We all knew before this new batch of episodes started that “Real Housewives” husband Russell Armstrong killed himself in August 2011. We knew that some of his family members blamed the unrelenting public scrutiny built into the show’s production for hastening his death, and that the tension with his wife, Taylor, was more than a tabloid spat between shallow rich folk — that it was, in fact, symptomatic of something far darker than the typical unscripted cable show could handle. But “Real Housewives” either ineptly failed to integrate our awareness of the tragedy into the plot in any meaningful way, or else decided to plug its ears and tiptoe through the hand-woven silk origami tulips. Is this approach evidence of a conscious creative choice — the calm before the storm? If this franchise weren’t so committed to manufactured melodrama and toxic materialism, I’d offer a very tentative “yes,” but I suspect it’s more likely the case of the show not having the slightest clue of what to do with such explosive material — material that it frankly never should have tried to deal with on-screen, because it is morally, intellectually and creatively unequipped to get anywhere near it without making it dishonest and trite. We’re not talking about “Deadliest Catch” here, or even “Survivor” or freaking “Celebrity Rehab.” It’s “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”

We’ve watched Taylor, Lisa, Kyle, Kim, Camille, Adrienne and friends skate through life same as always, planning million-dollar Las Vegas bachelorette parties and attending an engagement shindig in a Rhode Island-size mansion with a secret orgy room. We’ve seen them scowl and gripe their way through Russell and Taylor Armstrong’s daughter Kennedy’s fifth birthday party, a presidentially lavish affair that included a private performance by a pop star the child had never heard of and the gift of a horse that probably no one in her family would ever visit again.

The show’s standard M.O. — showcase copious wealth; watch rich women get drunk and shriek at each other; repeat — seemed grotesque enough in this political climate. Season 2 of “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” aired during a fall dominated by images of citizens protesting corporate welfare and the unfair accumulation of wealth by the super-rich.  But when you factor in Russell Armstrong’s suicide and the show’s craven and repugnant handling of same, “Real Housewives” goes from irksome to obscene. The show’s wacky “Desperate Houswives”-rip-off score, with its plucked violins going “Doot doot DOOT doot!”  as the show’s soused heroines stumble from one catfight to the next, is creepy enough to make Bernard Herrmann shiver in his grave.

In the last few episodes, “Real Housewives” has introduced and stridently repeated accusations that Russell Armstrong beat his wife and even broke her jaw. But because this was never an overt factor in the narrative before Season 2, and because it’s been framed in fuzzy third-hand terms — with Camille repeating stories that Taylor told her about events that happened off-camera, and warning her, “You need to be honest, because that’s not cool!” — the whole thing reeks of opportunism. It’s as if the producers had an emergency meeting after the suicide and, after what felt like an appropriate interval of weeping and binge-drinking, agreed that in every crisis lies opportunity.

When “Real Housewives” frames the tension between Camille and Taylor as a case of two friends fighting over inappropriate disclosure of a secret — in this case, alleged domestic abuse of Taylor by Russell — the show cluelessly reinforces the same cycles of dysfunction that it congratulates itself for bravely addressing. (Taylor spoke to People Magazine about the abuse allegations near the end of the show’s season two production cycle, and a month before her husband’s suicide.) And then the series manages to make things even worse, by tacitly vilifying a man who cannot defend himself against the charges that the characters and the producers are lodging against him. Russell has made very few appearances in the narrative, but every time he shows up on-screen, the editors fixate on his most glowering, coldly furious expressions, and the score shifts into a menacing atonality. There was a moment during the pony party episode where Russell and Taylor had words, and the music went into super-scary “All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy” mode. I half-expected an “Omen”-style close-up of Russell with glowing red eyes.

It’s possible that such moments of coiled anger are indicative of a homicidal monster who would fly into a lethal rage if he weren’t at a child’s birthday party. But it might also be evidence of slowly accumulating frustration and anger that all those cameras were constantly poking their lenses into every corner of his life, encouraging his wife and her friends to guzzle massive amounts of alcohol at every possible opportunity and “confide” in each other under hot lights and grow unhinged enough to call each other bitches and whores and worse — and that all of it would ultimately end up on national television and the covers of tabloids.

The distorting effect of all those lights and cameras cannot be discounted when we think about the tragedy of the Armstrong household. The whole thing is unnatural, bizarre, sick. Human beings were just not meant to live their lives this way. We should never forget that, ever. Even politicians, star athletes and rock stars have more privacy than these people. We can speculate that Russell Armstrong may in fact have been an abusive brute, or that Taylor may have been exaggerating or inventing details after the fact; we’ll probably never know for sure.

