The third season of Basketball Wives has been a wild success for VH1. With increased online coverage of its various interpersonal conflicts, advertising that focuses on the more explosive elements of the show, and no clique safe from possible implosion, the reality series has set ratings records for its last couple of episodes. While most shows would see this and immediately start coasting, Basketball Wives may be throwing a wrench into the reality television equation.

Earlier this summer, producer Shaunie O’Neal made headlines by proclaiming Basketball Wives to be a positive show, though she’s recently expressed her displeasure at the fact that spin-off Basketball Wives: LA has cast “trash” and that the ratings records for her show came due to the fight in Italy. With that knowledge, and the underlying vibe that she’ll be trying to change things for season four, I have to ask…

Should season four of Basketball Wives stop focusing on the fighting?

I can see why Shaunie may want to back away from the arguing and fisticuffs that have made the show such a success. Basketball Wives has its fair share of detractors and every moment like Tami/Meeka, Jennifer/Eric, and Evelyn/Royce just reinforces the idea that these women are trashy gold diggers with the social graces of a drunk elephant. If these women want to have diverse business endeavors after the show has run its course, they may have to start showing other sides to themselves or risk being pigeon-holed as somebody who can’t act right. Plus, nobody likes having people constantly talking mess about them, so I could see the wives having a season of damage control and filling out each of their personal lives so we get a better sense of who these women are aside from their fighting stances.

However, I just don’t see it happening. As Shaunie has made abundantly clear by her comments this summer, she has a producer’s credit but she can easily be outvoted by the other producers, so she can give lip service to the idea of making a more “adult” show all she wants and it’ll be worthless. Said other producers have saw over the best ratings VH1 has seen in several years and if I were a betting man, I’d say they’ll stay the course for as long as people are interested. The show already does have moments of vulnerability and looks at the personal lives of some of the wives, so it's not as if this is Basketball Wives: Mortal Kombat (although, can we take a sec to imagine how insanely cool this would be?) and we get an hour of fighting. They may leave out Tami's man, Shaunie's charity work, or anything about Suzie, but they include Jennifer's divorce and Evelyn's daughter/father/pregnancy storylines, so the show is not a total lost cause in that aspect.

Personally, I don't have a preference, as I enjoy both modes that the show has. My only hope is that they don't faze out either aspect because they work, especially when juxtaposed together. The stuff with Evelyn's family and Jennifer's quest for independence were the only thing to keep each from becoming the mustache twirling villains that they were for the rest of the season, as we got to see that they were indeed human and not immaculately designed cartoon characters. If the show extended that same treatment to the other women, I wouldn't complain, as seeing fuller realized "characters" makes you understand someone's motivation that much more. Sometimes it seems like these women just run around arbitrarily biting one another's faces off, so to understand where some of that anger comes from would be appreciated, at least by me.

Then again, I don't see the producers messing with the "formula" in the slightest, so what do I know?

Don't answer that.

Basketball Wives airs the second part of its two-part reunion on Monday at 8:00.