Why Vanderpump Rules matters (again)

This is 40, reality TV edition!

May 26, 2023

If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen my stories over the last several months involving snaps of TV moments featuring annoyed women looking disgusted, because I’ve been riveted by season 10 of “Vanderpump Rules.” I used to watch this Bravo-lebrity show back in the day, but I wandered away several seasons ago. Drawn back in by the social media and tabloid frenzy around an intra-cast cheating scandal, I have found watching Pump Rules in my 40s — and theirs — to be a very different experience. I used to watch the antics of this group of hard-partying social climbers and think, “I’m so glad my life isn’t like this anymore.” Now that they’re dealing with a lot of hard life stuff — family deaths, opening and sustaining businesses, custody battles, second marriages — the storylines feel weirdly relatable. If, like some of my friends, you are bewildered about the appeal of the show, I wrote about why it’s a little like Wharton with spray tans, a bit Austen through beer goggles, and why the stealth villain of the show has been the Other Tom — Tom Schwartz — all along.

Here’s where we begin:

I have been thinking deeply about Bravo's "Vanderpump Rules" lately. In my defense, the show broke its agreement with us — to not ever make its fans think too deeply — first. Like much of the internet and several of my group chats, it started with the off-camera reveal in March that veteran cast member and bartender turned lounge owner Tom Sandoval — he of the midlife crisis cover band and mustache — had been cheating on his partner of nine years, castmate and preternaturally chill peacemaker Ariana Madix, with her much younger "best friend" Raquel (née Rachel) Leviss, the pageant princess slash ex-fiancée of haunted Victorian doll-turned-DJ James Kennedy.

Far from a simple drunken hookup — the fuel that ran this show in its youth — Sandoval and Raquel carried on a full-blown secret love affair under the nose of Bravo's production team (and, as the cast euphemistically refers to themselves as, "the friend group") in the Valley Village house where his long-term girlfriend was grieving the deaths of her beloved grandmother and dog between trying to open her own business and to get Sandoval to stay sober long enough to fertilize her frozen eggs. Pass the Pumptinis, this is some bleak adult shit! 

Please give it a read over at Salon, where I examine how the show framed Schwartz’s treatment of his girlfriend/wife/ex-wife Katie Maloney, creating the kind of environment where a Scandoval could thrive.

And … Big North Star Energy here: 

The new “Barbie” movie trailer, where in the middle of her birthday choreographed dance party she turns to her fellow Barbies and says, “Do you guys ever think about dying?” Greta Gerwig has said that when she first considered making a Barbie movie, she realized it could be a career-ending move. And she said, basically, let’s f-ing go. I can’t wait to see this one. Here’s to stretching ourselves and embracing the scariest creative challenges, hair teased high but feet flat on the ground.