But I think we can agree that “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” is not the best forum in which to examine the matter, and that if it could not restrain itself from continuing, it should have tried to find some way to present all this heartbreak and horror with a shred of nuance and intelligence. It should not have presented Russell Armstrong as a psycho powder keg, and played up the sewing-circle theatrics of Camille’s disclosures about what Taylor told her, and it should not have added extra layers of nastiness by feasting on Taylor’s meltdown at a party in this week’s episode — a party that almost certainly wouldn’t have existed in the first place, much less spiraled into a drunken, profane screaming match, if the producers of “Real Housewives” hadn’t been perched on the edge of the melodrama with their cameras like electronic vultures. “I hate drama,” Camille told the camera during last night’s episode. Alas, she and the other housewives are required as performers to take part in it anyhow, preferably while swilling down glass after glass of alcohol to make things more “interesting.” And so they do. The program is a zoo, and they’re the self-committed animals we’ve come to gawk at; the producers are sadistic zookeepers, trying to rile up the beasts however they can.

I am not saying that “Real Housewives” killed Russell Armstrong, or that its intrusions had some bearing on whatever happened between him and Taylor behind closed doors. But there is no universe in which appearing on a show like this could have helped them. There’s no universe in which one can defend “Real Housewives” for the way it has dealt with this tragedy. And there’s no universe in which one can simply brush off the series as a “guilty pleasure” — not after watching the cast members, the producers and the network continue to exploit this catastrophe week in and week out. And anyone who watches a series like this for pleasure and discusses it as frivolous entertainment — as if it were a cooking or travel show or even a “Jackass”-style stunt compendium, or worse still, as if the “characters” weren’t actual people who agreed to let themselves be exploited and distorted by television — is “guilty,” indeed.

Everything about this season has embraced the ugliest and most reductive cliches about so-called reality television. The producers’ and the network’s financially motivated determination to go forward with the season under the guise of truth, healing and closure was disgusting enough. The housewives’ continuing to participate in offscreen P.R. — as if they were appearing on “The Amazing Race” or “Dancing With the Stars” — has been revolting, too. Last night, Taylor Armstrong told “Watch What Happens Live” that her behavior at the drunken Malibu party was the result of being abused by her husband. She never mentioned the hothouse environment of the TV series, with its circling cameras, bright lights and drama-lubricating booze, as factors. “My biggest fears were unraveling,” she said. “I was losing my mind. I was really terrified.”

Emotional pornography, thy name is Bravo.

Update: This piece has been corrected to straighten out the chronology of Taylor Armstrong’s public statements about being abused.

Armstrong’s lawyer, Ronald Richards, speaking to ABC, noted that: “These couples join these shows, and then they keep trying to outdo each other and they end up spending all their money trying to sustain a lifestyle that’s unrealistic and wasn’t there prior to the show,” said Richards. “The weekly social events, the dinners and all the BS, trying to pretend you have unlimited resources in Beverly Hills is tough.”

The couple clearly had issues. In an interview with People in July, Taylor Armstrong said that Russell had been physically abusive. Russell admitted pushing his wife. “It was during a time in our lives that was not characteristic of who we were,” he said. “This show has literally pushed us to the limit.”

So how complicit is the franchise so many people love to hate-watch? Can we ever look at it as mere train-wreck entertainment again? We went to the experts for answers, the people who get paid to recap “Real Housewives” for newspapers and websites.

Gabe Delahaye, the editor of Videogum.com, stopped his recaps last year but says that “reality TV in general has a real death problem.” The shows attract “miserable people who quickly learn that being on a reality show is not the solution to their problems.”

Does that make the audience complicit as well?

I don’t think there’s any guilt for the audience, I don’t buy that. I mean, you can make the long-range argument that we create the market for these shows, and that we are therefore complicit, but that feels really thin to me. We also create the market for “Inception” and “Avatar” and “The Wire” and “Game of Thrones.” The world is a big place and the market is fractured. People who like stupid stuff also like smart stuff, and vice versa.

I do think that the producers of the show can bear as much responsibility as we feel like dumping on them. I am willing to believe that the producers are good people, and that they genuinely care about their shows and the people on their shows. I am even willing to believe that they view them as real people with real feelings problems, even if that’s not how they end up portraying them on TV. But at the end of the day, they are also the ones creating this environment.

