For the record, Britani Bateman said she doesn’t care that she hasn’t been given a snowflake.
“i’m so flattered that anyone would care,” said Bateman — who is designated a “friend” of the main cast on Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” — about the recurring fan question, “When is Britani going to get her snowflake?”
“It mattered to me this year for about half a day,” Bateman said, as she started Season 6 where she spent Season 5 — without the honor of being a full-fledged “Housewife,” symbolized by the snowflake statuette each main cast member holds in the show’s opening. Overall, with Season 6 premiering Tuesday on Bravo, Bateman said she’s happy and “grateful” just to be part of the group.
“I feel like I’m included in everything. I’m very much an integral part of this season,” Bateman said over a recent lunch at Sapa, an Asian restaurant near downtown Salt Lake City. “I just show up being myself, and if that causes drama, it’s captured on camera. And if it doesn’t, I’m still there, speaking my mind.”
Speaking her mind wasn’t a problem in Bateman’s introduction in Season 5 — when she called fellow rookie Bronwyn Newport’s $15,000 designer Yves Saint Laurent jacket a costume. “I apparently put my foot in my mouth right off the bat, and we were off to the races,” she recalled.
(Fred Hayes | Bravo) Britani Bateman, center, talks with Bronwyn Newport, left (in her $15,000 designer jacket), and Mary Cosby, during Lisa Barlow's "Besos" party on the season 5 premiere of "The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City" in 2024.
Britani’s sharp learning curve
Before joining “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” Bateman said she had only watched about two and a half episodes of the show. “I still couldn’t even really tell Lisa [Barlow] and Meredith [Marks] apart,” she said.
One thing Bateman knew, she said, was that the established cast members were wary of newcomers. One of the episodes she watched before joining the show was the infamous Season 4 finale — when Heather Gay confronted rookie cast member Monica Garcia with the evidence of her online trolling, delivering the meme-worthy line, “Receipts, proof, timeline, screenshots!”
Coming into the show in Season 5, Bateman said she felt some safety, because she previously was friends with Heather. “She’s the pillar of the show,” Bateman said, “and I think everyone respects her. … So for her to be vouching for me meant a lot.”
Bateman said she quickly learned that she had to stand her ground, or be steamrolled by the other cast members.
“It’s a bunch of really powerful, strong women,” Bateman said. “We’re all type-A, we’re all go-getters, we’re all opinionated, we’re all outspoken, we’re all confident. And somehow, we make it work — or at least that’s the idea.”
When one cast member speaks to a couple of others, often what she says will be repeated and repeated, Bateman said, “and it often becomes a big game of telephone. And when it gets back to you, it’s twisted, and feelings are hurt by the time it comes back.”
Still, the ultimate proof is in what airs on TV — and watching Season 5, she said, she found a surprisingly accurate mirror of what happened during filming.
“Here’s the sad truth: They can’t edit what we don’t give them,” Bateman said. “They’re not out there sneakily trying to make us seem this or seem that. Unfortunately, we get to see ourselves in situations we’ve never been in before, under much duress, oftentimes without a safety net, feeling like we’re on an island by ourselves, like we’re backed into a corner. And this is what you get.”
(Bravo) Heather Gay, Britani Bateman and Angie Katsanevas, from left, talk at a fireside at Britani's house, in an episode of "The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City."
Britani and her Latter-day Saint faith
One thing Bateman said she was surprised to see in the edited episodes was how the producers “demonstrated the juxtaposition between me in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints versus me that nobody gets to see and I’m not always following the rules.”
Religion has been a focal point of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” since the beginning. Heather often talks, and has now written two books, about growing up as a Latter-day Saint and in adulthood leaving the church. Bronwyn talked in Season 5 about being expelled from Brigham Young University because she became pregnant. Whitney Rose has talked about being excommunicated from the Latter-day Saint faith for having an affair with her now-husband, Justin Rose. And Lisa converted to the Latter-day Saint faith — and fans watched her son, Jack, prepare to go on a mission for the church.
Not everyone on the show has history with the Latter-day Saint faith. Mary Cosby is an evangelical preacher with her own congregation in Salt Lake City. And a significant plot thread in Season 5 followed Meredith, whose family is Jewish, as she studied for her bat mitzvah.
Bateman is a practicing member of the Latter-day Saint faith, she said, and how she practices became a topic of contention in Season 5.
In one episode, Bateman played host to a church talk with other members of her neighborhood congregation. She also invited cast member Angie Katsanevas, who brought a bottle of wine as a hostess gift. When Bateman got upset at this gift, Angie pointed out that Bateman sometimes drinks alcohol and does other things that aren’t considered appropriate for Latter-day Saints — notably, in her relationship with sometime-boyfriend Jared Osmond. In a tearful confession near the end of Season 5, Britani told the other cast members that she and Jared had sex out of wedlock.
“I received a lot of judgment from that,” Bateman said, both from cast members and from fans. “But I was really taken aback and beautifully surprised by the amount of outreach, of kindness and acceptance, from so many people sending me emails and texts and DMs.”
The messages, she said, “were thanking me for showing the real, raw, imperfect part of myself. And also demonstrating through living it that you don’t have to throw the baby out with the bath water. … I’m a living example of not necessarily believing I need to follow every single rule to be a faithful member of the church.”
(Jocelyn Prescod | Bravo) "Friend" Britani Bateman, right, takes a seat next to Meredith Marks, in the third and final episode of the season 5 reunion of "The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City."
‘The Jared of it all,’ and what’s next
As Season 5 aired, Bateman said she learned to handle the comments of fans and non-fans online, which turned out to be easier than she expected.
“I get 90% kindness online,” she said. “But the 10% that are just truly rotten and mean, it’s really easy to shake it off.”
The negative comments, she said, fall into two buckets. In one, the comments are true, “in which case I need to really look at that and think about it. And I’m confident enough to be able to do that.” In the other, “it’s completely untrue, in which case it doesn’t hurt. Things only get really hurt if they’re true,” she said.
Bateman declined to talk about anything that might be a spoiler for Season 6. That includes talking about her current status with Osmond, which was much discussed online during the off-season.
She said she wished the audience could have seen Osmond in Season 5 the way she knows him. “He’s an extremely kind and generous person,” she said, “and for whatever reason, he didn’t display enough of that last season to make it into the show.”
In Bravo’s press materials ahead of the premiere, the network said that Bateman “returns with an exciting announcement about her love life, but proves that not all good things can last as their relationship reverts to old patterns.”
Last season, Bateman said, “I feel like, because of the Jared of it all, we didn’t really get to see all the layers.” This season, she said, “I think you’re going to see a lot more of me, and a lot more about me.”
“The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” kicks off Season 6 on Tuesday, at 8 p.m. Eastern and Pacific time — which means 6 p.m. Mountain time on DirecTV and Dish, and 9 p.m. Mountain time on Xfinity. (The show streams the next day on Peacock.)