This transcript is automatically generated and may contain errors. 

Scott Black: How do we watch The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City? Welcome to the Virtual Jewel Box podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center.

I am Scott Black, director of the Tanner Humanities Center, and today I am joined by Robert Carson, our associate director at the Tanner Humanities Center, and by Marcie Young Cancio, who is Clinical Associate Professor of Communication here at the University of Utah. The Tanner Humanities Center sponsors a broad range of humanities programs, and we support research across the humanities.

The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is not the kind of thing we usually do. However, we’re committed to humanities in the broadest possible sense, from highbrow culture to pop culture. Welcome, Marcie.

Marcie Young Cancio: Thanks for having me, Scott.

Scott Black: Welcome, Robert. Hello. So why are we doing this?

Robert Carson: Well, earlier this fall, when we were talking about this year’s programming, I mentioned to Scott as a joke, “Hey, we should do a big event on The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.”

Our director, Scott Black, got a little twinkle in his eye, saying that we should do this. This is actually a great idea, and so now we’re doing it.

Marcie Young Cancio: And then Scott came and presented to our department meeting in August that this program would be happening, and I literally left the meeting and chased him down to ask how I could be involved.

I think this is great conversation. These are the things that you want to talk to people about at parties. These are the things that engage people. If you are a fan of the Housewives and I say, “I have an announcement,” you know exactly what I’m talking about. If I say, “Receipts, proof, timeline,” you can visualize that scene. And when we’re all talking about something that’s happening on TV, that’s great programming for a symposium like this.

Scott Black: And the humanities are what we’re talking about, whatever we’re talking about. Whatever helps us build community, whatever’s happening in our communities, is the purview of the humanities. And there’s nothing out there in our culture that reflects our community in Salt Lake City more directly or more influentially than The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.

So I feel like it’s our job at the Tanner Humanities Center to talk about, or to provide people an opportunity to talk about, something that matters to our community. That’s one of the ways our community is understood, thought about, in the rest of the country. This is something that helps us build community among ourselves as fans and helps the rest of the country, for better or worse, understand who we are in Salt Lake City and Utah.

Marcie Young Cancio: From a pop-cultural lens, I think that’s absolutely spot on, and I think all of those other components of our community, many of them are reflected in the show.

They tackle marriage, they tackle divorce, they tackle parenting, faith, leaving a faith, challenges within a faith, running businesses as women, a sense of self, sense of community, and place. I mean, the show really tackles all of the things that are kind of national touchpoints that people talk about regularly, but that are also hyper-local and hyper-specific to Utah as a state that’s really unlike any other state in the union.

Robert Carson: And it’s not just topics that are presented in the show. I think the show itself is also a kind of high art. I think it was Oscar Wilde who once said, “Style is being yourself, but on purpose.” The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City are people being themselves on purpose.

This is one of the most stylized ways that people approach living, approach presenting themselves. There is art and artifice and rhetoric and presentation of self happening all over the show. So it’s not just a kind of sociological sort of sample of things that are going on. These are actually quite hyper-creative and articulate people sort of living their lives in public, which is prime territory for the humanities to think about not only what people say and do, but how they say and do it, and how they’re aware of how they’re saying it and doing it all the time.

Marcie Young Cancio: Right. And in understanding that this, even though it’s reality TV, that’s a performance.

They know what lines, what quotes, what outfits, how to get attention, and they understand this community, Salt Lake, our demographics, what lands in a way that will get a reaction. And turns out the country thinks it’s fascinating too. I think the show really taps into things that people from Utah can watch and, if you know, you know. They get the nuance, and it makes watching the show a richer, more dynamic experience. But if you are from Connecticut, you’ve never been to Utah, you don’t know anything about it, it still presents the show and the topics, the messaging, the entertainment, in a way that’s really, really compelling, even if you don’t know anything about Utah and our history and our culture. And that’s a real magical formula.

Robert Carson: I moved here a year and a half ago to start my work here at the Tanner Center, and one of the first things I did to sort of get up to speed on, okay, what is Salt Lake City all about, was to start from the beginning, sort of watch all the seasons of the Real Housewives in one intense few weeks of viewing.

And I learned a hell of a lot about the city and about what people think about from the show. It was genuinely educational. I like to think of it as a funhouse mirror, right? You could never say it’s an accurate representation, right? There’s no one-to-one correlation between the show and actual life. It’s a sort of distorted, playful, tinted funhouse mirror where certain things come into really sharp view.