Lizzie Skurnick blogs about “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” for the L.A. Times, and writes frequently about the franchise. When asked if she thought Armstrong’s death would force the show to change its format, Skurnick answered, “Not at all.” In fact, she considers these relationship issues to be one of the driving forces of the show.

“The theme of problematic marriages has been a staple of the show since the beginning,” Skurnick tells me over the phone. “Vicki Gunvalson and her husband were having issues and broke up on the first ‘Housewives’ show: ‘The Real Housewives of Orange County.’ It began as interesting drama, but it’s mutated to the point where the show itself has affected relationships. Nene from ‘Atlanta’ is also getting a divorce. The Camille/Kelsey Grammer story from the ‘Beverly Hills’ show is fascinating because Kelsey reportedly urged Camille to do the show so she would stay in L.A. and he could go have an affair.”

Skurnick says that husbands often don’t understand what being a character on the show involves. Russell was portrayed as a distant and unaffectionate husband; their marital struggles were a theme of the first two seasons.

A lot of them made their money in real estate, in finance, and it’s not always something they want to shed a lot of light on. I think it’s possible that in a lot of these marriages, the wives are flailing and the husbands think, “Well, this is something to amuse my wife.” What they don’t realize is that they are becoming a character… and in the case of Russell, you start to hear these stories about spousal abuse. His portrayal on the show was very cold and distant, and I think that’s not something he was expecting, so he moved away from it, and away from Taylor. And with Armstrong, she is truly a ‘desperate’ housewife’: she will find a way to play up the death as it affects her, though it’s not clear that this will be something that is actually shown on the program.

Ben Mandelker, a screenwriter who runs the reality show-centric B-Side Blog, believes the show’s producers will find a way forward.

“As for Russell, that’s a tragic situation, but I’m not sure you can blame the show for that,” he said. “Taylor and Russell knew what they were getting into — the show had been around a few years at that point. It sounds like the demons that ultimately consumed Russell would have been there no matter what. Reality TV is the easy thing to blame, but c’mon, look at Andy Cohen. With that big goofy grin, do we really think he could push someone to their death? Hmmm … don’t answer that.”

2. Cancellation of the day: Sorry, Kate Gosselin, your money train is at an end, as TLC has just canceled ” Kate Plus 8.”  Don’t worry, I’m sure you will find other ways to exploit your children for cash … maybe have the younger ones try out for “Toddlers & Tiaras”?

3. Preemptive grieving of the day: We knew this moment would come, but we still don’t feel prepared to hear that next season will be the finale of “Breaking Bad.” I’m thinking there’s a spinoff in the works with Kate Gosselin as Bryan Cranston’s quirky new love interest.

4. Birth of the day: Tina Fey’s second daughter, Penelope Athena. Oh come on, Tina! You aren’t even going to try to make things interesting by naming your kid after a piece of machinery or your favorite food?

5. Hot androgyny of the day: To get everyone pumped up for Fashion Week, New York magazine profiled the beatific Andrej Pejic, who models both male and female lines on the runway, and who claims to have “left (his) gender open to artistic interpretation.”

Then, this week — in a move that somehow coincided with the season premiere of the now Staub-free “Real Housewives” — the news came that Staub, who celebrated her last birthday at Scores, had signed a three-year contract with the famed gentleman’s club to perform “raw and fully uncensored” for its clubs and Web site.

But when photos of Staub enthusiastically working the pole predictably emerged, the former housewife had her aha moment, and, as she says, “walked away.” Staub, who has been open in the past about her prior history as an exotic dancer and escort, told People in a statement Wednesday that “My low self-esteem derived from childhood sexual abuse has messed with my mind and self-worth, and over the years I thought about getting help but pushed it deep into the depths of denial. For years I have had the suicide hotline on my cell phone and would like nothing more than to free myself from this constant pressure. Seeing how I have hurt myself and my family this time, I can no longer push it behind me.”

There is, should you choose to view it, a nine-plus-minute clip of Staub shimmying off her pushup bra, miniskirt, and thong on the Scores Live page, right above an invitation to judge whether “you feel Danielle Staub is hot enough to be a Scores dancer?” Trust me when I say, there isn’t anything about that full vulva-cam video, the accompanying text, or the comments underneath that will do anything to alleviate Staub’s admitted low self-esteem.

Staub says she was “coaxed” into doing the Scores gig, but God knows she wouldn’t be the first woman in adult entertainment to say she was sexually abused. And it’s clear that Staub, who wrote in her memoir of being molested in her bed as a child by a “relative or family friend,” is still working through her traumas.

