I am loving all the new and returning shows that I am watching this fall. Sunday Nights are ridiculously well stocked with top notch television – Dexter, Californication, and Entourage are the returning champs; True Blood and Mad Men are new on my list.

Since the whole gist of this blog is that I talk about being a mom and housewife in a luxury driven city I just have to post today about The new season of the Real Housewives series. This time Atlanta is the city and husbands and daddies are music moguls and pro athletes, and all but one of the wives are black. I have to say that at first I am more impressed with these women than any I have seen on this series, because they are TOGETHER. And when I say together, I mean they all have full staffs running behind them to tend to every task, so they can get together and party and have fun. No neurotic micromanaging for this crew – they hire real professionals to do the work, and things run quite smoothly MOST of the time.

Central to this season’s story line are Lisa Wu Hartwell, wife of NFL player Ed Hartwell, DeShawn Snow, wife of Cleveland Captains’ Eric Snow, Kim Zolciak, the kept woman of a man she calls Big Poppa in order to keep his identity a mystery, NeNe Leakes, wife of Big Daddy style real estate tycoon Gregg Leakes (my personal favorite couple), Sheree Whitfield, formerly married to some rich athlete, currently in settlement negotiation and she ain’t nice.

We’re now three episodes into the life of these women and they are much more socially intertwined than other seasons of the franchise. We already know that in spite of the fact that Sheree (pronounced Shar – ay, who throws herself a birthday that she calls a fashion extravaganza) thinks that NeNe (who I LOVE, and who is a real sistuh) is socially, intellectually and fashionably inferior to her, she claims that they are old and dear friends. Such dear friends that she forgets(hmmm.) to add her name to the guest list of her birthday party and causes NeNe to be stared down by bodyguards, thus sending her back out into the night, furious, despite the pleadings of Sheree’s publicist that it was a gross oversight. Kim ( whose hair really looks like a wig) is NeNe’s date, so she’s out too, and running what appears to be interferance that that is typical for their group.

Lisa is the little dynamo, with a real estate business, general deal making and supermommery to her name, along with a clothing line and painting – I say she’s on something like ritalin to keep that pace, since she claims to have given birth nine months ago. DeShawn is the good Christian wife and philanthropist, and the newest to the Atlanta scene. We see her enter her new home, outfitted entirely by interior designer and contractors with directions from a two hour phone call (remember no micromanaging) and just loves it. I loved watching her give directive to her acting estate director as to whether or not the in laws would be allowed alcohol during their upcoming visit.

Supsequent episodes have yielded a $16,000 birthday event for Kim’s eleven year old which she spends most of the time worrying if Sheree and NeNe will catfight when they inevitably arrive. DeShawn undertakes a very ambitious event to raise money for her charity.. Biggest personal drama yet is that of NeNe, who after seeing a country psychic who told her that she would get a letter somehow related to her father, and then she receives – you guessed it, a letter from her aunt alleging that her dead beat dad was not really her dad anyway.

Looking forward to the DNA test!