What became evident early on is that, in a small enclave of the most lofty echelons of society, there are women whose whole lives revolve around the spending of other people's money, and the demonstration of that.
As the show's expensively sculpted centrepieces were brought together and introduced, it was extraordinary to observe how women, whose lives revolve around the pursuit of personal beauty, can render themselves so ugly simply by opening their mouths.
The "are you a plus-sized model?" one-liner from former model Michelle Blanchard must surely go down in history as one of the most epic moments of reality television. It was so casually brutal, you just wouldn't have believed it if it had been scripted.
Quite frankly, it was the most hideously brilliant hour of television I've ever watched in my life. My husband agreed.
During the ads, while I was scanning Google for evidence of all this prolific former modelling (correction; one of them is currently modelling), my husband was taking equal delight in searching the companies register to see just how rich you had to be to secure one of these fading flowers of Auckland high-society.
The conclusion here was "very rich indeed", which to me presented a bit of a contradiction, because presumably one has to be fairly smart to amass great wealth, and yet I couldn't imagine anyone with half a brain cell finding the Auckland Housewives set attractive life-partner material.
While the trade-off of youth and beauty for wealth is a longstanding tradition, surely if you cast the net wide enough you could hook up with a hottie who has a few lashings of integrity, humility and kindness along with the willowy legs?
Or is that not the point?
It's certainly not the point of the show, and my hat goes off to the show's producers, who must have cast nets very widely indeed to find women of means who were prepared to be so grotesquely frank about their wealth and so unkind to their fellow women.
For a bunch that cares so deeply about their public image, it seems mystifying why they would sign up for a show that, in my opinion, is clearly pitched at portraying them as vapid, mean and shallow.
These are no real housewives, and the "reality" of this TV is as far from anything as most of us could imagine. Cheers to that.
- Eva Bradley is a columnist and photographer.