The future prospects for Staub, who was recently named part of the reality cast from hell for a restaurant-themed VH1 series featuring Heidi Montag, Jake Pavelka, and Ashley Dupre, are still up in the air. That she’s seeking help can only be a good thing after all the obvious pain just beneath the diva act and ass grinding. No one deserves to have a suicide hotline on her speed dial. But she’s not quietly retreating for some time out of the spotlight and therapy. Instead, she’s done what any former reality star might do when faced with a personal crisis. She tells People she’s sought out help from none other than a fellow VH1 star  — “Celebrity Rehab” host Dr. Drew Pinsky. She may no longer be dancing, but don’t expect Danielle Staub to stop thinking of her next move.

In fact, switching back and forth between AMC’s upcoming zombie apocalypse “The Walking Dead,” (premieres 10 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 31) and Bravo’s latest installation in the “Real Housewives” franchise, it’s tough to say which specter of dystopian despair chills me to the bone more completely. Here we have a zombie, cut off at the torso, dragging itself through the grass like a fish. But over here, we have Camille, Kelsey Grammer’s wife, who has four nannies, 17 acres and a private jet, but still needs to “get a little attention” for herself, according to her husband. Here we have a chained door with the words “Dead Inside, Do Not Open” written across it. Over here, though, we find Kim, a worried-looking mom who confesses that she doesn’t have a life outside of her children. Here we have a drooling, plodding zombie with dead eyes, throwing itself into the path of danger just for a taste of human flesh. But over here, we encounter Taylor, a leggy blonde who says, “I was almost envious, in some respects, of people who were content in living the middle-class lifestyle that they had. It would’ve been much easier not to have such enormous aspirations. It’s a lot of pressure.”

These teetering bubble-boobed zombies are their own worst enemies, you see. They sometimes wish that they were just lumpy and average and sat around in their soft pants eating jalapeno poppers and watching “Oprah” like the rest of the gals they knew back in high school. Life would be so much simpler, if only they had never been afflicted by the Bimbola virus, passed along when you spot a bubble-boobed zombie on the street somewhere, and instead of running for your life (like a normal person might), you think, “I have shiny, long hair, too. Why am I not filthy rich like that starving sea donkey getting into that Aston Martin over there?” “I was a child star, and everyone loved me. Now that I’m older, why don’t I get tons of attention from strangers, like Carmen Electra does?” “I have an anxiety disorder, an eating disorder and a compulsive personality. So why can’t I afford a pair of $3,000 hooker stilettos?”

Once the virus sets in, all hope is lost. You may not have a hunger for reality TV shows about idle rich people, but if you’ve watched lots of zombie movies, then you already know a lot about “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills”:

1. They’re agonizing to watch. Whether they’re dragging their feet across the ground, moaning, their eyes rolling back in their heads, or fidgeting through a dinner with their dismissive, high-roller husbands, Real Housewife zombies are torturous to endure onscreen – and that’s the point, really. Just as the appeal of zombies lies in their uncanny knack for creating suspense and dread, for sticking their dead fingers through little cracks in the barely open window or lurking in the pitch-black basement, the appeal of Real Housewife zombies lies in their ability to systematically destroy everything around them, using only their tumultuous emotions, their weak ego boundaries and their misguided attempts at fame-seeking. Like the undead, they won’t sleep until the world is in flames and the few remaining surviving non-zombies are crouching in their hidey holes, weeping into their hands, begging for mercy from this plague of terror – or at the very least, watching their show on Bravo.

2. They’re not human. Not really. The truly challenging thing about zombies is that you feel like you should have empathy for them, but you just don’t. Shooting zombie women and zombie children in the face in zombie movies might bring a tinge of guilt, but it’s necessary if you’re going to avoid getting eaten alive. In fact, one of the real joys of zombie movies is that they afford a rare opportunity to detest other humanlike nonhumans with impunity. Similarly, the “Real Housewife” franchise presents gaggles of humanlike women who, upon closer inspection, aren’t really human at all. Look closely at them. Stare into their eyes. Remember Linda Hamilton in “Terminator” (huge neck, sinewy arms)? Now think of Pamela Anderson (sculpted, Botoxed tigress face, plumped up lips) and Bruce Jenner (plastic, unmoving features that approximate his boyish self the way a figure in a wax museum might). It’s hard to empathize with a Madame puppet, isn’t it? This unnatural, plastic quality makes the Real Housewife zombies easier to hate – which is, after all, the whole point.

