“They fucked in her car then he rang the doorbell,” I scribbled furiously into my notebook.
I was watching Wednesday night’s season finale of Vanderpump Rules and taking copious notes. After a semester-length immersion course in the ups and downs of the worst friend group you’ve ever met—as chronicled by the long-running reality show—I felt the sweet relief of having studied hard and aced my final exam.
Vanderpump Rules, it was generally agreed, had seen better days when the show’s 10th season began earlier this year. The show, a spinoff of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills set at smirking housewife Lisa Vanderpump’s West Hollywood restaurant Sur, initially centered on a bunch of aspiring actors and creatives who were working in the service industry to pay the bills. They were beautiful, some were charming, and several were dating someone in the group while cheating on them with someone else in the group. But as the cast stopped aspiring and settled into the more lucrative field of professional reality TV stardom, they got busy with slightly more adult pursuits like real estate and reproduction, and the show lost some of its magic.
Or so it seemed until March, when a massive cheating scandal injected the show with some much-needed oomph: That’s when it came out that Tom Sandoval, originally a bartender on the show and now, somewhat dubiously, a bar owner, had cheated on his girlfriend of nine years, Ariana Madix, with another cast member, Raquel Leviss. (There are many more layers and incestuous connections to it than that, but that’s the long and short of it.) Looking back on this past season knowing what we know now, many people have observed that there’s an eerie quality to how the events of the show transpired: Did the producers know something? Did the cast? “[T]ry watching The Sixth Sense again,” the show’s executive producer told Variety recently, insisting that they were in the dark. “It seems really obvious after the fact—not because we edited it, but because you know.”
I feel a similar witchiness when I think about my journey with the show: Did I know something? Because I’ve never had such impeccable timing as I did when I set out to watch every episode of Vanderpump Rules in January 2023. Taking on projects of this magnitude is not something I often do; usually, I can only commit as far as watching a new streaming show that just dropped a six-episode season. So, I can’t claim to be one of the Bravo faithful who has been watching since the beginning, but I’m not a total bandwagon jumper either. Call me an advanced beginner: According to my records, by the time the so-called Scandoval broke earlier this year, I was six seasons deep. By mid-April, I had watched all 180+ extant episodes of the show and could begin taking in new ones as they aired.
Watching 10 years of these people’s lives condensed into four months did something to me. I watched people grieve, gaslight, and get nose jobs. I watched them get into bitter feuds with former friends and become friends again after the worst possible betrayals. I watched them get married, get divorced, and go on to co-parent their dogs together. Most of all, I watched them binge-drink. The entirety of the human experience seems to be contained in this show, and watching it felt like reading a big fat multigenerational novel, one that has so many characters—some of whom have very similar names—that it has to have a little cheat sheet of them printed in the beginning of the book. Catching up on all 10 seasons has been the biggest achievement of my year.
All my hard work paid off when I tuned in to watch this week’s finale. Between March and May, viewers caught up on the events of last summer, when the affair between Sandoval and Leviss had begun but was still a secret. With this week’s episode, the show finally caught up to the (almost) present, as we watched the cast deal with the fallout from the affair and various logistical details were illuminated. (Hence that note to myself: The first night Sandoval and Leviss hooked up, Madix was appalled to learn, they did it in Leviss’ car outside of Sandoval and Madix’s home, and he had forgotten his keys so he had to ring the doorbell to get in afterward. Despicable.) It’s one of history’s greatest tragedies that the show’s cameras didn’t capture the actual revelation of the affair, which took place during one of Sandoval’s performances with his odious cover band, when Madix discovered a smoking gun video on his phone—production had stopped filming months prior, in September, and only started up again after the news came out.
Still, what the cameras did get is as raw and affecting as anything you’ll see this year, reality or scripted. Madix, incandescent with righteous rage, confronted Sandoval in the couple’s home in what was touted as their first big conversation since the affair came to light. Sandoval, meanwhile, rather than apologizing seemed to blame Madix. If Madix had really wanted to figure out whether Sandoval was being faithful to her, why hadn’t she, as he suggested at one point, followed him in her car? There was something so poignant about the way the show was able to cut back to footage from earlier in their relationship, when the two were young and impossibly beautiful and first falling in love. Usually only scripted shows can do flashbacks like that (and sometimes still cheesily), but Vanderpump Rules has been on so long that its archives contain the entirety of these people’s long relationship. It’s not just this season that can be rescrutinized as viewers look for signs of the affair; the whole show now looks in retrospect like it was always leading up to this terrible moment.