Marcie Young Cancio: Were there moments in the show that you now get that you didn’t get prior to living in Utah?

Robert Carson: I would say entrepreneurship as a personal identity is really important in the show, and it’s important here in ways that I would not have guessed.

I only had very casual knowledge of the Real Housewives franchise before all of this, so this is my first real deep dive into the whole series, and I’m glad it’s the one that I’ve spent the most time with. One of the things that I find most fascinating about the show is the role of entrepreneurship, of commerce, of money, reputations about money, people’s public status as commercially successful people.

It’s a group of people who think about commercial success as direct expressions of themselves, that they have something at stake in their lives in the way that they and their businesses are represented, which I would never have expected going into this. I would never have expected that that would be a dimension of the show, but it’s actually really one of the things I find most fascinating about it.

Marcie Young Cancio: Right. I mean, these women are all businesswomen in some capacity, and watching that entrepreneurship kind of play out on screen is, I think, an unexpected moment of what most people would think of when they think of Salt Lake City and they think of Utah.

Scott Black: It’s interesting because they all do have businesses. They’re actually selling stuff, but they’re also in the new business of selling themselves, selling their celebrity. They are influencers as well as businesswomen. So you get sort of the older form of business and the new online mode of commerce.

Marcie Young Cancio: It brings us to kind of the audience, right? Like, who’s watching this as well. We think of reality TV often as this really lowbrow kind of dumb form of entertainment, but Bravo has actually pulled data that shows 70% of their audience is female, they have a median household income of at least $90,000, and then nearly 40% are college graduates.

So this all kind of skews away from that argument of, like, this is the dumbest kind of lowest level of TV. You have highly educated, high-earning individuals who are watching this show with intention and then signing up to participate in and come to a symposium to be able to make it academic. It’s like the perfect blend. It’s fun, but you’re learning, and those demographics, I think, really reinforce that this isn’t just some throwaway programming, even though it’s really easy to dismiss that.

Robert Carson: I would say it’s full-spectrum entertainment. It sort of entertains and commands interest on every level: at the level of spectacle, at the level of conflict, at the level of thinking about character.

I mean, one of the things that I figured out watching this was that the premise, or the way that the show sort of presents itself, is that anything can happen. But in fact there’s actually a very limited range of things that can happen in different permutations and different combinations over the series of the show. And sort of what you enjoy is watching every possible permutation of conflict, loyalty, alliance, gossip, betrayal, sort of unfold over this.

So you sit down, you’ve had a long day, you come home, you decide to catch up with The Real Housewives, right? You’re signing up for a form of entertainment in which you sort of know everything that can happen, and part of the pleasure is just watching it unfold. You can sort of predict one argument, one conflict. You can sort of predict what their responses are going to be, the things they’re going to accuse each other of, and you sort of watch that unfold in time.

And there’s something, there’s a kind of high theater to it. People go see films or people go see plays where they know the plot already. They know exactly what’s going to happen, but you go because you want to see it happen again. And I think part of every season, every episode, it’s like, I want to see these conflicts happen again.

Marcie Young Cancio: Absolutely. I think that those social complexities are what’s really, really interesting as they unfold on the screen.

You have alliances, you have strategy, you have legal issues, you have economic maneuvering, and these are things that appeal to all of us because we’re navigating our own lives with some of these things, right? And so when you watch these women get into an argument or a fight about something they’ve argued about before, you can’t help but jump in and be like, “Oh my gosh, I thought we were done with that already,” or, “Really? Bronwyn’s bringing up the spill-the-tea party? Heather did that last season. Do we not remember how it was such a cluster and went so off the rails?”

We’re able to watch this from kind of a bird’s-eye view where we’re not part of the conversation, but we have a lot of opinions about how it should be handled differently. Or we agree, yes, I like this tactic or this approach, or what is she doing? Like, yes, why is she going in and bringing up this thing that we know is going to implode?

And of course the answer is because it makes good TV. But you suspend your disbelief because that’s part of the entertainment, right? We do this when we watch movies or plays or TV shows that are scripted. Why are they going in that room? Don’t go up the stairs. Everyone knows don’t go up the stairs, right? But we’re doing that when we’re watching real people. We’re watching reality, quote-unquote, TV.

But I think it allows us to engage in all of those complexities again, those alliances, the strategy, the legal arguments, how people are running their business, and having opinions about how someone engages with their husband over an argument. It invites us in to have a conversation about things that we’re not involved in, but we feel very personally.