3. They’re starving. But do they crave a triple cheeseburger, or a hunk of your flesh? Who can tell? The only thing that’s clear is that these Real Housewife zombies are absolutely famished, and it’s making them very, very anxious. Why else would Kim, an unmarried mom already struggling to raise four kids, talk wistfully about wanting another baby? “Babies bring so much joy to a home,” she says, as if she’s talking about a new vase of flowers or an in-ground swimming pool. And how else could Camille Grammer imagine that appearing on a zombie reality show presents “an opportunity for me to show that I’m my own person”? With deranged comments like these floating around, you have to remember: These are women who spend most of their time off-camera running on treadmills or struggling through kickboxing workouts or jogging through their enormous estates with their personal trainers. They’re delirious with hunger, and that makes them unpredictable — just ask the mob of zombies who eat a horse alive in “The Walking Dead.” Thankfully, most zombies are very slow-moving (except for NYC Housewife zombie Bethenny Frankel, of course, and that’s why she’s scarier than those speedy undead bastards from “28 Days Later”).

4. They’d eat your face off for a chance at superstardom. Some scientists have theorized that the Bimbola virus actually infects small girls at a young age, via Disney princess movies. Once young ladies are inflicted with this virus, they spend every second imagining themselves the belle of every ball, imagining that their entire success in life hinges on the spotlight hitting their glittery gowns at just the right angle to catch Prince Charming’s (or the 18-49 demographic’s) fancy. While in the early stages, the virus creates a crippling compulsion to twirl and twirl and twirl in front of the mirror, humming, “So this is love, hmmm, so this is love!”, as the virus matures and mutates, it creates other side effects, like an urge to flat-iron your hair or wear leopard prints. Although milder cases resolve by early adulthood, severe sufferers find themselves seeking out the spotlight, no matter what the cost, through their 30s and 40s, whether that means wearing size 2 booty pants to PTA meetings or letting the nanny tuck the kids into bed while they wait in long lines behind velvet ropes to get into nightclubs where other afflicted souls wander, their eyes full of empty longing. The bottom line is that Real Housewife zombies would rip your arm out of its socket and ingest it in a few minutes flat, if that could guarantee them an invite to P. Diddy’s mansion or a guest appearance on some terrible talk radio show. (No, the undead don’t exactly aim high.)

5. They show no mercy. In a related note, the more driven to become perfect and famous and special the zombie housewives are, the more dangerous they become – even to their friends and family. Just listen to zombie housewife Kyle talking about her sister, Kim. “Kim has really made her kids so much the focus of her life that she doesn’t have a lot of great girlfriends. She’s very isolated.” “Kim has always been a big spender … She definitely has an issue with spending.” “Kim is a very codependent person.” At the end of the episode, Kyle confesses that when her mother was on her deathbed, she made Kyle promise that she’d look after poor Kim, but sometimes Kyle thinks she’s going to have to break her promise. Could a living, breathing member of the human race say something so condescending about her own sister in front of a national TV audience? Of course not. Zombies are foul, unforgiving creatures that should be avoided at all costs – except when you can observe them from a safe distance (and cringe and giggle and sneer, then toss and turn in bed all night).

6. There are no happy endings here. Things will end badly for zombies and Real Housewife zombies alike, no matter what. And even though you know that these zombies will destroy everything in their paths, self-destruct, decompose slowly, or all of the above, you still can’t look away. When Taylor says that there are hot girls everywhere to tempt her venture capitalist husband (“Like, oh lord, he’s gonna leave me for a 20-year-old!”) and then she lays out her exit strategy (“I don’t want to put myself in a position where I don’t have the ability to care for myself, in the event that one of these days, you know, the younger better thing comes along. And … you know, things happen!”), it’s just like that scene in every zombie movie where the unseeing zombie walks straight into an axe-wielding hero. Taylor’s husband is as good as gone. Why bother getting painful filler injections (as Taylor does in the first episode) to look younger, when you’re already convinced that random 20-somethings on the street will appeal to your husband more than you do? We know Taylor is going down, and we’re going to have to witness every torturous moment of self-doubt and self-annihilation along the way.

Of course, thanks to the tabloids, we know that Camille Grammer is going down, too. But how many other innocent souls will she take down with her? We won’t know that until the last terrible screams ring out and the final credits roll. Only one thing is for certain: This show will give you nightmares.