‘Real Housewives of Orange County’ 16th season premiere offers ‘complete immersion into fabulousness’

When the 16th season of “The Real Housewives of Orange County” opened on Wednesday, it felt a little like we’ve slipped into an alternate universe of coastal mansions and Botox injections and skinny margaritas.

Gone from the 15th season are housewives Kelly Dodd, Braunwyn Windham-Burke and Elizabeth Lyn Vargas, who have joined former stars Vicki Gunvalson and Tamra Judge in The Vast Untelevised Place.

Only Shannon Storms Beador has outlasted the Great Housewives Purge of 2020 and 2021, though, wait a second: Is that a familiar form standing in silhouette in the door of her 22,000-square-foot Newport Coast mansion?

“Hello, guys? I’m back!” the shadowy figure announces, and Heather Dubrow has returned as a housewife, five years after leaving the show.

“Oh my gosh, what has been going on in the last five years?” Heather asks herself in her first confessional of the season.

Apparently, she’s been enjoying the heck out of the home she and her husband, reality TV star and plastic surgeon Terry Dubrow, have built for their family of six.

Heather doesn’t really think it’s such an ostentatious monument to the earnings and egos of a reality TV power couple.

Sure, she admits she has no idea how many rooms the house has, but other than a literal movie theater, Heather is pretty sure that these are the normal rooms you have in any home, just a lot bigger. (The butler’s kitchen begs to differ.)

For the most part, this season opener is a table-setter for all the tables that may or may not get upended in fits of pique later on. Everyone is on their best behavior. No one even orders a drink until nearly the halfway mark of the episode.

That’s largely due to the need to rebuild the housewife universe. In addition to Heather’s return, two new housewives need to be introduced to viewers.

We meet new housewife Dr. Jen Armstrong first, as she jabs Botox here and there in housewife Gina Kirschenheiter’s face, as housewife Emily Simpson looks on.

“Just a little dab’ll do ya!” Dr. Jen assures Gina as the needle slips in.

We meet new housewife Noella Bergener when Heather’s friend Nicole James brings her along to Newport Beach for lunch with Heather, who is there to book the restaurant to cater a party at her palatial pad.

“Historically, I do love a party,” Heather says to the camera. “A Heather Dubrow party is a complete immersion into fabulousness.”

Noella tells Heather that her attorney husband Sweet James is just as sweet as the nickname he uses on the billboards he rents all over Southern California.

“He’s the sweetest, most authentic man. It’s not a brand; it’s him,” she says.

Noella starts to tell Heather about the time she and Sweet James decided to leave a hotel bar for a room upstairs.

“No one wants to hear about married people’s sex lives,” Heather declares.

“We have a sex dungeon in our house,” Noella cheerfully announces. “You will love it. It’s very chic.”

Heather demurs but offers her best wishes for Noella’s future visits to the red-and-black room that flashes on screen.

Across town, Shannon, Gina and Emily are at Lunch No. 2, and Shannon is starting to work herself up into a what-to-do-what-to-do existential crisis. She has realized something about which Heather is in the dark: Years earlier, Heather’s close friend Nicole James had filed a lawsuit against Heather’s hubby.

She blabs to Gina, who says Shannon must tell Heather the news, but when Gina and Shannon meet Heather for Lunch No. 3 of the episode they don’t blab.

Instead, Heather offers to give Shannon and Gina the royal tour of the rooms, however many there are, of her manse. Shannon, who lived in a similar style in the same neighborhood until her divorce, has a look on her face like she swallowed her pride and it didn’t go down right.

Gina, however, is the perfect guest, reacting to all the bells and whistles in exactly the way you imagine Heather had hoped.

“Oh, I love trap doors!” Gina cries when Heather reveals a secret door in the wall that leads from her office to her private bathroom. “I love a hidden potty!”

We see the game room, the gym, the butler’s kitchen, and the laundry room complete with an actual maid at an ironing board. In the kitchen, we meet the family’s chef and Heather shows off the refrigerated drawers in her cabinets.

“I didn’t even know that was a thing,” Gina marvels.

By the time we get to the master bath, with its heated towel drawer, it’s likely Gina is ready to secretly move into the attic.

Then there’s Heather’s closet, which is as large as many of the boutiques at South Coast Plaza, though we’re not sure any of them have a large button on the wall to press when you want a glass of champagne delivered to your closet. As one does.

Meanwhile, Dr. Jen is the only housewife to be left out of a lunch date, since she is, well, at work being a doctor. We do briefly meet her husband Ryne and three kids, but her storyline is like a double chin, left to be lifted in some future episode.

The day of the party arrives, and like the Avengers, the housewives assemble at Heather’s hotel-like fortress. A large ice sculpture of Heather’s initials, H.D., arrives. A server brings champagne to Heather in her closet.

And as a montage flashes across the screen, we get our tease for part two of the opener next week: Gina will tell Heather about Nicole and the lawsuit.

And it will not go well.