Culture Crash: Can “Vanderpump Rules” Rebound From A Wild Season 10?

WELCOME TO CULTURE CRASH, WHERE WE EXAMINE WHAT’S NEW AND OLD IN ENTERTAINMENT.

Reality TV can be exhilarating and wildly entertaining. It can also be kind of a drag. Case in point: Vanderpump Rules, which has had the highest of highs and is, in my opinion, currently very boring.

VPR premiered in 2013 as a show about young models and actors who were funding their attempts at fame by working at SUR, an LA hotspot restaurant and bar run by Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Lisa Vanderpump. The show was about 20 somethings who drank on the job, stole bottles of wine, went out all night, and made terrible decisions. As you can probably tell, it made for phenomenal television. And over time, the formula continued to work. Cast members got married and divorced. Some of them tried to clean up their acts, while others embraced roles as love-to-hate-em villains. Over the course of nine seasons, viewers were taken on lavish vacations to Mexico and wine country and reveled in the soapy reality TV goodness. And then came season 10. Season 10 was a world-shifting cultural bomb that aired after it became public knowledge that longtime castmember Tom Sandoval had cheated on his longtime girlfriend Ariana Maddix. This made the entire season an exercise in picking up on the clues, and climaxed in one of the most shocking season finales ever, where audiences were given a front row seat to the immediate aftermath of one of the biggest scandals in reality TV history.

But now we’re watching season 11… and it’s dull so far. Sandoval is almost unwatchable. He’s a jerk, he can’t take responsibility for his own actions, and most of the group despises him. The main cast is hardly even a group of friends anymore. They aren’t in their 20s, they don’t work at SUR, and this is just one man’s opinion, but they aren’t making for very good TV. Some of them have kids, some are married, and none of them are really bringing the cameras along for anything particularly interesting. Mostly, it’s just them sitting around discussing Scandoval, rehashing drama from last season.

Maybe it will get better, but maybe it won’t. All good things come to an end, and maybe season 10 of Vanderpump Rules was the climax of the entire experience. It seems to me that season 11 is just falling action. If that’s the case, then at least it was fun while it lasted.