Vanderpump Rules recap:  To be or not to be rill

Once upon a time, people knew how to watch reality television. We all understood that we tuned in to our shows of choice to watch emotionally stunted people fight with each other. Bad behavior was not only encouraged, it was celebrated. “Own it!” was the missive pissed-off Bravolebrities lobbed at the cast members they felt were putting on a show for the cameras, hiding how they really felt, playing to the audience. We understood that reality stars chose to walk this path, to share their ugly truths in exchange for a global platform and the opportunity to hawk batteries and garbage bags on the side. We understood that these people — chosen because of, not despite, their utter dysfunction and immaturity — owed fans nothing other than entertainment and honesty.

What the hell happened?

If the finale was about what makes a good reality star, the reunion was about what reality television is even for. When a Bravolebrity signs their contract, what are they obligated to bring to the cameras? What do they owe to the audience? To each other? What are they allowed to keep for themselves? And what happens when their answers conflict with each other?

These are the questions that have hung over Vanderpump Rules’ eleventh season. In a stroke of genius, the producers have the cast watch the final minutes of the fourth-wall-breaking finale together, and finally, finally, finally extract something that feels like honesty.

First, we dispense with a bunch of loose ends nobody cares about. We find out that Jax and the Toms are friends again, just like everyone knew they would be. We rehash the rumors that Katie read about Jax’s infidelity and Sandoval’s accidental Instagram block of Summer Moon. Brock says Scheana has been torn up online for fighting for a 15-year friendship. Ariana says it was hurtful to find out things said behind her back through social media clips. Scheana, who clearly hasn’t gotten over the time Kristen called her “unprofessional” for fast-forwarding through everyone else’s scenes, reminds her that watching the show on TikTok is not the same thing as watching the show. Katie reiterates that Sandoval ruined her marriage, which may be her truth but is hardly the truth. That relationship was doomed from day one. 

Then, the cast watches the end of the finale: Ariana’s walkout, Lala’s frustration, Sandoval’s rage and final hot mic moment. In a delicious editing choice, we watch a split-screen of the finale and the cast’s reactions. Katie rolls her eyes to the high heavens. Ariana’s face drops and gets sadder with every frame. A sinister smile plays on Lisa’s lips, doubtless summoned by her glee that her peons finally delivered some drama. Everyone wells up at the montage of their younger selves. It’s great television! Well done!

And then Ariana finally gets real. She says she’s not “here for Tom’s waterworks thing,” and that his hot mic moment proved her right. Sandoval dissolves into tears that after infinite fake-cries, no longer hold any weight. “You know me well enough to know that this is not acting,” he snuffles. “You knew me, Ariana.”

“I don’t, though,” Ariana chokes out through tears of her own. “I just want you away from me.” She says she didn’t want Sandoval to have his “crying in Miami moment,” and Sandoval apologizes “from the bottom of [his] heart” for “dishonoring” her. “You brought [Rachel] into our lives in a really fucked-up way and now this bitch fucking has to talk about me all the time,” Ariana weeps. “You did that.”

It’s an excellent double-fake. There is no part of me that believes Sandoval’s tears, or that he has any remorse for betraying Ariana. All season, he’s seemed relieved to be out of a relationship that he’s been complaining about on-camera since Season 6. If his tears were genuine, they were for his own reputation, shattered beyond repair by a series of his own terrible choices. 

As for Ariana, her sorrow is clearly genuine. But she’s still not admitting that she’s so heartbroken because she always believed that she and Sandoval’s relationship was different than the one he betrayed with her. Still, this is the most raw we’ve seen her since last year’s reunion, and I have to tip my hat to the producers for getting her to earn her check.

Then we move on to Lala, who finally says the quiet part out loud: She was frustrated by the gulf between how she was grilled after her breakup while Ariana was handled with kid gloves after hers. We flash back to the Season 9 reunion, where nearly everyone — Lisa, Sandoval, James, Scheana, Brock, Ariana, Charli — say they always knew Randall was a bad guy, rolling their eyes and pulling skeptical faces as Lala cried.

Back in the present, Lala shares that she felt isolated all season because she had off-camera conversations with the cast about Ariana but that as soon as filming began, everyone sang a different tune. “No one wanted to speak up on this,” she insists. “I was having conversations by myself. I will be damned if one person doesn’t step up to the fucking plate. I was livid that night. Livid. I’m sorry if I hurt you, but I stand by what I said.”

“I understood where Ariana was coming from,” she continues, starting to cry. “But I was like, why does she get to dictate how this goes down when I’ve never gotten to dictate?”

“Me walking away from that conversation was a lot more interesting than me sitting there and having it,” Ariana retorts. “Was that not a better ending to your season, to give you another season for another paycheck?”

“Had I not spoken my mind, it would have ended with you walking out the door,” Lala replies. 

