The Dog Days of Summer House

In the post-Scandoval era, it seems like every docusoap dude is a villain just waiting to be exposed.

When I was researching my book about the Real Housewives, one media scholar told me that watching reality TV actually makes us better media consumers. Unlike with a drama such as Game of Dragons, we’re not passively watching a story unfold; we’re watching how the show presents a story and then triangulating that with what the stars have said on social media, what has been leaked to the tabloid press, wild internet rumors, and stray Watch What Happens Live comments to determine what the real story is. Coming off the two-part Summer House reunion, there has been a lot of triangulation happening with fans jumping to conclusions on two different fronts, and in both cases, the conclusion seems to be that everyone sucks.

The first front is what’s happening with West Wilson and Ciara Miller. All season long, he was our new golden boy and they were our golden couple. The New York Times named him the “New Number One Guy in the Group” even though that is a Vanderpump Rules quote, but whatever. Go off, Gray Lady. Then at the reunion, it was revealed that West had lied to Ciara about not sleeping with other women and that he ended their relationship right before the show began airing so he could live his reality-star fuckboy fantasy by shagging every woman who follows Queens of Bravo.

The backlash was swift. Even the Times had to post a correction in the form of a follow-up article in which West “Discusses His First Taste of Infamy.” For his infractions against Ciara, he came in for plenty of comparisons to Tom Sandoval, a man who cheated on his girlfriend of ten years with her best friend, a characterization that even Paige DeSorbo, Ciara’s best and staunchest defender, thinks is unfair. Suddenly, the narrative is that West was a terrible villain all along. Noted West stan Joel Kim Booster joked on WWHL that the reunion made him not want to trust a straight white man ever again and that he wants to Gone Girl him; this one redditor suspects West was only trying to sleep with Ciara because his friends bet him he couldn’t. Many feel that he purposefully duped us, only getting with Ciara for the “clout,” and that none of his apology tour — not in the Times or on the The Viall Files or even here on Vulture — matters. Nor do the opinions of his staunchest critics, Paige, who said she would never not be his friend, and Ciara (the person it happened to!), who said at the reunion she could give him another chance under the right circumstances. Fans are aggrieved on behalf of people who have already let the matter slide.

The other out-of-control narrative is that Carl Radke called the Summer House producers to film his and Lindsay Hubbard’s breakup. Unlike Ciara and West’s breakup, which was kept from fans until the reunion, we knew about Carl ending things way back in the fall, way before BravoCon, way before the season was even finished being edited. That gave Lindsay, a former PR professional who was excellent at her job, a chance to do an interview with Us Weekly right after the split and say, “for [Carl] to call up producers and then set up cameras and manipulate me into sitting down [so he could break up with me] after we’d already wrapped is scary.”

Ever since then, it’s been set in stone that that is how it went down — even in the face of a counternarrative Andy underlined at the reunion when he said that Carl did not call the producers but that they wanted to film what happened after the huge fight he and Lindsay had on the last day of filming in the Hamptons. This makes sense if Bravo was planning on airing the nuptials, which seems to have been the plan; the show couldn’t go from them being at each other’s throats to walking down the aisle without an intermediate step showing they had reached some kind of détente. Did Carl know he was going to break up with Lindsay before that chat? I don’t know. Maybe. He says he didn’t, but what we do know is that Andy says this rumored call to production never happened.

But just look at the responses to this tweet by @bravobybetches saying they’re glad Andy revealed that Carl didn’t initiate the filming: “No one believes that,” one says. “Why are we supposed to believe anything production says,” says another. “I wouldn’t believe everything Andy or Production says,” echoes a third. These are probably the same fans who erroneously think Andy single-handedly makes every decision at Bravo; he’s either the all-knowing, all-seeing Svengali, or he’s a giant liar who is just making things up to punish Lindsay for some unknown crime. But what if Andy just wanted to set the record straight because Lindsay has been spreading lies? While Andy didn’t directly accuse her of lying, he did say at the reunion, “I’m making it clear to the audience [that Carl didn’t call production] because that’s the narrative.” Yes, he was harsher to Lindsay than to Carl, but Carl hasn’t been talking to the press the same way Lindsay has. Why should Andy, and by extension Bravo and the production company that makes the show, let her get away with spreading falsehoods at the expense of another cast member? They would lose the trust of everyone sitting on that reunion stage and then there wouldn’t be a show.

It seems to me like while we’re all triangulating the same data, some of us are reaching for the conclusions that give us something to be mad about. We want to believe the worst in people — especially of the men on these shows. I’m not saying what Carl or West did was right, especially West, who really shouldn’t have slept with Ciara if he knew he wouldn’t provide the level of commitment she expected. But isn’t it all we’ve ever wanted from a man on Bravo for him to sit on that reunion stage and say “This is my fault, and I’m sorry”? That’s what West did. Yes, he disappointed us, but we’ve given the hero treatment to Bravo people who have acted far worse. Post-Scandoval, so many fans and even Time magazine proclaimed DJ James Kennedy  the “No. 1 guy in the group” (see, it fits ’cause he’s on Pump Rules) after seeing him be despicable to several girlfriends over the years. What West did was minor by comparison, and he didn’t try to shout down the woman he wronged or explain how it was all her fault, as Shep Rose or Austen Kroll would have done. (The bar for Bravo men is so low an ant could step over it with ease.)

As for Lindsay, we’ve seen her craft victim narratives for herself on the show for years, rewriting events to make the other person seem at fault. She did it in fights with Everett, with Stravy, with Danielle, with Paige and the other girls in the house, and with Kyle. (Though those Everett and Stravy fights were probably justified.) Was Carl perfect in his relationship? No. Should he have broken up with her on-camera? Maybe not. But Lindsay’s spin is working, and we’re all blaming him based on a narrative that doesn’t seem to be true.

It appears we’re about to enter this territory once again with my imaginary husband, Kyle Cooke, as rumors that he cheated reached a fever pitch when a video of him getting familiar with a woman in Charleston recently surfaced online. Even though Southern Hospitality star Leva Bonaparte, who owns the club where this happened and was in the room with Kyle, says that it’s not what it looks like and that it was a harmless interaction between Kyle and an also-married mutual friend of theirs, fans still don’t believe her.

Given the timing, I can’t help but see Scandoval’s fingerprints all over this. Just as Scheana Shay said she doesn’t trust her own husband after what Tom did to Ariana, I think we’re now all predisposed to imagine that every dude on a docusoap is just as bad as the proverbial worm with a mustache. And because of the way Scandoval played out, with amateur online sleuths picking at clues, we’re also predisposed to see a conspiracy theory lurking behind every Instagram comment — like the theory that Amanda Batula and Jesse Solomon (always both names!) are having an affair because he leaves thirsty comments on her selfies. It’s all getting to be too much!

I’m not saying there aren’t enough asshole men on Bravo that a legion of proctologists couldn’t see them all. I’m not even saying these particular men are blameless. But I am saying the fandom seems increasingly eager to believe the worst of people who have let us into their lives for our own entertainment. They want to believe that there is some great conspiracy, that they have figured out something the people who are actually living this have been hiding from us. Trust me, I understand, even celebrate, the impulse to milk every last drop of drama out of these shows. But sometimes the simplest narrative — that West didn’t pull a Sandoval, that Carl didn’t call production, that Kyle wasn’t cheating — can actually be the correct one. Yes, one of the greatest, most rewarding things about being a reality-television fan is our ability to triangulate the truth from all available sources, but only if it doesn’t cause us to lose sight of actual reality.