Can Starting from Scratch Save “Vanderpump Rules”?

In Aidan Zamiri’s recent mockumentary, “The Moment,” Charli XCX plays a version of herself: a pop star who’s contemplating her next move after achieving great success with a Zeitgeist-defining album called “BRAT.” What should she do, Charli wonders, now that the clock on her relevance is ticking? Even though “people are getting sick of [her],” should she “go even harder,” as Kylie Jenner advises her, and continue to celebrate “brat summer forever”? Or should she stop harping on the same string and, instead, recede, regroup, and attempt to remake herself into an avatar for a new era?

Though I felt like Zamiri’s movie didn’t ultimately offer a satisfying answer to the quandary it presents, I found the quandary itself fascinating. How long can a cultural product go on captivating its audience? And what is to be done once it stops? As I watched “The Moment,” I kept thinking how apropos this question was to the Bravo reality series “Vanderpump Rules,” which, on its début, in 2013, began filming the lives of a group of good-looking servers and bartenders at the West Hollywood restaurant SUR, co-owned by a sassy, handsome Brit named Lisa Vanderpump. These protagonists were classic show-business aspirants who, having come to Los Angeles to be within grasping distance of their dreams, fell, in the interim, into service work. The show’s fundamental genius was turning its spotlight on this unglamorous if drama-filled purgatory, and, within a couple of seasons, its subjects, who had been fighting and fucking each other in obscurity for years, had been made into bona-fide stars, known nationwide for their messy love lives and interpersonal skirmishes. They might not have become celebrated models, actors, or singers, as they had initially planned, but with “Vanderpump Rules” their moment had nonetheless arrived, and Bravo was naturally keen to extend it for as long as possible.

Over time, though, this newfound celebrity began to chafe against the show’s establishing constraints. No one really believed that these now quite famous, no-longer-so-young protagonists—sexy dissembler Jax Taylor, excitable d.j. James Kennedy, grumpy drunk-texter Katie Maloney, volatile vixen Kristen Doute, evasive dandy Tom Sandoval, and the rest of the gang—would continue to clock in for shifts at SUR and receive stern if maternal talking-tos from Lisa Vanderpump forever. To deal with this contradiction, more grownup plotlines were developed, with the show following cast members as they pursued other hospitality endeavors, among them the West Hollywood lounge TomTom and, later, the sandwich shop Something About Her. In Season 8, a new cadre of rookie bartenders and servers were thrown into the mix, but their addition felt contrived; meanwhile, the series’ seasoned old standbys had begun to lose their ability to amuse and astonish. “Vanderpump” was running on fumes.

Then, in 2023, during Season 10, what I can only describe as an act of God took place: It was revealed that Tom Sandoval had secretly cheated on his longtime girlfriend and fellow cast member, Ariana Madix, with a newer, younger cast member, Raquel (née Rachel) Leviss, right under the camera’s nose. The true, organic surprise of this turn of events—to Bravo, to the viewers, to most of the show’s cast—created a frenzy, and “Vanderpump” experienced a resurrection. At the time, I tweeted, “vanderpump this season gives me hope. you might think something is dead… you might think something is over… and then it rises again like a goddam PHOENIX. A lesson to us all.” In actuality, however, I knew that this kind of rebirth was both rare and most likely brief, and that, soon enough, the show’s moment would once again be over.

This was borne out when, after “Scandoval” fever died down, “Vanderpump Rules” pretty much died with it. Season 11 dealt with the affair’s fallout, but between the lack of authentic, gripping new story lines, Madix’s refusal to film with the adulterous Sandoval, and a number of the “Vanderpump” O.G.s’ decampment to “The Valley”—a sequel of sorts about their depressing if still messy married-with-children lives—the writing was on the wall. When news officially broke, in late 2024, that “Vanderpump Rules” would be rebooted with an entirely new cast for Season 12, the Bravo honcho Andy Cohen, who isn’t a producer on the series, called it “absolutely the right thing to do,” noting how impressed he was that the show had gone as long as it had when, for years, “slowly but surely, none of [the cast members] were working at SUR.” Now it seemed like it was finally time to go back to where it all began.

Heraclitus once suggested, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man”—a sentiment echoed by Lisa Vanderpump when, on the first episode of Season 12, she laughingly tells a cameraperson, “my tits, they get lower and lower every year, so we need to make the frame wider.” Time’s flux affects not only the body but also the world outside of it, which in Vanderpump’s case means the West Hollywood restaurant scene SUR is part of. As the camera captures the deserted intersection of Robertson and Santa Monica Boulevards, she notes that, since the pandemic, West Hollywood has never recovered its onetime vibrancy as a night-life hub, and that her own establishments have suffered as a result. In 2023, she was forced to shutter the gay lounge PUMP, just around the corner from SUR, which she admits also “hasn’t been thriving.” Vanderpump, however, isn’t one to give up. When SUR’s co-owner, Nathalie Pouille Zapata, tearfully reminds her that the restaurant has been “struggling so much,” Vanderpump reassures her, “We have survived over the years, we’re going to survive now.” Later, in a lecture she delivers to her staff, she admonishes them to shape up: “Many restaurants . . . have closed down. . . . This is survival of the fittest!”

From its very beginning, as a show whose cast had come to town with dreams of making it in the entertainment industry, “Vanderpump Rules” has had a hint of the Darwinian about it. (As Alfred Hayes, in his 1958 novel “My Face for the World to See,” writes about achievement in Hollywood: “Did one ever go from success to success? But one went, simultaneously, from failure to failure.”) And yet, when the show premièred in 2013, we were still in the Obama years. Hope was in the air, SUR was bustling, and, if the staff started out poor, they were still bright and bushy-tailed, certain that the only way was up. As Kristen Doute, a longtime server, said on the series’ first season, Vanderpump “doesn’t want us to be lifelong waitresses or bartenders but to kind of use it as a stepping stone to get into whatever it is that we aspire to be.”