Next, Andy asks Lala to elaborate on her claim that Sandoval and Ariana never shared the truth of their relationship until he cheated. As Vanderpump Rules scholars know, this is hardly news. For years, the cast said Sandoval and Ariana hid the ugly parts of their relationship from the show. The producers roll unaired footage from last season that seems to confirm this.

“Tom and Ariana tend to present themselves one way on the show,” Season 10 Katie says. “They tend to like, present themselves as having the perfect relationship when I don’t see it as that.”

“Why aren’t we talking about that?” Lala asks. “Because we’re not allowed to,” Katie replies. “Point blank, this is what I’ve seen go on.”

“We were in couples therapy,” Present Day Ariana mutters, which only seems to strengthen Lala’s argument — after all, we never heard about it.

Scheana, who has been suspiciously quiet this whole time, continues to waffle. She’s seen moments when Ariana and Tom had issues, but also moments when they were making out. “Rolling at a music festival, though,” Sandoval mutters. (Ariana overhears, and looks like she’s just been kicked in the stomach. It’s sad. He’s gross!)

Wracked with OCD and terror of the fans, ScheaShu also won’t own up to her statement that Sandoval has been a better friend to her than Ariana has. She flips and flops, claiming she can’t remember events where Sandoval has shown up and Ariana hasn’t.

That’s when Lala loses it. She is straight up not having a good time. “I don’t want to do this anymore,” she cries, getting up and making to leave. “This is not fun for me. I’m the only one who I feel has been honest at all.” Even as she airs Katie out for thinking pre-Scandoval that Ariana hadn’t given much to the show, it feels like she’s still holding back. (“There wasn’t anything to give,” Katie retorts, and I simply do not believe her.)

What makes Lala and Ariana’s clash fascinating is that both of them are right.

Ariana is right that a conversation with Sandoval in San Francisco wouldn’t have added much to the show, inauthentic and performative as it was bound to be. Though the season would have ended on a rather dull note if Lala hadn’t let loose, Ariana’s walkout was the spark that lit that flame. And her boundaries are hers to decide. If Ariana wants to grey-rock and go no-contact with Sandoval, that’s her prerogative.

But to sign a Bravo contract is to ink a deal in your own blood, to legally bind yourself to a group of people you may loathe, but who you have agreed to work with anyway. If you do not want to participate in the exploitative, manipulative mess that is reality television, you simply do not have to.

This seems to be what Lisa, speaking on her choice to quit Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, tries to communicate in the reunion’s final minutes: “If you want to fight because you think you want to go forward, then fight for it. If you want to say, you know what, I’m fucking done — then that’s okay too. Sometimes, it’s okay to walk away.”

It seems increasingly like the space Ariana needs to heal will be impossible to get on Vanderpump Rules. I don’t see how she can protect herself unless either she or Sandoval leaves the show — and with a business in distress, an expensive band, and a complete lack of self-awareness or shame, he isn’t going anywhere. To grey rock someone is to deny them any access to you, to your innermost thoughts, feelings, and emotions. But exposing your innermost thoughts, feelings, and emotions is also the price of entry to reality television. Walking away from a six-figure paycheck is no easy feat, but if her wellbeing is at stake, is there any other option? 

And Lala is right too. Even when she concealed her relationship with Randall, she showed up exactly as she is — a brash, emotional, reactive woman who shoots first and asks questions later. And she has been held to account for her dishonesty for going on nine years, called a whore and a liar by not just producers and castmates but also the audience, grilled by Andy at reunion after reunion after reunion. While she hasn’t been happy about it, she’s still shown up and taken it from everyone. None of that is Ariana’s fault, but Lala and every other woman on the cast have always been subjected to the kind of scrutiny that Ariana was protected from this season.

Lala’s more salient point is that this difference in treatment flowed directly from the image Ariana curated for herself, which made her seem more worthy of protection in the first place.

Ariana has been vulnerable on the show. But what she chose to share was really strength in disguise, vulnerability that was studied and curated. It’s easy to sympathize with a woman who overcomes suicidal ideation, past abuse, and sexual insecurities. It’s not as easy to sympathize with one who owns her full-throated anger (like Katie), freely admits her desire for vengeance (like Kristen), or returns to her cheating paramour (like Brittany).

When it came to her relationship, Ariana painted a picture that evoked Simone de Beauvoir’s description of the woman in love, “endowed with a high and undeniable value, at last allowed to idolize herself through the love she inspires.” Despite her aversion to marriage and motherhood, she embodied traditional values, standing by her man and prioritizing his needs above her own. Her participation in Sandoval’s humiliation of Kristen was laundered through the true-love loophole, her image burnished by the fact that she was a “crazy” person’s cool-girl foil. It’s not a stretch to think that at least part of the pair’s secrecy was rooted in their understanding that the relationship had to appear special enough to justify its origins.

