Well, little Pumptinis…Vanderpump Rules as we know it is finished. On November 26, Bravo announced that the show had been renewed for Season 12, but would be recast with new faces from SUR and TomTom. After a truly terrible season, I can’t lie: I’m relieved.
Fans rushed to blame their least favorite members of the cast for the reboot (okay, they were mostly blaming Lala and Scheana), but the decision feels more like a reconsolidation of power for Bravo than the fault of any one former SURver. Yes, the reboot is Bravo cutting loose an expensive and underperforming cast, but it’s also a warning to talent across the network and an escape hatch from a toxic fanbase.
Feuds are nothing new in the Bravoverse, but left unchecked can paralyze a show. Case in point: The Real Housewives of New Jersey, who have been locked in a yearslong detente between Team Teresa and Team Melissa. Things got so bad by this last season that for only the second time in Housewives history, the network didn’t even bother holding a reunion. (Real Housewives of New York’s Season 13 reunion holds the dubious honor of being the first — due to an investigation into racist remarks made by Ramona — and as any Bravo fan knows, RHONY also got rebooted first.) Now, RHONJ is on pause, and a full reboot seems all but guaranteed.
So it makes sense that producers put so much weight on Sandoval and Ariana reaching some sort of resolve. But rather than having a “come to Jesus” meeting or throwing a Hail Mary the night of the finale party to force the exes to film a disingenuous one-on-one conversation, a more effective team would have pushed the exes to do individual reflection with other scene partners throughout the season.
It would have been an uphill battle. Ariana was perfectly positioned to expose the depth of Sandoval’s toxic playbook, but to do so would require honesty about her enthusiastic participation in it for nearly a decade. Instead, she hid behind a mélange of therapy-speak and faux-feminism to avoid saying anything deeper about her breakup than “it was traumatic,” in that way white women do when they want to cast any criticism of them as misogyny.
Meanwhile, Sandoval would film a colonoscopy if he got paid for it, but his idea of a good scene was whining about how he was the real victim of the affair, how much he had suffered from his friends and the fanbase turning on him, how much sympathy he deserved. Cue eye rolls.
If I know this, then certainly the producers should have too. That they went into the season without a plan for how to coax honesty out of their historically squirrelly central players seems like a massive oversight. Who knows if they tried and just didn’t get there, but at the very least, producers should have asked the uncomfortable questions in confessional interviews so the audience could see the exes’ squirmy answers.
By and large, the cast wasn’t going to do it. The fan response to Scandoval was bad even by Bravo standards, and the audience’s rage became its own storyline — the vandalism at Schwartz and Sandy’s and harassment of its waitstaff; Sandoval’s acquaintances getting harassed for following him on Instagram; Billie Lee subjected to transphobic hate; Scheana slammed for attending a cast trip that Sandoval was also on.
Catapulted from Z-list to D-list overnight, the Vanderpump cast buckled under fear of more public backlash. Not until the reunion did we learn that James and Scheana played to fan sentiment throughout the season, that the women (sans Ariana) had side conversations about why they didn’t receive as much fan support after their breakups, and that Katie had hidden a laundry list of grievances about Ariana from the cameras.
They weren’t wrong to be intimidated. As the season aired, already furious fans only became more so. I wrote in May: “In the past few weeks, angry fans have review-bombed Lala’s podcast so that its rating dropped from 4.8 stars to 3.1, and co-opted the Blockout 2024 trend to punish Scheana and Lala for their performance this season. One irate Reddit poster compared them to dogs whelping puppies.” This is, to put it lightly, unhinged and antisocial behavior, so I don’t blame the cast for not wanting the noise. Unfortunately, a fearful cast will never make honest or interesting television.
To Lala and Scheana’s credit, they were the most truthful about their feelings and tried the hardest to get Ariana and Sandoval to open up. But they didn’t go far enough, sitting too long on information that would have forced honest conversation. Do you think Tamra (Real Housewives of Orange County) would ever let Shannon get away with shit-talking Heather for months off-camera, then switching it up during filming? She would not.
It seems clear who Bravo wants us to blame for the reboot. Already, two stories quoting anonymous production sources have pointed the finger at the cast — especially Ariana. In People, a source claimed that “everyone was still stuck in their feelings and refusing to bend. The network felt there was no path forward with the group in that capacity.” A source who spoke to Page Six was more explicit: “Ariana was absolutely insistent that she wouldn’t film [with Tom]. And that really pissed off everyone else.” Another production source said the series needed “a cast that were engaged with each other and prepared to film together.”
