It is not easy to be a practitioner of the reality television arts and sciences. To sign up for a reality show is to sign away your mental and physical wellbeing to a for-profit television network, to accept that your most vulnerable moments will be plumbed for entertainment, to invite the judgment of not just your coworkers but the entire viewing public. It’s a massive gamble. Reality shows do not pay well until they are established (the Vanderpump cast got a mere $10,000 each for their first season). If your show never makes it past this inflection point, congratulations: Your bad behavior is out there forever, and you will have barely anything to show for it.
What makes a good reality star has little to do with one’s character, though it’s true that goody-two-shoes tend to make boring television. Some of the best Bravolebrities are terrible — Ramona Singer comes to mind — but that alone doesn’t make for good entertainment. It’s all about a cast member’s willingness to show their necks. Do they tell their truth, even when it’s ugly or humiliating, and share how they’re really feeling in the moment? Or do they retreat, put their walls up, and reveal only what they are comfortable with?
Vanderpump Rules has always been reality magic because the cast does the former — well, except for Ariana Madix and Tom Sandoval. Both are relentless self-producers whose castmates have long believed that they put a front on for the show, and behaved the most differently off camera.
It’s a shame that Vanderpump’s biggest scandal ever centered on these two, who are strong supporting characters but have proved this season that they do not have what it takes to carry the show. Since January, we’ve had to watch Sandoval shed crocodile tears and halfheartedly feign remorse. Meanwhile, Ariana’s battened down the hatches and refused to own the depth of her heartbreak.
And so the last five minutes of this week’s finale felt like a relief. After 14 episodes in which almost nothing happened, production finally did what I’ve been begging for all season and broke the fourth wall.
Let’s get the rest of the episode, which is uneventful, out of the way. The crew rides a cable car up and down Powell Street. At lunch, James asks New Boyfriend Dan if he’s met Sandoval yet (no). Scheana relays the details of her heart-to-heart with Sandoval to Ariana, and Katie gets upset that Sandoval is still being given the benefit of the doubt. Brock is frustrated that the group continually dismisses Scheana’s friendship with Sandoval. Ariana snaps at Schwartz for calling the affair “a trash thing” (her objection is that it was not one, but many, trash decisions, which feels pedantic) and tells him to leave the table if he’s going to speak like that. Lala says in a confessional that Ariana cares deeply but puts on a “cool girl” vibe because she doesn’t want to confront the painful mourning process that’s on her horizon (true). Sandoval tells Schwartz that he’s decided to try and apologize to Ariana for weaponizing her mental health because he wants to become a better person and learn from his mistakes (yeah, right).
Things don’t get good until Kyle Chan’s whiskey party. Scheana and Sandoval get there early for sound check, where he reveals that he’s flown his band’s sound engineer out to San Francisco on his own dime to help with setup and equipment. It’s on-brand for Sandoval, who buys friendships with gifts and favors, but it works on Scheana, who says this is the guy she’s remembered and loved all these years (eek).
The party starts, and one by one the cast arrives. Brock, still irritated by Ariana and Katie’s behavior at lunch, tells Sandoval that he and Scheana are friends with him and Ariana. In a confessional, Scheana shares that Ariana’s boundary of having no mutual friends with Sandoval is causing her to lose herself, and that for her own sake, she needs to let her anger at him go.
After Scheana’s performance of “APPLES,” which is fun but will never be “Good As Gold,” she really gets to work. When Ariana congratulates her, Scheana promptly informs her that she believes Sandoval is changing for the better. “Do me a favor, don’t talk to me about that path of growth,” Ariana replies. “He doesn’t deserve to be in my presence and breathe the same air as me, and that will not change.”
Scheana explains that she’s been trying to get Sandoval to apologize because she thought Ariana wanted one. Ariana says she doesn’t, which I don’t believe. Scheana replies that she’ll always have Ariana’s back and is afraid to lose her or compromise the friendship, but that she can’t write Sandoval off forever.
Is Scheana being the friend Ariana needs in this moment? No. But she’s being honest, and this is why I appreciate what she brings to the show. A friend to all may be a friend to none, but this is also who Scheana has always been — quick to forgive, quick to forget, quick to move on. She reached out to Stassi when Katie and Kristen iced her out. She stayed friends with Kristen when Sandoval and Ariana were trying to get her off the show. She apologized to Lala when the Witches of WeHo were hazing her within an inch of her life. She’s always been attacked for not falling in line with the hive mind. Of course she’s missing Sandoval, and I give her credit for owning it.