Consciously or not, Ariana set herself up to be idolized and projected on through Sandoval’s love; a better, higher love than her female compatriots were able to squeeze out of their partners. In turn, she was viewed as a better, more worthy, more deserving woman, an image her supporters deploy as sword and shield against anyone who dare disagree with her.

Imagine a world where Sandoval and Ariana had come clean about the timeline and extent of their affair instead of keeping up the lie that Kristen was crazy to suspect them for crossing a line. Where they admitted that Sandoval had cheated on Ariana with Miami Girl just weeks after they started dating, and that she chose to stay with him anyway. Where they let the audience see their fights, their disagreements, the many nights Sandoval wouldn’t come home. Where they discussed Ariana’s suspicions of Sandoval and Rachel, or why they were in couples therapy in the first place.

Would the public still have seen the relationship as “endgame,” as Ariana described it in Glamour? Would they have been surprised that Sandoval, who cheated on Kristen five times during their relationship and on Ariana as soon as they got together, cheated on her again?

Or would they have said she should have seen it coming, that she lost him how she got him, that she never should have gotten in bed with a serial cheater, the way every other woman’s pain on Vanderpump Rules has always been dismissed, an inevitable consequence of her own lack of self-respect? I think they might have.

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. The fanbase has even realized that Lala appropriates and fetishizes Black culture, a read so belated and obvious it begs the question why nobody cared until the moment she dared to question a white woman who joked about calling the police on her ex twice this season.

These are doubtless the same people who sent death threats to Rachel and transphobic insults to Billie Lee, who came out in force to condemn Scheana for her Tahoe picture, who flooded Schwartz and Sandy’s with fake reviews, harassed waitstaff, left angry voicemails for Sandoval, vandalized bathrooms, wrote in “I stand with Ariana” in lieu of tipping, and booked reservations under “Fuck Tom Sandoval.”

The great irony is that Lala and Scheana were the only ones who did their jobs this season. They’ve been honest about how they really feel and what they’ve been up to, reporting back to Ariana on every conversation they had with Sandoval throughout the season. Yes, they vented behind her back too, but they did it on camera, creating footage that they knew they’d have to answer for at season’s end.

The rest of the cast, if we are to believe Lala — which I do — allowed her to act as the mouthpiece for their collective grievances while refusing to get their own hands dirty. Lala and Scheana haven’t made the best choices for their friendships with Ariana, but if that’s not their truth, it’s not what I want to see.

A year on from Scandoval, we still haven’t gotten a real postmortem on what happened. Neither Sandoval nor Ariana has an incentive to perform an honest accounting of their relationship, and Sandoval would sooner die than share the gory details of his affair. Katie, whose financial future is bound up in her allegiance to Ariana and is basking in fan support for the first time ever, has too much to lose by speaking her inconvenient truth. James, who is seconds away from being #MeToo’d, can’t afford to go against the grain. Even Schwartz, who is desperately trying to claw his way back into the nice-guy persona he’s carried for so long, can see which way the wind is blowing.

It’s easy to imagine how compelling the season could’ve been if everyone had told the truth. We could have explored the psychic damage that Ariana’s rise to stardom wreaked on a group of fame-hungry people; the mindfuck of going from Z-list to D-list overnight in Scandoval’s wake; Katie’s impostor syndrome as she tried to open Something About Her without Ariana; Katie, Lala, and Scheana commiserating about the lack of support they got from the cast, let alone the public, in their breakups.

All of that would have been more honest and interesting than a paintball game, a water party, or a Top Golf hangout. If the women had been a united front, I would have happily watched a season of the Spice Girls too. But clearly, they were not.

As Andy asked the cast how they will move forward from here, it was impossible not to see the dark cloud of terror hanging over their heads, each trying their best to keep the tsunami of the audience’s parasocial rage directed at somebody else.

Is this really what we want? A cast, cowering in fear of the fans, afraid to say how they feel for fear that their businesses will be attacked, their social media flooded with hateful comments, their employees and friends harassed? Would we rather watch a group of people faking a pretty picture instead of sharing their truth, even if it’s ugly? Especially if it’s ugly?

When it comes to reality television, the only team I’m on is my own. If I am going to spend my one wild and precious life watching trash people do trash things, I want to be entertained, not sold a false bill of goods. I don’t need to agree with or even like anyone on a cast to enjoy watching them. I just need to believe what they’re trying to sell me. And besides Lala and maybe Scheana, I no longer trust anyone on this cast to tell the truth. If I wanted to watch a morality play, I would turn off Bravo and turn on the Hallmark Channel. Maybe some of the fans would be happier if they did the same.

That’s all, folks! Thanks for coming along on this ride with me. I’ll be recapping The Valley next, starting from episode 1.