On Display, On Fyah & Feelin’ Jovani: ‘The Real Housewives’ & Andy Cohen Take Us Inside 20 Years of Bravo-Fueled Music

Don’t be tardy for the (anniversary) party! For the past 20 years, the Real Housewives franchise has dominated pop culture as the go-to reality TV institution for catty drama, aspirational wealth and navigating the ever-complicated social politics of female friendship.

Related RHOSLC’s Whitney Rose Prompts Hilarious Response From Rihanna After Saying She’s Sad Because ‘We Still Haven’t Had Any New Music’ Erika Jayne Is Ready to Bet It All on Blonde With Las Vegas Residency: Exclusive Ex-‘RHOBH’ Star Brandi Glanville Drops Her First Song, ‘Life of a Housewife’ Now, more than two decades after a little experiment called The Real Housewives of Orange County first premiered, Bravo is commemorating the landmark milestone with The Real Housewives Ultimate Girls Trip: Roaring 20th , a nine-episode anniversary series celebrating all the iconic women who’ve graced our screens from New York City and Atlanta to Beverly Hills, Miami and beyond. (New episodes premiere Sunday nights on Bravo at 9 p.m.

ET/PT and start streaming the next day on Peacock.) Many of the women who’ve redefined what it means to be a “Housewife” in front of Bravo’s cameras have also turned their exploits into a catalog of quotable, clubby musical earworms.

As Porsha Williams, the Real Housewives of Atlanta mainstay representing Georgia’s peaches on the new season of RHUGT , quipped during the third episode of the anniversary special, “If a Housewife gon’ do anything, they’re gonna be confident as a singer , honey.” But before Bravoholics were singing along to “Tardy for the Party” or “Chic C’est La Vie,” a girl from Southern California was the original Real Housewife to turn her reality TV ambitions into dreams of pop stardom.

U Can’t Control Jo Back in 2007, Jo De La Rosa was an original cast member of The Real Housewives of Orange County .

At just 26 years old, she was filming her second season of the show that would soon launch franchises across the country and start a pop culture phenomenon that would define the 21st century.

From the start, De La Rosa stood out from her fellow First Ladies of Bravo.

Younger than her castmates by nearly two decades, the then-engaged daughter of musician Juan Carlos Contreras already had her sights set far beyond the cloistered gates of Coto De Caza — the exclusive gated community in sunny southern California where Bravo had inadvertently struck gold.

“I was going to L.A. a lot with my girlfriends on the weekends, meeting a lot of people, and producers happened to know that I was trying to get into the world of [music],” she tells Billboard — adding that, in actuality, her goal was not to become the next Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera, but to write for them.

“Really, my dream in my entire 20s was to move to L.A. and get a publishing deal.