To be sure, the staff on Season 12 of “Vanderpump” are still searching for stardom. Audrey, a twenty-two-year-old blond Texan who serves as a hostess, has been waiting tables since she was sixteen to support her “dreams of becoming an actress”; Natalie, a self-proclaimed “crazy bitch” and bartender, is an aspiring singer and actress who “grew up going to the same mall” as Ariana Grande, and “trained with the lady that discovered Orlando Bloom”; Chris, a ripped New Jersey bartender who lives with his cousin, the equally ripped host Jason, wants to be a “big actor” and “model for John Varvatos.” But the grandness of these dreams butts up against the precarity that their dreamers are facing. If, in the show’s first iteration, the staff lived mostly close to West Hollywood, where SUR is located, they are now more far flung, suggesting Los Angeles’s increasingly inhospitable real-estate climate. Chris and Jason live in Marina del Rey; Venus, a flamboyant server, lives in Winnetka, in the Valley; Shayne, a buff, lady-killing friend of the gang with a shock of “nineties hair,” lives in Burbank. There is much talk of rent and the lengths people are willing to go in order to pay it. Survival is the currency of the hour.

Much of the season is given over, as in the show’s first iteration, to the round-robin-style hookups and breakups taking place among the young and largely attractive staff. Marcus, a worried-looking server who recently lost both his parents, is off and on with Kim, a fellow-server; Angelica, a hostess who still lives with her ex, goes out with Jason and, when that entanglement sours, moves on for a bit with Shayne; Natalie, too, goes on a date with Shayne, but then makes out with Jason on a staff trip to wine country; Audrey and Chris begin seeing each other, but Audrey has doubts about the sincerity of his intentions; and so on. What serves as the dramatic centerpiece of the season, however, is the gang’s discovery that Chris and Jason not only work at SUR but also have successful OnlyFans accounts, and that they made a joint video that could be deemed “incestuous,” a claim that Angelica makes, and which the cousins both deny. (“Massaging each other is not incestuous. . . . We were not spreading each other’s assholes,” Jason tells the camera.) When Angelica also finds out that Jason uses a penis pump—presumably for his OnlyFans posts—she makes a meal of it, telling everyone so as to embarrass him. (“It’s for a man who can’t get an erection,” she helpfully explains to a surprised Lisa Vanderpump.)

Angelica’s attempt at humiliation fails, however, because Jason and Chris refuse to be shamed. Before moving to L.A, they both worked as strippers. (“I needed to pay rent,” Jason says, “and I thought, What’s the fastest way to make money?”) The OnlyFans gambit, too, is a financial proposition. When he moved to L.A., Jason worked three jobs and ate cat food to survive. Chris lived in his Jetta. “Serving, you could make good money, but we were still kind of, like, in the hole,” he says. (SUR, certainly, won’t suffice. When Kim tells Demy, a manager, that she ordered four hundred dollars’ worth of stuff on Amazon, Demy scoffs, “That’s good, cause you make so much money at SUR.” To which Kim replies, “I did the Afterpay thing, where you can pay later.”) After Jason started an OnlyFans, Chris was impressed with his cousin’s new earning power and joined in. “We own our OnlyFans shit. We do what we do,” Jason says. As for the penis pump, both employ it, and neither minds talking about it. “I use a penis pump because I’m on OnlyFans to overdeliver,” Chris says. (Listening to his words, I was reminded for a moment of Taylor Swift, who in her docuseries about her recent, extravagant Eras Tour says, “I wanted to overserve the fans.”)

Shayne, too, is unabashed about his own perceived limitations. An aspiring actor and screenwriter, he was introduced to drugs and drink as a child by his family, and is now sober. But his traumatic earlier years have clearly scarred him both mentally and physically. As a young man, he was shot multiple times in a fight, and was paralyzed for a spell, an event that has affected his ability to achieve an erection. “Me personally, I could never be embarrassed about a penis pump, because I got shot, and so I have erectile dysfunction, and I have to take Viagra,” he tells the camera, matter-of-factly. “For me, that’s just life.” As far as Chris and Jason’s exploits on OnlyFans go, “Once I found out how much money these guys were making,” Shayne says, he felt they should “do whatever the hell [they] wanna do.” He, meanwhile, is making a quick and easy buck by starring in vertical micro-dramas, in which low-budget, feature-length productions are cut into “very, very soapy,” phone-friendly two-minute clips. “I’ve made a lot of money this year,” he says, explaining that an actor can make ten to fifteen thousand dollars a pop.

This it-is-what-it-is, reduced-expectations vibe is a little depressing and a little mercenary, but there’s also something open and authentic about it. Everyone at SUR knows that life now is a struggle for survival, and no one is pretending they’re something they’re not. This honesty, perhaps counterintuitively, allows for a new sense of vulnerability. There is much talk among the “Vanderpump” protagonists of opening one’s heart—of approaching life and love sincerely. “My heart is fucking aching,” Venus, the server, says, after fighting with Kim; “I like wearing my heart on my sleeve and showing her truly who I am,” Jason says, when trying to woo Angelica; “I’m a little nervous. Like every time I talk about it, my heart, like, palpitates a little bit,” Audrey says, of her relationship with Chris, whom she wants to see a “deeper side” of. We are no longer in a moment of pure surfaces. When Angelica decides to get a breast enlargement, Jason sounds a warning. “A boob job can’t enhance the personality,” he tells the camera. “That takes fucking therapy.” ♦