the best days of our lives
On Tuesday I went to Schwartz & Sandy’s to watch the season (series?) finale of Vanderpump Rules. This may or may not be a sentence that means anything to you.
But I have been watching VPR since its 2013 debut. In 2018 I wrote about the cast’s extracurricular ventures, and how to monetize reality TV fame. I also visited Tom Tom and wrote about how Lisa Vanderpump’s restaurants have come to function as de facto theme parks for Bravo: places that you come to pay to interact with characters you know from a screen. Schwartz & Sandy’s is very much in this tradition: we watched it be conceived of, built, recipe-tested, and finally opened one episode at a time.
But before we really get there, I also wrote, in 2020, that I wanted the show to be cancelled. I had watched a group of strangers live through their early twenties, and make it past their Saturn Returns. They finally seemed like they were doing well. I wanted to leave them there: settled, at some kind of peace.
At the time, I wrote, of their romantic entanglements:
Stassi Schroeder and Jax Taylor, who spent the first several seasons in a tempestuous, on-again, off-again relationship, have broken up for good, and found partners who seem to genuinely love them. The death of Jax’s father in early 2018 inspired him to propose to longtime girlfriend Brittany Cartwright; the two got married over the summer. Stassi, meanwhile, is engaged to boyfriend Beau Clark. SURvers Katie Maloney-Schwartz and Tom Schwartz are married and talking about having children; Ariana Madix and Tom Sandoval are seriously committed to each other and talking about not getting married or having children.
Of course, the show did not end. It kept going, and going. And things have not stayed peaceful, particularly on the romance front. In the intervening four years, Jax and Brittany have become estranged and seem to be heading for divorce. Katie and Schwartz have gotten divorced. And Sandoval has cheated on Ariana with castmate Raquel Leviss, herself fairly freshly un-engaged from DJ James Kennedy.
That scandal— which quickly came to be known as Scandoval— breathed new life into the franchise, and also, paradoxically, spelled its doom. Almost as soon as TMZ broke the news, Bravo cameras were back in operation— the season had wrapped weeks prior— catching every detail of the aftermath of an ugly, shocking breakup. (It’s hard to convey what Scandoval was to non-VPR watchers, and I doubt many of you have made it to this paragraph in the first place, but just in case: Ariana had always maintained that she didn’t want kids, while Sandoval said he did. The woman froze her eggs from him, just in order to keep the option open! Injected herself with hormones, spent more than $10,000, and endured minor surgery while he was sleeping with one of her friends. And not being particularly secretive about it.
He’s also just such a perfect villain, and it was wonderful to see him suffer.)
Anyway. We love to watch, and ratings were series-high. But then came the problem of the next season.
Ariana, understandably, refuses to shoot with Sandoval. She would prefer not to have mutual friends with him. But she also doesn’t want to leave the show, which is the anchor of her cultural relevance, as well as a reliable paycheck. (And why should she have to leave when he’s the one who cheated?) But Sandoval won’t leave either, and the producers aren’t about to make him.
The cast of VPR has always maintained that the show’s appeal comes from its authenticity. They might pre-arrange events and stage conversations, but the feelings underlying those actions were all real. And for a long time, that felt true.
I mean, obviously they were performing. But it felt more like they were showing off— not playing characters so much as heightening their own personalities and dramas for the camera.
Now, though, it’s hard to watch the show without feeling viscerally that you are watching contortionists at work. The thing about Ariana refusing to have mutual friends with Sandoval is that she knows perfectly well that it’s an impossible ask while they are part of the same cast. As is her desire not to play a part in his rehabilitation— an inevitable by-product of him being on the show, telling his side of the story. Being portrayed as human, and hurt.
And then Ariana’s conflicting desires twist up everyone around her, as they try to support their devastated friend without abandoning Sandoval— or their own storylines.
Watching this season of VPR has made me uncomfortably aware of myself as a viewer. Because it is so clear that they are in this bind because they are, in fact, performers. And they are performing specifically not just for but because of me.
This is something I’ve been trying to think around for a while: the ways in which understanding how the attention economy works makes us feel complicit in what gets made. I mean, we are and always have been complicit! What we watch and buy has always affected what got made. But we are now so acutely, agonizingly aware of each click, and how it resonates with the people on the other end of the camera. How our tastes make or don’t make their lives and work possible. If I— and, to be fair, millions of other people— stop watching, they could end this charade. But we don’t. And so they can’t, or don’t, anyway.
Didn’t they trap themselves? But even if they did, don’t I hold at least one of the keys to their cage?
The cast is annoyed with Ariana’s contradictions. (And also how famous this all has made her.) It’s been simmering all season, but it came to a head on the finale. In the last minutes of the episode, Sandoval walks up to Ariana, and she walks away.
And Lala— we haven’t even talked about Lala yet, there’s no room to do Lala justice here— breaks. She says something to the effect of, I haven’t complained about this all season, because it would be breaking the fourth wall too much. Basically, she continues, she feels like the rest of them have had to suck it up and do shit they didn’t want to do for filming. And she doesn’t think Ariana should get a pass on that.
That argument itself is another thing I don’t have the space or energy to litigate here. The real thing, for me, was her broaching the subject at all. Saying fourth wall. Saying filming. It felt like a release of energy. The thing we had been trying to pretend wasn’t happening all season was finally being acknowledged. These aren’t people having a personal conflict, or they aren’t just that. They are also co-workers, having a professional conflict. It’s not really a question of who loves who. It’s a question of how they’re going to earn a living off of personal lives that should be diverging, but instead are required to continuously collide.
But what’s the difference between personal and professional, when you play yourself? When you have for more than a decade? The last moments of the episode— maybe of the show— feature the Toms in conversation. You don’t see them as they talk; it gives you the impression of overhearing something meant to be private. A producer says, “That’s the end.”
Schwartz laughs. “That was a fucking plot twist.”
They know how to talk about their lives as a story. And they know how that story plays will play to the audience. Sandoval is already calculating. “I love it,” he says, of someone turning on Ariana, calling her the hypocrite, for once. The potential of her downfall. He measures the arc of his own redemption, seeing immediately the possibility of an upswing, playing the only game he knows how to play. “It’s good for me.”
When I wasn’t watching TV, I reviewed Jose Vadi’s excellent Chipped: Writing From a Skateboarder’s Lens for The LA Times.
& the podcast is still podcasting. We have recently interviewed Switched On Pop’s Charlie Harding, writer and podcaster Amanda Montell, and MTV News alum Chris Connelly.
I also have some very exciting book-shaped news coming soon, so stay tuned, please…