Bravo probably would have preferred Ariana to quit on her own. That was certainly the message Lisa tried to send at the reunion, when she told Ariana that it’s okay to walk away when you no longer want to move forward with the group. There would have been plenty of story to explore: Sandoval and Schwartz both have new girlfriends and are shuttering their eponymous restaurant, Lala has a new baby, and Katie is dating a man who’s been accused by multiple women of having affairs while he was still married.
The network was in an unenviable position. To move forward with the old cast, they would have had to fire Ariana, which would have been terrible optics and enraged her fans. They could also have canned the Toms/Lala/Scheana, which would have sent the show to its death anyway. Much cheaper to reboot the entire thing for pennies on the dollar and cut loose the baggage of fan loyalties. Now, Bravo has the chance to juice at least one year of ad revenue out of the brand, and even has a chance to make a new hit show. If it flops, they’ve still saved millions in payroll.
There are fringe benefits, too. Sandoval and Ariana are both defendants in a lawsuit brought by former cast member Rachel, and both seem to have broken the law: Sandoval illegally recorded nude videos of her, and Ariana stole copies of those videos off his phone, which the judge in the case described as “illegal as a matter of law.” The cases are still ongoing, and in the event NBCUniversal needs to distance itself from Sandoval or Ariana, it will be a lot easier to replace them on one-off gigs than if they are full-time cast members of a reality show.
Rebooting a highly-rated show also sends a message to Bravo talent: Feud all you want, but never forget the job you’re here to do. And since the RHONJ and Vanderpump pauses were announced, Bravolebs have responded in kind. After months of fighting, Tamra and Shannon kissed and made up — twice — in the last part of the Season 18 reunion. In an interview with People, Amanda (Summer House, which chronicled Carl and Lindsay’s breakup weeks before their wedding) made a point of praising her costars: “They knew that they were signing up to co-exist under the same roof and they really embraced that.” In the age of the Reality Reckoning, it’s a not-so-subtle warning that anyone is replaceable.
I think Vanderpump Rules ended the only way it could have. Twelve years ago, a bunch of idiots with no prospects, no talent, no skills, and seemingly no prefrontal cortexes were given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get famous. They made iconic television at the expense of their mental and physical health and their dignity. Then, they hit their mid-thirties and wanted to be seen as respectable and aspirational. Unfortunately, they were not, and the more they tried to act like they were, the worse the show became.
How fitting that this group of philandering half-wits, who spent the last decade making the worst decisions possible, were only handed a second once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — this time, to revive their dying show — because of Sandoval and Rachel’s colossally terrible decision. How fitting that they banded together one last time to make a total bungle of that opportunity.
In its heyday, there was no show like Vanderpump Rules. Even when it was bad, it was still one of contemporary pop-culture’s most important studies of misogyny. But all good things must come to an end, and as far as reboots go this one doesn’t feel particularly high-risk. Unlike Housewives, Vanderpump has never depicted an enviable lifestyle — it’s all “there but for the grace of God go I.” Restaurant staff who party and sleep with each other aren’t exactly an endangered species, and in Los Angeles of all places it can’t be that difficult to find a new group of twentysomethings as desperate and drunk as the OGs.
Spekaing of the OGs, this isn’t the last we’ll see of them. Lala, Scheana and Schwartz will appear on Season 2 of The Valley — Vanderpump’s spiritual successor — and Jax’s renewed friendship with Sandoval suggests that he may not be far behind. Specifically naming TomTom as a setting for the Vanderpump reboot opens the doors for the Toms to appear here and there. I’d be surprised to ever see Ariana on a Bravo show again, but she’ll be booked for NBCU gigs as long as she can draw in viewers. Only James and Katie have no clear path forward with the network, but their other ventures — DJing and podcasting/sandwiching — are up and running. Against all odds, it seems like everybody is going to be fine.
There may never be another show like Vanderpump Rules, but we don’t need one. After all, next season of The Valley features Jax’s stint in a mental health faciity, his divorce from Brittany, Kristen and Luke’s engagement, and Michelle and Jesse trying to coparent. With television like that to look forward to, who needs Top Golf and paintball?