Before Madix, Sandoval dated a woman named Kristen Doute. No Russian novelist could write a character like Kristen Doute. She left the show after Season 8 due to an unrelated scandal, but when we met her in her late 20s, she was the worst waitress at Sur, a wiry brunette who could always be found outside any party smoking a cigarette and getting into a screaming match with her boyfriend and/or her female friends. Doute and Sandoval clearly resented each other and were limping through their relationship until, in the defining scandal of the show’s early years, it was revealed that she cheated on him with one of his closest friends and another member of the group, the scoundrel Jax Taylor (who was at that time only recently broken up with another member of the group). Sandoval moved on with Madix, and because they shared a kiss and maybe more before Doute’s relationship with Sandoval was over, Doute operatically despised Madix for years.
Doute, in her insistence that Sandoval was unfaithful to her, was painted as a mad woman, and while her point was undercut by her own bad actions and tendency to get falling-down drunk, all these years later she’s found a kind of redemption. In Season 3, Doute notoriously engineered a confrontation at Sur between Sandoval and a woman, known to fans simply as “Miami Girl,” who claimed to have slept with him in that Florida city while he was in the early days of his relationship with Madix. He denied the allegations in a famous scene that eventually led to Doute getting fired from the restaurant after she told a manager to “suck a dick,” and he continued denying them for years. When the finale and the aftershow flashed back to those moments, viewers finally found out that it was all true. There were uncanny parallels to be observed between Doute and Sandoval’s breakup and Madix and Sandoval’s. After several years off-screen, like George Clooney swooping back into E.R. for one killer scene, Doute briefly returned to the show to comfort Madix, who had long since declared their feud water under the bridge. Together, they performed a Wiccan cleansing ritual. When the two embraced and referred to “our ex-boyfriend” in union, it was a full-circle moment.
There were many such moments in this finale, which fans have been anticipating for months, referring to it as their Super Bowl. It was fitting, then, that there were Super Bowl–style ads to accompany it, most notably a commercial for Uber One starring Madix and two of her gal pals from the show, Scheana Shay and Lala Kent. The charm of the star-studded commercial wore thin a long time ago, but the (non-evil) stars of Vanderpump Rules have such a sheen on them right now that I can say for the first time in years that I genuinely like an ad. For a company I kind of consider evil itself! The ad features the women at a recording studio, laying down a song of Shay’s from when she was trying to become a pop star, “Good as Gold,” one of those songs so atrocious that it’s become beloved by fans, rewritten with Uber-relevant lyrics. Continuing the Super Bowl metaphor, Madix has appeared in other commercials since the scandal broke, like an athlete gaining endorsements, and instead of going to Disney World, she’s going on Dancing With the Stars.
Each time the finale drew on the show’s expansive lore, I felt grateful for my Vanderpump education. There was Madix negging Leviss on the aftershow by referring to her by her birth name, Rachel. There was Leviss’ ex, DJ James Kennedy, calling her on speakerphone purely to taunt her. There was these people’s odd tendency to use the word “text” as both a present and past-tense: “Sandoval finally text me.” There were references to Sandoval’s disastrous interview on, of all places, Howie Mandel’s podcast. There was Shay insisting that she never could have punched Leviss, because her clacky nails make it such that she can’t form a fist. (“If the hand can’t hit, you must aquit.”) I’m so happy to know all of these things.
The season is not quite over yet, due to Bravo’s habit of hosting end-of-season reunions, where cast members must traditionally answer for their sins. The network has divided Season 10’s into three parts, each one poised to be must-see for both longtime fans and the Scandoval-curious. Still, this finale was a triumph, an example of reality TV at its very best. I know there’s a lot I could have accomplished in 130 odd hours it took me to watch the whole show—read several books, trained for a marathon, maybe even started learning a language—but I’m not convinced I didn’t experience something just as rich while enrolled in Vanderpump University.
