Of all the phenomena that have made reality television worse over the last two decades (fans’ parasocial behavior fueled by social media access comes to mind), one of the most frustrating is the “teams” mindset. Casts that split into immutable alliances kill any possibility of dramatic development. If Sarah is always going to side with Mary, and Alice will forever choose Betty’s side, the cast will forever be locked into the same fight over and over again.
The best casts are the ones with zero loyalty. The Real Housewives of New York is peak — in their heyday, the New York ‘wives handled each fight as an independent entity, choosing sides based on their evaluation of the situation and not blind allegiances. Sometimes alignments would even shift mid-fight, creating an environment where each and every woman had to come to filming prepared to do battle.
The Valley is shaping up to be just such a cast. After last week’s episode, I thought I had a decent sense of where loyalties lay — Kristen-Nia-Luke-Danny vs. Janet-Jason-Jasmine, with Jesse, Michelle, Jax, and Brittany too preoccupied with their hellish divorces and Zack too irrelevant to the larger group dynamics to be involved in the season’s main rivalry. But this week, the most dysfunctional friend group on television happily proved me wrong, blowing up their alliances for the sake of an incredibly perplexing fight.
We open with a debrief post-Brittany’s shark party. Jason, Janet, Brittany, and the ever-present Jared Lipscomb have gathered at my beloved Schea-Shu’s to eat her famous enchiladas and talk shit. Janet and Jason got worked up after speaking to Janet’s mother, who apparently cried because she was so distraught at the rumor (ringmor? Is this anything?). After laughing off the rumor at the shark party, they’ve returned in a fury at not just Kristen but also Jasmine, who they seem to believe started this rumor. “That is NOT my friend!” Janet says. On Kristen: “You just put a target on your back, bitch.”
Most of the cast gathers for yet another ill-fated beach day. Jesse, Zack, Danny, and Nia weren’t there, which I didn’t even realize until the producers showed a clip of them playing cornhole later in the episode. Not a great sign for the B-team! Scheana, the hardest-working woman on reality television, has primed the group for a fight by telling Kristen what Janet said about her at enchilada night. Thank you, Schea-Shu.
Jason and Janet arrive first, joined by Brittany, who tries to tell them that Jasmine never believed the rumor. Kristen and Jasmine show up together, because they’re “both over Janet.” Like Janet’s mom, Kristen has done some riling up of her own to rally Jasmine to her Janet-hating side. “She’s getting nothing from me,” Jasmine says when asked if she will apologize.
When the entire group is assembled, Jason asks Janet if she wants to pull Jasmine aside. Janet says it’s not their job to initiate conversations with people who don’t give a shit about her, but in fact that is exactly what her job is when cameras are rolling. Jason understands this, and corrals Jasmine to ask her what is going on.
What follows can only be described as a bizarre performance from Jasmine. She’s immediately heated, and says she heard the rumor years ago, didn’t care then, and doesn’t care now. Janet asks when she first heard the rumor — a question I would like the answer to as well — and Jasmine flips. She starts yelling at Janet to shut up because she’s speaking to Jason right now, calling her a vibe-killer, exhausting, and a shit friend who gives Karen energy.
None of this is incorrect! Janet is very much all of those things. She also proves once again that she would rather flee from a fight than stand her ground, by far my biggest gripe with her as a reality star. But the intensity of Jasmine’s reaction is confusing too, and makes me feel like we’re missing a huge piece of Jasmine-Janet history. Jasmine even says that she has plenty of things to take up with Janet but can’t, because Janet keeps running away. I would love to know what those things are!
The most frustrating part of this fight is that Jasmine and Janet have their guns trained on each other when they should be pointed at other people. Janet’s beef with Jasmine seems to be that she shouldn’t have repeated the rumor at a time when she wasn’t on good terms with Kristen, but it’s hard to know whether that’s true without an accounting of the timeline. In any case, Kristen is the one who brought this rumor to the cameras, not Jasmine, and she says she heard it from Zack. Meanwhile, Jasmine’s upset by Janet’s accusations, but a better friend would have taken that rumor directly to its subject when it first surfaced. In short, they’re both wrong, and they’re getting played by the person who started this fire in the first place.
