The women in Real Housewives of Melbourne want to mesmerise and in a hundred ways, sometimes startlingly, sometimes in free fall, they do. No wonder young gay men see them as icons of flamboyant womanhood and a lot of women see them as versions of themselves. It somersaults and saunters, it sizzles with joie de vivre and malice.

One argument you hear from the detractors is that the formula is reductive: take a few rich women and show them brawling and behaving badly like any group of people whose tribal rites are essentially those of primary schoolyard sadism.

The Real Housewives of Melbourne has plenty to haunt any mind that doesn't automatically want to feel superior to the actuality and pretension of other human beings.

But that doesn't explain what's so compelling. The new season kicked off last week with a central drama about Gamble – blonde, wide-eyed, easy going – marrying her eye surgeon chap, Rick Wolfe. Will she invite Pettifleur – that sumptuous Sri Lankan-born beauty the camera eats up like candy – to the wedding?

Well, Pettifleur did declare in her lilting musical voice (which also tends to the uncompromising) of Gamble, "She's a black widow. She mates and she kills." That somewhat pejorative remark was repeated by the opulent, never less than troublemaking, Lydia, who's about to get a very dazzling new Porsche and has had her Asian housemaid, a serious-looking woman called Joanna, driving her hither and yon in her own humble Japanese car. Should Joanna ever be driven to decapitate Lydia with an ancestral sword it would be hard to complain.