How has The Real Housewives of New York managed to survive ten seasons of cat fights, wine swigging, backstabbing, and man sharing? To executive producer Andy Cohen, the answer is simple: “I just think hands down, it’s so funny”—both intentionally and otherwise.

“It’s a different kind of humor, and it makes me laugh so much. It always has, even from the beginning,” says Cohen. “I’m constantly shocked by some of the drama that happens in the group that you just don’t expect. There’s a whole language that exists around R.H.O.N.Y., and it’s incredible. This is stuff no one could script. It’d be considered too absurd.”

Absurdity is the perfect descriptor for the series, which features story lines that often beggar belief. While the first Real Housewives series, Orange County, premiered a full two years before R.H.O.N.Y., it was the latter’s mercurial cast members, wild story lines, and over-the-top drama that made the franchise into the juggernaut it is today. From Kelly Bensimon’s Scary Island meltdown to Aviva Drescher throwing her fake leg at a dinner party to Ramona Singer’s seemingly demon-possessed catwalk during New York Fashion Week, R.H.O.N.Y. is so consistently shocking that missing a single episode means losing out on some of the craziest moments on television.

The series reached new heights of ludicrousness when Luann de Lesseps married Tom D’Agostino in a lavish Palm Beach wedding in 2017’s Season 9, despite his multiple transgressions—a list longer than Ramona’s wine-shop receipt. None of her castmates could believe the former countess would go through with what felt like a sham wedding; everyone could believe that by the Season 10 premiere, which airs on Bravo April 4, de Lesseps would be divorcing D’Agostino, conveniently forgetting that she had called the very friends who’d tried to warn her “jealous bitches” on multiple occasions.

Events like this are par for the course on R.H.O.N.Y., which is greatly enhanced by the shared history of the women as well as the somewhat incestuous nature of their social circle. As Cohen recalls, “There was a moment we became aware of, I think it was back in Season 1 or Season 2, where Tom comes into a bar and tries to flirt with Ramona and her friends. Who would believe that years later, Tom would end up marrying Luann and we’d have that moment on tape? That’s just a small example of the kind of connections being made here.”

Those connections are true to life—even if the show itself emphatically isn’t. “A lot of people have said these women don’t represent New York City, and they don’t,” Cohen says. “They represent a very specific group of women in the city who live their lives in a certain way. I mean, they all sleep with the same men, they all go to the same places. They’re running into each other constantly. There’s a lot of overlap happening there.”

While these Housewives—the current cast includes Bethenny Frankel, Carole Radziwill, Dorinda Medley, Tinsley Mortimer, Sonja Morgan, de Lesseps, and Singer—spend more time screaming and gossiping than, say, doing any actual homemaking, Cohen insists that there’s an underlying bond of friendship here, something unique to this corner of the Real Housewives franchise.