Vanderpump Rules Should Have Done This Years Ago

TFW you broke the fourth wall. Photo: Griffin Nagel/Bravo

And lo, the phrase of the day for Vanderpump Rules is no longer “Scandoval.” Instead, as Andy Cohen’s reunion cue cards keep reminding him and us both, this 11th season now hinges on the cast “finally” breaking the fourth wall by acknowledging that they’re on a show at all.

After 14 strange, saggy episodes limped to the finish line, season-finale “Plot Twist” finished with newly minted golden girl Ariana Madix refusing to indulge her ex in a one-on-one conversation as the rest of the cast raged in confusion over how to keep filming. Tom Sandoval spit nasty asides to anyone who would listen about how “lazy” Ariana was to not engage with him, a startling but not at all surprising 180 from the groveling act he’d put on when he assumed he was being filmed. But Madix held firm, telling an overwhelmed producer that all Sandoval wanted was “30 seconds with the audience” before grabbing her new boyfriend’s hand and leaving for Applebee’s (an admirable escape plan in any scenario; when in doubt, go get mozz sticks).

“I have thoughts that I’ve been biting my tongue on,” seethed Lala Kent, one of Vanderpump’s most reliable drama-stirrers. Then, instead of cutting away as the show normally would, the cameras stayed on her, letting Lala rip into Ariana not as her friend but as her co-worker on a series in danger of losing its way.

Vanderpump Rules hyped up this scene all season, teasing it in trailers and promos that ended in a burst of symbolically shattered glass, to make it clear that this is A Turning Point, that There’s No Going Back Now, that Nothing Will Ever Be the Same. It’s even taking a page out of The Traitors’s book by having the cast watch it for the first time together to get their reactions in real time, though of course it’s saving this juiciest moment for the final reunion episode next week. But from where I’m standing (an island flooded with so much useless knowledge from Vanderpump’s extratextual universe that the only way off is to probably just give up and drown), this 11th-hour fourth-wall break is coming years later than it should’ve.

I resisted Vanderpump Rules hard when it first premiered in 2013. I, like the friend group it followed, was also living in shitty L.A. apartments trying to “make it,” or something, and I didn’t really feel like turning on my TV to watch other people make the same mistakes I was (statement necklaces so big they might as well have been chest plates, bleaching my brunette hair an unsettling orange, Vegas in August, etc.). But once I did go back and dive into Vanderpump from its beginning, I realized that flinching at your reflection in the show was half the point. These 20-something friends were messy, selfish, funny, and transcendentally chaotic in a very different way from Bravo’s more glam Housewives, who started their shows with the kind of capital and access that the Lalas and Sandovals of the world would kill for. Instead, the first few seasons of Vanderpump cleverly captured the realities of a friend group perpetually on the edge of stardom, ruin, or both.

With the show’s success, however, came a shift. What was once a reality show about friends in L.A. had evolved into something more like a soap-opera summer job for minor celebrities. (The show always, with the unusual exception of season ten’s format-breaking “#Scandoval” episode, films in summer.) The cast slowly but surely made more money and quit their day jobs slinging goat-cheese balls to tourists and dancing on the most heterosexual float at the Pride parade for Lisa Vanderpump’s amusement. Friends who might’ve naturally drifted apart struggled to stay together, bound as they were by Bravo contracts to remain in each other’s orbit. By season five, Vanderpump Rules was simply no longer the show that started with Scheana Shay walking from a confrontation with then-Housewife Brandi Glanville straight into her shift at SUR.

Whether the producers liked it or not, Vanderpump Rules had become a perversely fascinating case study in what fame, however niche, can do to people and their relationships and how chasing the kind of notoriety that being on a reality show invites will never be satisfying enough to end the pursuit. And yet the series did its best to keep those cracks in its reality from showing. Outside the explosive reunion episodes, Vanderpump rarely tipped off that being on-camera might’ve changed the cast’s group dynamics or that any of them had become famous at all.

