behavior, Angie’s marks are matched with fashion. She’s an absolute hoot, mixing in a dash of whimsy to her fickle nature. We also know that she’s not a vampire, so that’s good.

Comedy

Humor is where Angie really stumbles. Sure, she makes me laugh, but it’s never intentional. I prefer my Housewives to be funny on their own accord while also inadvertently hilarious, and Angie has yet to master the former. Take, for example, when she said that Meredith looks like “a trampoline with eyes.” At face value, that’s a pretty good dig. But look at it for more than one second, and it falls apart. What does a trampoline with eyes even look like, just flat? I think Meredith and her surgeons would agree that they’ve taken great care to make sure her face maintains its curvature. Furthermore, calling someone a “trampoline” is really a compliment disguised as an insult. Oh, my face looks bouncy and supple, and everyone wants to sit on it? God forbid.

Angie’s comedic stylings have really left something to be desired when it comes to her confessionals, as well. In her first confessional of Season 4, Angie mused that her friendship with former cast member Jen Shah—who was indicted and charged with fraud—taught her the difference between state and federal charges. Why anyone would admit to not knowing something as basic as the distinction between levels of criminal charges is beyond me, but Angie doesn’t really know the extremity of anything, it seems.

In Palm Springs, she scribbled down “All Trix, No Trust” onto a T-shirt to mimic the custom “No Trix, All Trust” tees that Meredith had made for the group. As if Angie’s joke weren’t goofy enough, she adds another layer in her confessional. “It was either make the T-shirt or call out a hit on her family,” she says. So your choices were to put Sharpie to fabric or pay to have someone in her family murdered? Got it.

For comedy, Angie’s marks are staggeringly low. So low, in fact, that they cancel out the strides she’s made in fashion and behavior. That leaves us back at square one, which I think Angie prefers. Like I’ve said before, Angie Katsanevas is merely the personification of an idea. She cannot gel with our world because she exists outside of it, like someone in a movie putting their hand inside of a mirror, trying to pierce the veil. Whether or not she will succeed in stepping over fully into the mortal realm is something that only God and Andy Cohen can know, but I’ll be keeping my eyes on her yet.

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