And I think being able to jump into those conversations and feel like we know these people who, there’s a chance we can see them if we go to dinner at Valter’s or we go and grab a drink at Franklin Avenue. They’ve filmed in these locations. Maybe we could see them there, you know, or if we go to Beauty Lab and Laser, or if we pop into Katie Waltman to buy a pair of earrings, we could see these folks.

And I think that brings a dynamic to it because we already feel like we’re engaging with them, because we watch with friends or we watch at home and we already feel like we’re part of the conversations. And that’s not something scripted TV does usually. This is something that is unique to reality TV. And then when you bring it hyper-local to your community, like here in Salt Lake City, it changes that dynamic even more. And it creates a real cultural touchpoint in a different way than other programming can.

Robert Carson: Judgment and being judgy is in fact the correct way to watch this show.

It is a show that invites you to make kind of constant evaluations of what people are doing. They all constantly judge each other, right? And so the kind of tight frame of the show, how it’s all kind of bounded, actually becomes this really rich kind of context to think about, well, what does it mean to pass judgment on other people? What does it mean to sort of criticize the way someone behaves? What does it mean to demand an apology from someone for something? And then what counts as a real apology?

That’s what I find one of the most fascinating recurring things in the show, right, is that people demand apologies, but the apologies that they’re often given are sort of entirely performative, as though just saying the words “I’m sorry, I apologize” constitutes an apology, and as though the slate can be wiped clean and people can start over. I find that one of the most riveting aspects of the show. The repetition of apology and re-offense is, I think, I can’t get enough of it. I love watching it over and over.

Marcie Young Cancio: And I think this is exactly why Scott thought your joke was a great idea to actually do a symposium, because one of our presenters is actually presenting a session on “I’m disengaging,” and it’s a therapist who’s talking about that very dynamic.

So what we’re seeing unfold on the show, the things that we think are wild, like apology style, communication style, there’s now an academic framework that we’re bringing to it in this symposium by breaking down those conversations. And then when you go back to the audience demographics, educated, these are folks who are already thinking those things. So this symposium is providing a framework for how they’re already watching the show, whether they’re realizing it or not, that that’s how they’re watching it. But it’s actually naming those more intellectual concepts and giving kind of permission to say, okay, let’s get smart about this thing that we watch, that we talk about in these ways.

But we’re kind of on the outskirts of it, and I think that’s what’s really cool about the symposium, is we’re already doing it. We’re now just giving it a framework to formalize it, which is really cool.

Robert Carson: I mean, since we’ve started planning this, the minute we go around campus and say, “Oh, we’re doing this event about The Real Housewives,” there are two responses people get. Scott, what are the two responses that people give to this?

Scott Black: By far, the most popular response is, “No way, I’m there.”

I mean, seriously, I’ve been really surprised by how many people are genuinely excited. There are some raised eyebrows, of course, generally some older colleagues who still have a very strong distinction between high culture and pop culture. They don’t understand why this would count as a University of Utah or a Tanner Humanities Center event. But most often the excitement that people express when I talk about this is genuine because, as you’re saying, Marcie, people do watch this. Our colleagues watch this. Our colleagues enjoy it.

There’s one thing I want to say also. I do think thinking about things we enjoy is part of the humanities, meaning and pleasure are not separate in our field. And helping us understand what we enjoy better is a way to increase the pleasure as well as increase the understanding about that. So what you’re talking about, a permission structure to actually help us more fully understand, is also a way to help us more fully enjoy what we already enjoy.

Robert Carson: People use the word camp a lot in reference to this. And if you haven’t read it, I think anyone listening to this, you owe it to yourself to look up Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” to figure out what the term actually means.

I’m not going to go into it now, but I think the central tension in camp is sincere enjoyment. You have a genuine kind of affective response to something, and at the same time you see yourself watching the thing that you’re watching and you understand the kind of framework of excess or ridiculousness or extremity that sort of underwrites the whole thing. And the point about camp is that it’s both things happening at the same time. It is genuine pleasure, it is genuine emotional investment, and at the same time a hyper-alert awareness of what you’re doing and the limits of it and just how extreme it is.

Marcie Young Cancio: Honestly, that’s a perfect way to frame this. And I think, Scott, going back to your point of folks responding and kind of having a difficult time drawing that distinction between high culture and pop culture, I have been making this point quite a bit.