Meanwhile, Ariana can’t even be honest about her own boundary. “I’ve never once said that we’re not going to be connected anymore,” she says in her confessional. “I don’t know why she’s not understanding that.” Kudos to the producers for pulling up all of the times Ariana said she would cut anyone who remained friends with Sandoval out of her life, because girl, yes you have.
I’ve had to set no-contact ultimatums in my time, and I applaud Ariana’s boundaries. She’s got to do what she’s got to do, and forcing her to break those boundaries wouldn’t exactly be authentic. But I don’t respect her endless attempts to talk around them or the pretense that Scheana has no reason to be confused about where the boundaries really are, especially because the inconsistencies are so glaring.
The women hug, and Sandoval decides to make his fake apology. As soon as he walks up, Ariana bolts. We watch as she removes her mic and showrunner Jeremiah Smith tries to convince her to stay. She’s pissed, and tells him that Sandoval is only approaching her now so he can have 30 seconds in front of the audience to look like a good guy (correct). Jeremiah waves the white flag, and Ariana leaves for Applebee’s, which she mentioned so many times this episode I started wondering if they paid her.
We cut back inside, where everyone else is pissed too. “If you don’t want to film with your ex, then don’t be on this show,” Sandoval snarls. He stalks over to the cast and tells them that Ariana doesn’t like any of them and talks sh*t about them behind all of their backs. This is petty of him, but it’s also not news if you’ve been paying any attention to the last 10 years of this show. Point, Ariana.
Lala thinks it’s nonsense that Ariana won’t film with a man she lives down the hall from, and that she’s trying to dictate how everyone in the group behaves while not giving anything herself. Sandoval may have done a terrible thing, but “he did not kill somebody,” she yells.
As a montage of past moments plays — Sandoval and Kristen’s post-breakup heart-to-heart in Miami, Schwartz and Katie’s wedding, Scheana’s divorce, Lala breaking down over her father’s death, James weeping through one of his many firings — Lala voiceovers her take on the situation.
“There’s a responsibility that comes with living your life on camera,” she intones. “You have to be truthful even when it’s extremely uncomfortable. I watched James live his authentic life. Scheana has. Tom [Schwartz] and Katie. I feel I have, but there was a time that I was not honest about what was going on in my life. And it was suffocating. I don’t feel that Tom [Sandoval] and Ariana were ever honest about their relationship until Tom got caught cheating. And you think that you get to be honest for one moment, and then you get to pack it all away, and all is good? f*ck that.”
Then it’s Katie’s turn: “Sometimes you need to stick to your f*cking boundaries, and if your peace is worth more than that, then f*cking stand your ground.”
Finally, Ariana says: “We live these difficult parts of our lives on-camera, but if it’s something thatactually reallymatters to you regardless, you do it anyway. [Sandoval] has never tried to speak to me off-camera. He could have written me a f*cking letter and left it on the kitchen counterandI could have read it at my leisure, but if you’ll only do it on-camera, you just showed your true colors.”
As we fade to black, we hear Tweedledee and Tweedledum — sorry, the Toms. “That was a f*cking plot twist,” Schwartz muses. “I loved it,” Sandoval cackles. “It’s good for me.”
I’m glad production ended with this mask-off moment. Far from trying to redeem Sandoval, they’ve allowed him to dig his own grave. Though he’s tried to project an image of a remorseful, evolved man, he’s done nothing but remind us that that he isn’t sorry, that he doesn’t feel bad for cheating, and that he only thinks about the edit. In any case, my disdain for this man is well-documented: He sucks, has always sucked, probably will always suck, and is all the more dangerous because he thinks he doesn’t.
(As an aside: I also appreciated the choice to show fan comments, even though they barely scratch the surface of the fanbase’s parasocial rage. The fans have been the real villain of this season, and the vitriol with which they have gone after Scheana and Lala has been ugly to behold.)
Katie and Ariana aren’t wrong. They’re raising existential questions about what reality television should even be. Can you sign up for an entertainment medium that is built on boundary-crossing and emotional distress, and still hope to protect your peace? (I don’t think so.) If you perform for the cameras but act different when they’re not rolling, should your fakery be indulged? (Definitely not, especially when we’re talking about Sandoval, the most performative person on the show.)
But neither is Lala — at least, not about all of it. Ariana shouldn’t have to have a performative one-on-one with Sandoval if she doesn’t want to. She shouldn’t have to let go of her anger yet or forgive her ex if she’s not ready.
However, I also understand why Lala, whose situation was far worse than the Scandoval, would be skeptical of how Ariana could feel so unsafe she can’t film with her ex, but safe enough to continue living with him. I don’t agree that her trauma somehow means Ariana’s is less than, but I appreciate Lala’s willingness to say what she really thinks.
