With word that Bravo's Real Housewives franchise is expanding to Atlanta this summer, and later to New Jersey, we have to wonder: Will any of them be able to top The Real Housewives of New York City? In its brief eight episodes this spinoff proved to be smarter, cattier and infinitely more entertaining than the Orange County original.

In fact, next to the New York women, the Stepford wives of the OC have the personalities of a mudslide -- if the mudslide wore French manicures, spray tans and sky tops.

Maybe it's because shallow materialism has only so many expressions. And for the Botoxed OC women, that means no expression at all.

Orange County's elites are conformists, which may explain why the county hasn't elected a democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt. The husbands are businessmen, the wives dabble in real estate -- apparently the OC equivalent of New York's philanthropic scene. The architecture is Mediterranean, and the fashion ... don't even get me started on the fashion. The result is a bland sameness bordering on parody.

In New York, the real currency is status, and here's where the show gets delightfully juicy. Social climbing offers an endless supply of faux pas, posturing, score-keeping and fawning. If Coto de Caza is a community college, the Upper East Side is the Ivy League. It's not enough to be invited to a show at Fashion Week; you must be seated in the front row. It's not enough to send your child to a private school; it must be the right private school. Nor is it enough to be wealthy; you need have to connections. Indeed, the word connection appears in the New York version more often than the OC's Vicki Gunvalson shouts "woo-hoo!"

Jill Zarin, a no-nonsense New Yorker who collects party invitations like the rest of us collect coupons, is the connector for this group of housewives. That much is obvious, since it's hard to imagine the crazy-eyed, socially inappropriate Ramona Singer ever rubbing shoulders with the Countess LuAnn de Lesseps. (Actually, Ramona is in the wrong show. She should be living in Coto where she could be switched with Tamra Barney and no one would know the difference.) Yes, a countess named LuAnn and, we predict, a drag icon in the making.

Jill also is the connector for socialite wannabes Alex McCord and Simon van Kempen, the breakout characters in the first season. (They've signed up for season two, and they're now feuding with Jill. Bring it on!) The conjoined couple seem clueless to their own pretentiousness as they shop for designer gowns, scan the New York Times style section for their photos and speak French to their impossibly bratty kids.

In a bit of brilliant casting, the New York show has another advantage over Orange County: natural chef and the show's only single woman, Bethenny Frankel, who serves as a sort of Greek chorus. While the OC women reinforce each other's cloistered, artificial existence, Frankel mocks the silliness of New York society. After being corrected for introducing Mrs. de Lesseps to a driver as LuAnn, she tells producers, "I did not have the countess handbook, I apologize."

Unless the The Real Housewives of New Jersey have husbands who work in "waste management" and are named Tony, or the Atlanta cast includes Whitney Houston, I can't imagine a livelier group to spend couch time with than The Real Housewives of New York.

Shirleen Holt is a former newspaper editor and freelance writer living outside of Portland, Ore.