Shakespeare was pop culture in his time. The Globe was drawing groundlings and the nobility into the same space for the melodramas, the betrayal, the identity, performance, the gossip. It was all there. So to say, in some ways, The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, in this form of pop culture, is today’s Shakespeare is not totally wrong.

In fact, the celebrity audience around the Real Housewives is pretty incredible. Julia Roberts, Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence, these are all people who do interviews talking about how much they love The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City in particular. John Oliver, the British comedian, is obsessed. He has been on Stephen Colbert twice talking about his love of the programming.

Robert Carson: He says it’s the best television.

Marcie Young Cancio: He says it’s the best television. Just two weeks ago on his Last Week Tonight show, he was talking about it again at the end, saying, “Watch this.” And he said, “It is today’s Shakespeare.”

And I was like, yeah, yeah, it is, John Oliver. There is something to it. When you are drawing such a range of folks, my niece in New Jersey, 21, obsessed with the show, John Oliver, the hundreds of people that we already have signed up to come to the symposium, there is something here. I mean, it’s fascinating, the audience that it draws in, and it’s because it’s entertainment and it is very much rooted in the humanities.

Scott Black: I’m a historian of the novel. The novel started as a crappy form for girls and servants. Now I teach it as part of the high-culture profile of Western civilization.

Forms change. The novel was a popular print-culture form when print culture was reaching a brand-new audience. We now have a new medium, TV, reality TV, and, of course, the really significant online effects of this reality TV. All of these are new media that allow for new forms of popular entertainment. These will become classics in their time. I don’t know exactly what will survive. Maybe it’ll be The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. That’s the new Shakespeare. Maybe it’ll be The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Time will tell that.

But something from our generation of pop culture will become future generations’ touchpoint of their own culture. That’s fascinating. And I think it’s really narrow-minded, as you’re saying, Marcie, to think that what looks popular or even trash TV now is always going to have that status. That is just not to understand how artistic forms work.

Marcie Young Cancio: So I teach COM 1500, which is Media and Society, and we talk about culture as a skyscraper.

And then on the lower floors you have kind of this trashy, low-quality entertainment. The Real Housewives are in there, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Jersey Shore, right? Probably TikTok would be in there in some capacities. And then you go higher and higher up the skyscraper, and up at the top you have Finnegans Wake or The Odyssey, right? Hamletmay be up there. But we exist in a society because we have a range in what we consume and what draws us in and what’s interesting to us.

And it would be incredibly boring if we existed only on the sixteenth floor or only on the fiftieth floor or only on the first floor. It’s having a rich and diverse menu to choose from that makes us interesting, that makes conversations engaging. So having something like The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, like The Secret Lives, like any of these, actually creates a more dynamic conversation. Missing it doesn’t make it less trashy, it just makes it less interesting.

Robert Carson: It’s a show that generates argument and opinion. Like, any two people watching this are going to have things to say about it. They’re going to have different things to say about it. Their affection or loyalty or judgment about it will differ, and I’ve gotten into arguments with people about why—I’m not going to say who my favorite Housewife is.

Marcie Young Cancio: “Favorite” is really interesting, I think, in this conversation, because at least in how I watch and how most of the people I know watch, it’s not from a space of adoration. We’re not putting anyone on a pedestal. I think with some of the wealth, with some of the things, there’s maybe some like, oh, that would be fun, to go on a superyacht, right? But it’s not because we’re necessarily admiring these women as people that we look up to and want to be. They’re not on a pedestal.

Robert Carson: I want to say, in kind of local moments of argument and combat between them, you have someone who you want to win.

Marcie Young Cancio: Oh, for sure.

Robert Carson: Maybe that’s better than favorite, because it changes over the course of a single episode, or certainly over the course of seasons. You start one season being absolutely fed up with someone’s nonsense to, a few seasons later, realizing, oh, they were right the whole time.

Marcie Young Cancio: Right. And it’s a mirror a little because you’re seeing certain ways that you see the world or argue, like, you see yourself and how you would respond to an argument in some of these women and how they address, or how they would respond to certain situations.

So I think there might be some recognition in self as you’re watching this. Like, oh, I would totally respond the way she did. Or, this person’s completely in the wrong. Or, these two are fighting because they’re the two smartest ones on the show, and this one’s threatened by how suddenly witty this new character is. That’s why that’s happening.

And I think you can see those sorts of things. And someone that you really liked, you’re like, ooh, I don’t like the way that they’re presenting themselves this season. They used to be one of my favorites, but now it’s a scale.

