'Bethenny Ever After' Season 1, Episode 1 (Series Premiere) Recap

['Bethenny Ever After' - 'Hoppy Trails To You']

"Look at how happy you are. I'm already dead and you're so excited. You're already dating some blonde, young, f**king loser who's 23 years old in, like, a pink cardigan. A**hole."

-- Bethenny, to Jason, on how fast he would rebound if she kicked the bucket

Ah, she's back. All fresh-faced and foul-mouthed. To start a new season of her renamed series, Bethenny Frankel, aka Mrs. 30 (or 32) F (or G), collided with the small-town niceties of Hazleton, Pa.

"I don't know how you found me," she told a drunk Jason at the townie bar. She was speaking to their differences, he a homegrown suburban guy and her a cosmopolitan empire.

"I can't even stand right now," he replied.

They're sweet.



As Jason came to the revelation that "dads carry sh*t," his car smells like sh*t, and Bethenny hates it when he, too, smells like sh*t, she came to see what it was like for her husband to grow up in a place far removed from Manhattan. Where a friend lives who wears a shirt announcing love of "hot moms" while admitting he drives over 100 miles for a Bon Jovi haircut. Also the home of a guy named Buck, who calls himself a "sperm donor." A place with a mostly vacant main street, one where this Bravolebrity's weekend trip to her in-laws hits like a visit from Elvis.

All of this levity came with a healthy shoveling of heavy stuff, dispersed through two dinners with Jason's parents: One where strangers gawked and stared, another at the Hoppys' home. In both cases Jason, not his parents, seemed the most perturbed about Bethenny's ... frankness. If she's happy to not visit Pennsylvania every weekend, he would probably be happy to have his parents hang out with his daughter more often, even if it means five bloated hours of road-tripping with dog, city wife and baby.

You can see where the balance is skewed. Bethenny doesn't have a family to share her daughter with, but Jason does. She has a career, though, that looms large over just about everything. Including where they'll live in the next five years. Regardless of what Jason's mom actually said, she had the look of death on her face when the word "California" entered the conversation.

As ever, Bethenny dealt with her past. "Ever after" doesn't mean "never again." The wedding-era therapist from last year's 'Bethenny Getting Married?' re-entered the picture with pressing questions for the newlywed mom multi-hyphenate. What did she really think of the bond she must have shared, however small, with her own mother? It's obvious that pain has caused Bethenny to push that idea out of her mind, but she can't, not completely.

The very mention of "roots" at a toast in Jason's local watering hole brought on the waterworks for Bethenny. On a normal day sitting around the apartment with Jason, she talks wills, death and replacement whores without flinching. But one mention of family and legacy and she's a puddle of catharsis. Still, you get the feeling that this, and Pennsylvania, is good for her. Rest assured (assuming she fixes her supply-and-demand issues) she'll get the Skinnygirl Margarita in that townie bar.

'Bethenny Ever After' airs Mondays, 10PM ET on Bravo.