Breaking Up Is Hard to Do on 'Vanderpump Rules'

When I watch Bravo, I think a lot about the ways their shows collapse the boundaries between front-stage and back-stage selves, between fiction and non-fiction, until what you see is a chaotic chimera: neither entirely real nor entirely false, neither entirely a performance nor entirely genuine. No wonder the extremely watchable sex nightmare Vanderpump Rules (back on Bravo and Peacock for their 11th season) has become one of the most explosive programs on Bravo’s roster. When you throw the interpersonal dramas of aging “models” and “DJs” desperately pretending to be 24 into the volatile chimera-reality (chimereality? I’ll workshop it) of Bravo, you get quite the nuclear reaction.

I am of course talking about Scandoval, the many-tiered disaster that unfolded when it was revealed that Ariana Madix’s partner Tom Sandoval was carrying on an affair with Rachel (neé Raquel neé Rachel) Leviss. It was quite the community theater production of Twilight of the Gods as everyone took sides in a melee of fools. The word “mistress” was uttered so often that I nearly lost my mind, and Sandoval, a man in his 40s, kept saying, “I dipped out!!!” We laughed, we cried, we learned you can’t make a fist if you have giant talons, and we were subjected to Sandoval’s sperm consultation. As we began this new season in the wake of a historic melodrama and checked in on each cast member, we found Ariana and Sandoval somehow, someway still cohabitating. This was quite a shock for viewers, especially considering that Ariana declared at last season’s reunion that she never wanted to see him again. Besides, who wants to stay in a house cramped with their loathsome ex?

The rest of the cast had similar questions, and it turned out that Sandoval had offered Ariana a buy-out of their house: he’d essentially pay her to leave. Ariana turned him down, and when pressed about why, she explained that she didn’t want to make life easy for him by moving out. She seems miserable living with him, and that’s very apparent during a flap over a party he wants to throw while she’s out DJing. Using Sandoval’s inexplicable assistant (we don’t have time!) as go-between, they fight over the sins of ragers past. It seems that Sandoval’s parties would wreck their home, and he’d leave Ariana to clean up the mess. All of that said, it’s interesting that causing Sandoval grief seems to be worth living with him for Ariana.

Ariana is in a recognizable situation: she feels wounded by her ex and wants to hurt him back. The Pyrrhic nature of it all is recognizable too. It can be difficult to maintain perspective when you’re hurting and fury feels empowering. So even if it sucks for her, too, she will stay with Sandoval, and at least it’ll suck for them both. The funny thing is, this is only the latest in a series of iterations on this very scenario. It’s not just that VPR has had many couples with acrimonious on-camera disintegrations; it’s that so many of them continued to work together on the show despite breaking up. This is where we cross the threshold into the truly deranged nature of reality TV because any on-camera couplings are also couplings between co-workers. If/when they break up and they both stay on the show, filming together becomes near-unavoidable and the dynamic can turn toxic.

Imagine you’ve broken up with someone, and it’s uncomfortable because you enmeshed your friends into one group, and you all do everything together all the time. Now layer another element on top: you, your partner, and your friends are all paid to “work” at Sexy Unique Restaurant and play out all your interpersonal drama in front of cameras for a nationally broadcasted television program, where all your indiscretions and infidelities are both explosive events in your personal life and lucrative products. You become known for your operatic cycles of drama, to the point that you almost certainly get more attention (and thus money from brand endorsements and side hustles) when you’re fighting. To some extent, you stand to gain when there’s strife in your personal life. Fights, cheating, revenge, these all are storylines. These are all golden tickets to screen time and that’s the lifeblood of this hustle. None of this is to say you’re not genuinely hurt by the break-up or that you didn’t love your ex, but just that none of these emotions existed on their own outside the panopticon you depend on for an income. That can complicate and warp those feelings, leaving them neither fully personal nor fully professional. It makes staying in a house with your ex you hate neither entirely about hurting them nor entirely about flogging a storyline that’s gotten so much screen time so far.

I imagine the incentive of all that screen time (to say nothing of the attention from other media) gained from Scandoval had a warping effect: if your highpoint was the drama that ensued from being cheated on, to what extent might that incentivize you to stay? Sure, a normal person who makes these decisions in the context of the average level of surveillance we all live with would probably see this a bit more clearly, take Sandoval’s buy-out, and leave the home. Someone might leave the group entirely, needing to be away from spaces where Sandoval might be. But Ariana has to make that decision in radically different circumstances. Leaving the house might feel like moving away from the gold mine you discovered last season and leaving the friends group is leaving the show, which is leaving the income. So, of course, Ariana stays because it’s a decision about money as much as it is about emotional well-being.

It’s worth noting that Ariana is only the latest to chain themselves to a sinking relationship on VPR because it’s also the best storyline they’ve ever had. Katie and Schwartz dated, got married (we think?), and are still dealing with divorce stuff. Jax and Stassi, VPR’s ur-example of the sort of breeding pairs the show loves to follow, both dated, cheated, broke up, and left the show only once they had settled down with new people. It’s worth teasing out these threads and examining them because as we watch, we’re asked to treat them as real (like us, subject to the same emotional reality) and not real (not like us, fictional) simultaneously. When we face this chimera, neither genuine nor inauthentic, we see a unique snare of contradictions: relatable and alien, aspirational and tacky, felt and acted, unscripted and heavily produced. As viewers of reality TV, an art form as valid as any other, it behooves us to keep our eyes clear. When you’re taking in something like Vanderpump Rules, which asks for revulsion and attraction, pity and scorn, mindlessness and mindfulness all at once, it’s easy to forget what we’re really seeing: people paid to do a job that consistently asks them to act against their best interest because it’s lucrative to do so. The stars of VPR act with entirely different goals and priorities than the ones we have and in many ways inhabit a separate reality. When someone’s life is work and that work is drama, can they really say they’re on the same plane as the rest of us?