Robert Carson: When I started watching the first season, I got maybe three or four episodes in, and I was thinking, do I really want to keep going with this? Because I sort of can’t keep track of them. They all kind of sound the same and sort of are doing the same things. And now looking back, I think, how could I possibly think that any two of them were at all interchangeable, or how ridiculous it would be to confuse any two of them with each other. My initial impressions of this were wrong.

Marcie Young Cancio: Well, and as I’ve been telling people about the symposium, folks will be like, “Oh, I don’t watch it. Sounds like I need to, or should I?”

I’m like, well, no, you don’t need to. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, by all means start watching. But this is not for everybody. If you are not a reality TV person, if you don’t like this sort of entertainment in the pop-cultural sense, you probably won’t like it, but you probably won’t go into it with the same sort of lens of wanting to break it down as someone who is.

So if you are curious, please go watch it. It’s fascinating to really let yourself get past this superficial level of it and get into the meaning of the storylines. And again, you can’t dismiss Utah as place in this. We are so rich, and I think people who are from here watch it with a different lens than people who don’t understand the culture. You can allow yourself to get really brainy and dorky and geeky about it if you want, or you can watch it and it can just be mindless and dumb in the background.

Scott Black: And as someone who loves people who love things, this is just going to be a really, really rich experience. I’m not a superfan of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City—

Robert Carson: Yet.

Scott Black: Yet. But I do love fan communities. I love to hear them talk among themselves because they’re deeply invested in a particular form or a piece of art or a series, in this case. And that kind of engaged, deeply committed community is interesting in itself, and I think that’s what’s fascinating about this show: what it’s about, what it’s doing, but as much as both of those things, how it creates this really intense community around it that’s part of our city, that’s also part of our culture.

And I think now with reality TV, more than many forms, that sense of a strong online, really connected community that forms their identity around their fandom is fascinating, and I think very, very much what the humanities are right now.

Marcie Young Cancio: And I think that we’ve talked a little bit about this, but I think that it’s really important to talk about Salt Lake specifically.

This franchise is uniquely rich because it’s ours. It depicts faith and wealth and what it means to be a woman in this cultural kind of geography that most of the country thinks they understand, but it’s rooted in stereotype. People who don’t know Utah understand Utah as it presents in shows like this, but it comes from stereotypes about the state, and this show both kind of, I think, reinforces some of those stereotypes while also striking them down.

We can’t have this conversation without acknowledgment that this in many ways is a feminist series. How many programs that do incredibly well are fully cast by women, where men are the secondary characters in it? We don’t live in a culture where we have a lot of entertainment that is centered fully around women. Primetime television dedicated to female casts, addressing things that matter to women, and there’s many, many franchises dedicated to this in the Bravoverse.

Salt Lake City addresses those things in an even more layered way because of the stereotypes that exist in Utah. I think the faith component is incredibly interesting. I only think one person on the cast right now is a practicing Mormon, and only kind of. Britani Bateman, she is kind of what they call a friend of. She’s not one of the main cast members, but she gets regular airtime.

And in her first season, which was last year—she just wrapped her second season—the show ended with she’s dating a man named Jared Osmond. Yes, of those Osmonds. And she has a really interesting dynamic that plays out on screen where another character comes over to her house for basically a family home evening, which if you’re from Utah, you know that that’s when you get together with your family to talk about faith and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

But she invites some of the women to her house, and one of the women brings her a bottle of wine as a hostess gift and gives it to her. Britani is mortified and she calls her out, saying, “My family’s here. They don’t know I drink.” And this woman is in her late forties, right? But she’s mortified that this woman has brought her wine, and that is not how she’s supposed to be presenting as a good Mormon woman.

And if you’re from here, you understand that you are supposed to present a certain way if you are a member of this faith. And so when you’re watching that as someone from Utah, you get it. I get that. I was born and raised here. I understand that dynamic.

Later in the season, Britani’s been dating this man, Jared, and at the end of the season she finally talks to these women and is like, yes, we’re sleeping together, we’re having sex. And she’s been married, she has kids, but admitting out loud and publicly that as an adult woman she’s having sex without being married brought her to tears. She was hysterical and embarrassed by this. And some of the women at the table who weren’t raised in the dominant faith here were like, ugh, that’s it? Seriously.

But then other women were like, I get that that’s a really, really hard thing to contend with and embrace. And I think if you’re watching this outside of Utah, that’s just interesting TV. It’s also why The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives does so well, and Mormonism in pop culture does very, very well.

