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.