Denise Richards knows exactly what I want: Her first confessional in this episode name-checks Starship Troopers, Drop Dead Gorgeous, and Wild Things, the holy triumvirate of her ’90s roles. Sadly, it’s downhill from there. I am trying to meet this show where it’s at instead of wishing it were something different and better, but I would so rather hear behind-the-scenes stories from those three movies than lean into overly produced drama. “Video Killed the Movie Star” keeps grasping at something illicit happening between Denise and her ex, Patrick Muldoon — nudging Aaron to feel uncomfortable with their relationship — but there’s simply no there there.
The thing about Aaron is that he doesn’t seem like the jealous type; he’s far too supportive for that. When they were on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Aaron was the worst kind of Housewives husband, overstepping with Denise’s castmates to come to his wife’s aid. On Denise Richards & Her Wild Things, he seems to have completely abandoned his actual career to be Denise’s full-time photographer, and given how much money she’s pulling in on OnlyFans (allegedly $2 million a month), that sounds reasonable to me. Denise says doing OF has been empowering, particularly knowing that people are still that interested in seeing her naked at 54, and she notes it’s gotten her more movie opportunities. As Elise Elliot wisely said, “There are only three ages for women in Hollywood: babe, district attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.” The fact that Denise is now getting cast as a trophy wife does feel like a win.
“I love that he’s so supportive,” Denise reiterates of Aaron helping her with her OF. “He knows what men love.” He also agrees with her that the jacket Dorit called her out on looks better upside down. But outside of the photoshoots, Aaron is also very down for Denise to keep hanging out with her one-time lover, Patrick. The three of them plus Brooke meet up for pickleball — I know I complained about the lizard memorial, but pickleball on Bravo shows is the bigger crisis — where Patrick loses his dental bridge so that he has to spend the rest of the episode semi-toothless. (But not homeless!) At pickleball, we get another rehash of Denise’s history with Patrick, which I swear has been covered in every episode up to this point, though the revelation that the “Schweet Babe” nickname was coined on the Starship Troopers set was news to me. Pat asks Denise to star in his new music video for a song that’s totally not about her but is about the woman who got away. Denise is down as long as she gets to be sexy in it. Know your worth!
Most of this episode is devoted to the nonexistent Denise-Aaron-Patrick love triangle, but we do take a moment to see Sami get her new post-nose-job headshots. I enjoyed watching Denise declare that she doesn’t want to be a momager while making suggestions on the shoot and offering to hold a giant fan to blow Sami’s hair. At the same time, I’m once again more interested in the tension lurking beneath the surface. Sami shares that she’s been turned down by modeling agencies because of her OF career, even though that’s how she pays her rent. In a confessional, Denise calls this a double standard, pointing out that she has only gotten more opportunities since finding herself in the top one percent of OF creators. We know Sami started her OF first, and that she wasn’t thrilled when Denise decided to join. Surely she has some feelings about the way things have shaken out since. I’m not saying I need to see mother and daughter fighting — I’d just love for the show to explore the resentment it touched on in the premiere and hasn’t returned to since. But sure, the second photoshoot scene of the episode is fun, too.
Denise meets up with Patrick for lunch — I think it’s lunch, but honestly, it’s never really clear what time of day they’re meeting, and they’re always drinking like it’s after 5 p.m. — so they can discuss the specifics of the music video. Patrick asks if he’s slurring because of his missing tooth, which is a little endearing. As for the video itself, it sounds like a pretty generic “man reminisces about the woman he had and lost” story. That translates to Denise in a series of moody black-and-white flashbacks. The vibe, according to Pat, “kind of scares you, kind of turns you on,” and though I don’t think the end result matches that intention, I see the vision. Denise explains (in case you somehow missed it!) that because she and Patrick were together so long ago, what they have now is just a deep friendship that Aaron isn’t threatened by. The show really insists on reminding us that there could be drama here, even if there isn’t any. I do, however, believe that Charlie had a problem with Pat, because I would imagine Charlie had a whole mess of tiger blood-induced irrational feelings over the course of that marriage.
Sami picks Denise up to take her to Patrick’s sister’s house, where the music video will be filmed. I’ll give Denise that entering the car in a full hazmat suit to avoid getting makeup on the seats is a good bit. (I’ll also give Sami that she has remarkable self-awareness for a nepo baby after she remarks that she’d like to be in a music video but is horrible at acting, singing, and dancing.) Once on set, Patrick shares that they’ll start with a love scene on the bed, which Denise says wasn’t in the storyboard. Ultimately, she’s down — it probably helps that the “love scene” includes a single kiss between them. Sami keeps asking how Aaron could possibly be okay with this, especially given the decades of history between Denise and Pat. I’m reminded of Britney Spears famously saying, “It’s pretend. You’re an adult, you should know that.” And as Aaron says, again, he doesn’t get jealous of Denise and Patrick’s relationship, and he’s confident in his marriage. Sounds healthy and normal! We can drop it here, right?
We can’t, it turns out. In a confessional, Sami says that Pat is flirty with Denise, and while she doesn’t want to get him in trouble, she thinks he still has feelings for her mom. This really feels like some producer prodding — if Sami actually felt that way, she wouldn’t be saying it on camera. Shortly thereafter, Denise and Aaron share a confessional where she demands to know if it was weird seeing her kiss another man. (He’s seen her movies, right? This is a big part of her career!) He confirms that it’s not weird in context, though seeing her kiss someone else outside of a set would be. “That means it was weird for him,” says Denise. (It really doesn’t!) As for the music video itself, the snippets shown throughout confirm that I am not the target audience, though I wish Patrick well on his journey. It’s fitting that the final moment we see filmed is an explosive fight between Denise and Pat, an expletive-laden argument they improvise. Everything about the (almost) drama in this episode is so performative that the expressly fictional conflict barely stands out.