Twenty years ago we had Big Love. We had Sister Wives come out. We had a big Mormon moment that was happening in the early two-thousands. And now with this new lens on reality TV, with digital internet culture like TikTok bringing us characters from The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, bringing us folks from The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, it has become a really significant pop-culture moment.

The New York Times has written up the Mormon moment in pop culture. The New Yorker magazine listed The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City as must-watch TV in its roundup of the best shows of 2025. I mean, it’s hard to get much more highbrow than The New Yorker, I think.

Scott Black: Excuse me. The Tanner Humanities Center is sponsoring a symposium. I think that’s more highbrow than The New Yorker.

Marcie Young Cancio: You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I got that wrong. But there’s something to be said about these moments, right? And Utah is interesting to people.

Robert Carson: Is there a specific kind of thesis you have about the difference between the moment twenty-odd years ago and now? Can you identify some fundamental kind of tectonic shift in—

Marcie Young Cancio: Well, one, I have not done any sort of formal research into this particular topic, but I think that the Olympics put a lens on Utah and Salt Lake City in a way that hadn’t really happened before.

You were starting to see a lot of things happening that had roots to the dominant faith. So you saw the raids in Texas of the FLDS compound that happened right around the same time that Big Love was popular and on TV, that Sister Wiveswas happening. And I think that what happened in the early two-thousands in pop culture with that programming opened the door to say, oh, what other stereotypes about this state, about this religion, are unfolding?

And then you had the internet become more popular and things like Instagram and TikTok showing this culture in a more dynamic way, paired with this opportunity to create really cheap television, right? Like, reality TV is significantly less expensive to produce and actually show than scripted television programming, right? It’s much, much less expensive, and people respond to it. So we saw just like an explosion of that sort of programming.

So I think those things together have brought this conversation in. And we could really go off the rails here, but in the social media space you’re also talking about MomTok influencers, you’re talking about trad wives. Many of those are rooted in Utah and have the culture. Ballerina Farm is one of the most prominent of the trad-wife Instagram accounts, and many of those are rooted here.

So there’s something, there’s this culture that has garnered all of this attention in Utah, for better or worse, right? But we also have from The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives spinoffs where you have Whitney Leavitt, who was on Dancing with the Stars, who is now starring on Broadway as Roxie Hart in Chicago in New York City. Another wife, Taylor Frankie Paul, is the new Bachelorette. So you see these things that are rooted in Utah that have all of these spinoffs.

The Real Housewives franchise, for example, Heather Gay has written two books, which I believe both were on the New York Times bestseller list. She’s participated in another docuseries about leaving Mormonism. So these things don’t just exist in the show itself, but spin off into other forms of pop culture, including literature and television programming, documentary television programming. It’s fascinating.

Scott Black: We’ve been trying to keep these evergreen, but I don’t think we will for this one. I’m going to read what you wrote, which I think is great:

“For people who’ve never watched The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, come see what a room full of scholars does with something you’ve been told not to take seriously. For fans who’ve watched since season one, we see you. We are you, and we’ve built an entire academic symposium to validate your close-reading skills.”

Marcie Young Cancio: Well, Scott might not quite be you, but Robert and I absolutely are.

Scott Black: Thank you for the clarification. As I said, I’m actually very excited. This is a fan community I’m personally fascinated by, and I’m really excited to talk to them about their passions.

Our Tanner Humanities Center symposium on The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, Receipts, Proof, Timeline: How We Watch The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, will be on April 10th, at nine in the morning till three in the afternoon, at the Cleone Peterson Eccles Alumni House on the University of Utah campus. If you would like to reserve your free spot, visit the Tanner Humanities Center website, tanner.utah.edu, to reserve your free tickets. We hope to see you there.

Marcie Young Cancio: And if you join us, please noodle around on what your tagline would be. We might be doing some programming where we are asking the audience to engage, and I will be preparing some taglines to bring to the symposium. We’d love to hear yours.

Robert Carson: The symposium will be an interactive, audience-participation event. It will not just be passively listening to people give papers. So if you come, be prepared to participate and share your thoughts.

Marcie Young Cancio: We’ll be having a trivia night the night before. So if you are attending or you sign up, you’ll get details on that as it gets a little bit closer. But if you have not been able to tell from this podcast, this is fun, and we are going to make the symposium fun.

Scott Black: You’ve been listening to the Virtual Jewel Box podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center. Our music is by Jelly Roll Morton, “Perfect Rag.” Thanks for joining us.