And Lala is right that everyone else has bled for Vanderpump Rules. Stassi owned all her emotions and never pretended her ultimatums were anything but. Katie and Schwartz showed all their relationship warts: When cameras missed Schwartz throwing a drink on Katie’s head, they had to re-film the scene the next night. Kristen never hid how humiliated she felt by her partners’ betrayals and always (eventually) admitted her sins. She even did producers the favor of pretending she was the one who flew Miami Girl out to SUR, a false narrative Ariana and Sandoval were all too happy to propagate in their campaign to discredit her as a crazy ex. Brittany played a recording of Jax and Faith’s postcoital conversations on a speaker at a party. Scheana got divorced on camera and has always shared her inner monologue. And Lala has processed her breakup with Randall, admitted the red flags she overlooked, and owned up to her past lies, in front of us.
Ariana and Sandoval were a different story. To this day, they will not admit that their yearslong affair was anything more than a single kiss (lol), and spent multiple seasons trying to paint Kristen as mentally unstable for calling out the truth. They shut down conversations they didn’t like — about Sandoval’s infidelity in Miami, about Jeremy’s on-camera harassment of women at Katie’s wedding, about Sandoval’s rage toward women — preferring to pass judgment on a group they saw as beneath them.
Nor is this misdirection a thing of the past. At last season’s reunion, Sandoval revealed that James had assaulted a waitress in Atlantic City in a transparent attempt to get the focus off him, a revelation Ariana batted away by saying, “At least he didn’t f*ck my friend.” This season, Sandoval has faked tears at least three times, while Ariana has preferred to lie by omission, refusing to discuss the breakup beyond a surface-level, “it was traumatic.”
Ultimately, Ariana made a choice. Rachel left the show rather than stay in an environment where she didn’t feel safe. Ariana chose to return. She signed up for a season that was never going to be about anything other than the fallout of the affair. Implicit in that decision was her agreement that she would share the emotions she experienced as she experienced them. And she didn’t.
It was never Ariana’s job to be a “cog in the Sandoval redemption arc,” and characterizing it that way is a neat trick that allows her to pretend that forgiving her ex — a clearly unreasonable ask — was the only way she could have contributed to this season.
But it’s not true. Her best moments came when she stepped into her anger and dropped the unbothered act. She’s been given dozens of opportunities to bring something honest to the table that Sandoval wasn’t present for at all. At every turn, she chose to grey-rock the producers and her castmates instead.
If anyone on the cast could foil Sandoval’s attempt at redemption, it would be Ariana. She knows him better than anyone. But she can’t go there, because to expose the full extent of Sandoval’s machinations would require her honesty on a whole host of other topics.
Why does she think that Sandoval was going to try and ice her out? Because it’s exactly what they did, with great success, to Kristen. Why does she think that Sandoval’s apologies are inauthentic? Because she used to help him craft them: If Sandoval’s press over the last year has revealed anything, it’s that Ariana was the one writing their narratives and keeping their stories straight. Why can’t she admit how heartbroken she is? Because she would have to admit how certain she was all those years ago that she was better than Kristen, who she always seemed to believe deserved Sandoval’s infidelity.
Ariana has always been the most curated of the group, a Taylor Swiftian blank space onto which anything can be projected. That blankness is exactly what makes her such an appealing celebrity and such a weak reality star. You might not like who Lala, Scheana, Katie, Stassi, or Kristen are, but no one can argue that they haven’t showed their true colors. I have no idea who Ariana is under all the media training and therapy-speak, and she’s savvy enough that I don’t think we’ll ever find out.
I want to root for Ariana. I really do. But I don’t know what I would even be rooting for. Has she reflected on what she got out of a relationship with a man whose misogyny has been a constant for the last 10 years? Does she regret her complicity in his schemes? Does she wish she had acted differently when she was the other woman, and understand now why Kristen was so hurt all those years ago? Does she regret refusing to take sides on behalf of the friends she now wants loyalty from? I have no idea. She was at her most believable in last season’s gutting admission that she “would have changed anything [Sandoval] didn’t like” about herself and “would have followed [him] anywhere,” but that honesty is locked up in a vault somewhere far, far away.
If Ariana had the juice to be the queen of Vanderpump Rules, we’d have answers to at least some of those questions. On reality television, there’s nothing more compelling than a person who owns their truth — warts, mistakes, and all — and demands respect anyway. All Ariana’s given us this season is a lot of deflection away from the galaxy of emotion she clearly feels. So what are we really doing here?
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