At a post-beach day debrief with Zack, Danny, Nia, and Kristen, Nia takes Jasmine’s side. After a fraught few weeks in which Jasmine has been positioned as attacking the Booko-Sanchez marriage, Miss USA seems to have spotted an opportunity to bolster her anti-Janet campaign. “Janet is targeting my husband” is an easier fight to win than “The woman my husband drunkenly groped is still upset about it,” after all.
Back at Jason and Janet’s, Janet is really hamming things up. She says Jasmine’s tirade feels like “being dumped out of nowhere,” and that the two have been incredibly close for years. Based on last season, when Jasmine bristled at Janet’s tone and being asked to choose between her and Zack, I’m not so sure this is true, but Janet is working it as hard as she can, even going so far as to say baby Cameron is affected by her energy for the first time since he’s been born. Perhaps she, like Nia, has decided it will easier to win the fight she’s picking with Jasmine than the one with the person who’s responsible for all of this chaos: Kristen.
This is the kind of good old-fashioned reality fight that shakes up existing alliances, dredges up historical hurts, and puts each participant’s reality television game on full display. The rumor is also, despite Janet and Jason acting like they’ve been dealt a mortal blow, pretty low-stakes — not a single person seems to believe it, not even Kristen, and the whole thing would have blown over by now if Janet and Jason had just left well enough alone.
But it’s not all low-stakes here on The Valley, as yet another Jax appearance via FaceTime and sinister texts proves. Jason, who’s quickly proving himself willing to take on the conversations no one else will for the sake of plot development, calls Jax in the asylum to see how he’s doing Jax gives the latest version of his “work in progress” speech, moaning about how tired he is of anger and yelling, how he wants to break the cycle, and how he wishes Brittany left him a long time ago. He also says he plans to give Brittany all of the money from their then-joint podcast as penance for skipping out on their mortgage, which he now owes more than $100,000 on.
To the uninitiated, it might sound like Jax is sincere and contrite. Jason and Janet certainly swallow it all hook, line, and sinker, praising him for finally taking accountability — which they will come to regret. Sure enough, just one commercial break later, the truth comes out.
Brittany is on FaceTime with Jax’s sister Jenny as she moves back into the Cauchis’ marital home. She says she can’t find her wedding rings anywhere, probably because Jax sold them on his eBay shoppe. At that moment, a producer runs into frame to show Brittany a text from Jax: “Make sure you get that on film. I can hear everything. Childish behavior.” Clearly, Jax is watching his home camera feeds 24/7 from the asylum, and once again I would like to know what kind of a hack facility this is. His ass should be in therapy! Jax takes this moment to tell Jenny that he’s getting high blood pressure and is headed to the hospital just in case he’s having a heart attack, which Brittany is rightfully skeptical of.
The other tidbit that comes out is that Jax’s podcast generosity is an utter ruse, because of course it is. Brittany reads aloud an email from Jax himself stating that he’s spoken to the bank, that their home is in foreclosure, and that she will be responsible for the entire mortgage until they sell the house if she’s going to live there. This man will never, ever change.
Next week, Danny gets excessively drunk at Jax’s Studio City again, prompting a new nickname — Danny Darko — and Janet and Nia’s feud continues to escalate. As a firm believer that we have yet to see the worst of Darkside Danny, I am praying that he shows his whole ass this time, preferably without grabbing anyone else’s.
Balls and chains
- Scheana steals every scene she’s in, revealing that she got hemorrhoids after anal sex due to the size of Brock’s…well, you know. I cherish her.
- Groundwork is being laid for a rift between Zack and Brittany. Apparently, Zack said something horrible about Jared at the shark party after filming ended, which marks the second time that he has apparently gone too far off-camera. (The first was after the Season 1 finale party, where Scheana insinuated that he made comments about Janet’s past mental health struggles.) Is there a plot to smear Mr. Wickham, or is he really as cruel as Janet claims he is? I don’t trust anyone here, so I’m withholding judgment until something happens that we can see for ourselves.
- Nia and Danny go to lymphatic massage to discuss adding yet another child to their brood. Pretty soon, they’ll be able to field the starting lineup of a basketball team. Maybe it’s because I’m not a megachurch Christian, but I simply cannot relate to this insatiable desire to breed. In any case, thank goodness the cast is calling Danny out for his drinking — can you imagine if this solo footage was the only contribution the Booko-Sanchezes made to this show?