‘The Real Housewives of Atlanta’ at 15: Why Its Former Stars Left the Show
Don’t be tardy to the (anniversary) party: The Real Housewives of Atlanta is turning 15! The third installment in Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise debuted on October 7, 2008, with Lisa Wu, DeShawn Snow, Kim Zolciak-Biermann, NeNe Leakes, and Shereé Whitfield — pictured above — on the payroll.
Of course, most of those ladies aren’t full-time Housewives anymore, and rumor has it that some or all of the Season 15 cast members might have to give up their peaches, too. In August, Entertainment Tonight reported that “a major shakeup” is coming to the show, perhaps even a reboot like the one that replaced the entire RHONY cast. (A source told Page Six that “nothing official has been decided,” however.)
While we wait for word on Season 16, keep reading to find out why RHOA’s former cast members dropped off the payroll.
DeShawn Snow
Snow told Essence.com after her Season 1 departure that she had been let go — and that she was “fine” with the decision. “[One of the RHOA producers] called and said that I was ‘too human for a circus show’ and that because the show did so well, they are about to pump up the drama and they didn’t think that I would fit in,” she added. “He gave me an example, saying that during the reunion when I found out what a few of the other ladies said about me, they were expecting me to say more, but I’m not the type to go ‘television’ and start acting crazy because somebody’s talking about me.”
Lisa Wu
A “difference in creativity” led to Wu’s Season 2 exit as a full-time RHOA cast member, as she explained to TheJasmineBrand.com in 2014. “If you’re telling me what I should be doing and what my storyline should be, then it sounds scripted to me,” she said. “If it’s scripted, let me do damn scripted. If it’s reality, let it be reality. For me, I just bowed out because I don’t have to do that. … There were certain things that I just would not do.”
Kim Zolciak-Biermann
Zolciak-Biermann walked away from RHOA during the reality show’s fifth season. “I was eight months pregnant, and there was so much drama; I just had to walk,” she later told InTouch at the time (per Complex). “I’ve taken on so much in the past five years, but this was the final straw. My priority was the child inside me.”
Claudia Jordan
Jordan only starred on RHOA for the reality show’s seventh season, and in a 2018 episode of the Brandi Glanville Unfiltered podcast, she said that she left the show because she was interested in acting and hosting a talk show — and that she was being downgraded to “Friend of the Housewives” status anyway. “I fought and earned the peach, and now you want me to come back [with] a pay cut?” she said. “I do it for the money. I’m there for the money. … When you’re downgraded to a friend, they don’t follow your personal story. You just kind of have to be a Housewives’ plus one. So it didn’t make sense.”
Kim Fields
Fields only starred on RHOA for Season 8 because it was “only supposed to be a one-and-done,” she explained on The Breakfast Club last year. “For me, I did what I set out to do. The mandate at that time in my career was, ‘I’m celebrating 40 years in the industry.’ And so [to] my team, I said, ‘Hey, let’s go into uncharted waters. We’re only going to do stuff we’ve never done before.’ And so they kept asking me to do reality for years, and I was like, ‘No, the time is not right. It’s just too much.’ So we said let’s just give that a try and see, but knowing I still had other shows to do, other work to do as a director, as a producer, all kinds of things.”
Phaedra Parks
Parks lost her peach in 2017, when she was dismissed from RHOA after admitting to making up a disturbing story about costars Kandi Burruss and Todd Tucker, per E! News. Andy Cohen explained to the outlet that none of the RHOA stars wanted to film scenes with Parks following that ninth-season drama. For her part, Parks told Entertainment Tonight last year that there are “two sides to that story.”
Shamari DeVoe
DeVoe told TheJasmineBrand that RHOA’s editing was one of the reasons she left the show after Season 11. “There’s a lot in editing, so they make you look like something that you’re not,” she said. “So there was a scene that I did during [RHOA] that was about couples and learning different tools and skills to keep your relationship going. And they cut that whole scene out. But they wanted to show me with my little wine and make it seem like I’m just this drunk or whatever.”
Eva Marcille
Marcille announced through The Rickey Smiling Morning Show in 2020 that she wouldn’t return to RHOA for Season 13. “After speaking with my family and representatives, I believe that what I hope to accomplish for the culture and community will be better served by focusing on other opportunities,” she said. “I have a six-year-old daughter and two young boys still in diapers. They’re 24 hours a day, and there’s a lot of work to be done. And so I decided to spend my time and energy focusing on my kids and my community, and not so much reality show business.”
NeNe Leakes
Leakes left the show after Season 12 after executives offered her only a six-episode part in the 13th season, as she explained on the Reality With the King podcast in August. “Why are [co-stars] being offered 18 episodes, and I am being offered six episodes?” she asked. “What did I do? Because I don’t know anything that I’ve done ever on this show that no other Housewife in this franchise [has] not done. I’ve never done anything that no one else has done.”
Cynthia Bailey
When RHOA returned for a coronavirus-delayed 14th season, Bailey wasn’t part of the cast. “It was time, it was honestly time,” she observed in a 2021 interview with E! News. “I had been thinking about it for a while, just the whole transition. I knew it wasn’t going to last forever. I knew I didn’t want to do it forever. … Then the whole thing happened with us going on hiatus, so it gave me more time to think about it, and then I got really used to not going back.”
Porsha Williams
“I had already decided that it was time for me to step away at least six months before I told any of the executives what I was going to do — and long before I even met my now-husband,” Williams said to People this March, reflecting on her Season 13 departure. “I was turning 40, I was hitting my 10-year mark on the show, and I really just had to reassess where I was and what I wanted totally out of my life. So that’s where that decision came from.”