When three couples left SUR and bought $2 million-plus houses, there was no acknowledgment that it wouldn’t have been possible without them cashing steady Bravo paychecks. Their hundreds of thousands of social-media followers only came up if, say, those hundreds of thousands of fans swarmed the comments to question someone’s wildly homophobic pastor. The cast’s ever-multiplying podcasts only get mentions when one of them talks so much shit about the other that there’s no ignoring it. Drama that goes down “in New York” is often code for “on Watch What Happens Live!” Most egregiously of all, when original cast members and erstwhile queen-bee rivals Stassi Schroeder and Kristen Doute were fired for falsely calling the police on one of the only Black people the show ever featured, the show never explained their absence. It just returned for the next season without so much as a cursory “They had to go because racism is bad” title card and pretended like they’d never existed (at least until they welcomed Kristen back to anchor The Valley, so, so much for that).

It makes sense that the Vanderpump powers-that-be initially hesitated to shift the approach that first made the show pop. But with so much happening with the cast in between filming, as the excellent podcast Eating for Free states in its (terrifyingly thorough) series on the Vanderpump ecosystem, if you’re only watching the show, you’re only getting half the story. If you were someone who just flipped on Vanderpump every week to zone out for an hour instead of spending its off-season tracking the evolution of Katie Maloney’s haircuts to her current gold standard, you’d have no idea why Stassi and Kristen were there anchoring all the drama one week and gone the next. You’d think the highlight of James Kennedy’s DJ career was making Pumptinis quake on their brunch tables. You’d definitely not catch the reasons for half the show’s arguments as they shifted from botched birthdays to competing #influencer showdowns.

Which brings us back to Scandoval. Tom cheating on Ariana with their mutual friend would’ve always made for a fractured season 11, but the life the story took on outside the confines of Vanderpump Rules immediately changed the game. Having already broken its own format for the season-ten finale by picking up cameras to capture the fallout, the show’s producers had a choice to make. Should they keep up the ruse that this aging friend group is like any other and continue as if Tom and Ariana hadn’t become household names overnight? Or should they capture the result of all-consuming media attention by showing how this fame-chasing friend group, known to its audience for over a decade, reacted to it?

In the end, Vanderpump split the difference, satisfying just about no one. While the season allowed Tom ample space to react to becoming hated on a grander scale than even Jax could ever dream of, it also twisted itself into knots trying to get him and Ariana to have yet another uncomfortable conversation on camera, despite Ariana stating clearly in season ten’s powerful finale that she never would do so again. Fans looked on in bewilderment as her best friend, Scheana, kept wringing her hands over “losing” Sandoval’s supposedly incredible friendship. Lala, undergoing her own horrific breakup with a cheating liar, suddenly became the patron saint of hearing Tom out, reasoning that Ariana was “thriving,” which just felt like code for “Ariana got all these brand deals the rest of us would kill for.” Not that the show bothered to reveal how Ariana was handling all this life-changing goodwill, anyway.

As Scheana tells it now, almost a year after filming wrapped, production allegedly implied that Vanderpump Rules is “an ensemble show about a group of friends” and that it simply wouldn’t work if that ever ceased to be the case. Therefore, she and Lala seemed to reason, Ariana’s steadfast rejection of Sandoval wouldn’t be sustainable for either the show or their livelihoods — so they chose prioritizing what they deemed best for the show over what might be best for their friend.

No matter whose side you’re on, that is exactly the kind of layered conflict that Vanderpump could’ve laid bare. The clash between cast members who believe that stoking tensions into full flame is their job (Lala, Scheana, Tom Sandoval) versus those who see the show as just a documented part of their life (Ariana, Katie, maybe the eternally bemused wet noodle that is Tom Schwartz) has been bubbling up for years. Friend groups break up all the time for far less singular reasons; Scandoval gave Vanderpump Rules a unique opportunity to talk about it all like few other reality shows ever could. Instead, we got 15 episodes of awkward flip-flopping and backstabbing with only vague allusions to what lay at the heart of it, until Ariana’s final walkout frustrated producers enough to let ’em rip.

Vanderpump’s near-absolute refusal to admit that it’s not documenting the lives of random waiters anymore has stifled the transparency that once made it great. Unsure how to handle its own evolution as reality TV, the show just keeps throwing the cast into increasingly nonsensical situations in the hopes of returning to something “real,” only to come off incredibly fake. Unless it’s going to scrap the entire cast and start over with true unknowns (an option, but a huge risk), it needs to show these people’s actual reality, even if it no longer feels “relatable” to its audience. It needs to stop trying to glue the pieces of its shattered fourth wall back together so that it can become something new and far more real.