The Messy 'Vanderpump Rules' Season Finale May Have Killed the Series for Good

By Emma Chance | TV | May 8, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | TV | May 8, 2024 |

Since the start of Vanderpump Rules season 11 we’ve been teased with a clip of LaLa Kent screaming “I have never experienced someone who gets cheated on, and suddenly she becomes God!” It’s been in every trailer, sneak peek, and promotional “still to come” clip, and spread around the internet like a harbinger of doom. In last night’s finale, we finally saw Kent’s outburst in all its contextual glory.

Allow me to set the stage. The whole gang is in San Francisco for a cast trip—Ariana Madix, her boyfriend Dan, her ex Tom Sandoval, Tom Schwartz, his ex Katie Maloney, Scheana Shay, her husband Brock Turner, James Kennedy, his girlfriend Ally, and LaLa Kent—culminating at a combined DJ set by Kennedy and musical performance by Shay at a distillery. The trip has been tense but uneventful up to this point, as Madix and Sandoval have been tag-teaming the group hangs lest they be forced to communicate.

But their friends are struggling. They feel awkward about managing their relationships with one of them without upsetting the other. When Sandoval is around they try their best to mend fences and leave the situation feeling optimistic about his growth (except Maloney, who is ride or die Team Ariana), and when Madix is around, they try to express their discomfort about the arrangement and she blows up at them for so much as speaking to Sandoval. This confuses them, as she and Sandoval still technically live in the same house and communicate via personal assistants. They wonder why Madix doesn’t just wash her hands of it and move out, and worry she’ll excommunicate them from her life if they give Sandoval another chance. She told Schwartz outright that they were not friends anymore due to his friendship with Sandoval, but has stopped short of saying anything as harsh to Shay or Kent, instead making faces at them when they bring him up and responding with things like “He will not have access to me or my life,” and “He doesn’t deserve to breathe the same air as me.”

This all comes to a head after Shay’s performance. Madix finds Shay in the crowd to congratulate her. Shay says thank you and then starts whining about how she wants to be friends with Sandoval again. Madix makes the faces and says the things about air and access, and then Sandoval tries to sneak up on them to join the conversation. Madix feels him approaching and scurries away to the VIP section, where the cast was corralled for the evening. She finds a frustrated producer waiting for her.

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“Don’t end like this,” he pleads, to which Madix responds with her typical tirade about boundaries and says Sandoval only wants to talk to her “for the audience” and claims he’s never tried to talk to her when cameras were down, then storms out to go to Applebee’s with her boyfriend. Once she’s gone, Sandoval appears in her place and starts shouting at Shay, Kent, et al. about how Madix doesn’t even like them but he does!

Then Kent delivers her long-awaited monologue.

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“I’ve been biting my tongue because …it’s a lot of breaking the fourth wall, so I’m gonna do it now. This happened to her and the world rallied around her. She now thinks she is Beyoncé. It’s bullshit that she can’t film with someone that she stays under the same roof! It’s a lot that she’s saying, ‘Don’t fuck with Tom Sandoval, don’t fuck with Tom Sandoval, but I’m gonna sleep down the hall from Tom Sandoval.’ I get it—he fucking cheated … but he did not kill somebody!”

Then she delivers the God line and we launch into a dramatic confessional from Kent that smashes down what was left of the already crumbling fourth wall.

“I love filming this show because it is real,” she says. “For Ariana to walk out this way is just such a slap in the face. This is what we do. We’ve been doing this for most of our adult lives.” And so begins a montage of the cast members in seasons past. “We’ve all experienced high highs and low lows,” Kent narrates. “And there’s a responsibility that comes with living your life on camera. You have to be truthful, even when it’s extremely uncomfortable.”

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Producers have spoken previously about how challenging it was to film this season with the fan fervor and real lives of the cast bleeding through. They recently announced that filming for the next season is on pause to give everyone a break, but after that ending, I’d be surprised if it ever picked up again.

Before Scandoval, the show was floundering. The cast was getting older and splintering off and having families, and then the scandal created watchable drama again. But Lala has a point. When reality TV can’t touch the actual reality of people’s lives because it’s all too painful, what do you even have anymore? It’s a recent symptom infecting the whole genre, with relationship details and closeted skeletons looming over every season of Housewives and the like. Even the new VR spinoff, The Valley, is already falling victim to plotlines hingeing on “secrets” that cast members don’t want revealed on camera. Andy Cohen celebrated the finale on Watch What Happens Live! late last night with a montage of Bravo’s top 5 fourth-wall-breaking moments, and ended by saying, “Fourth walls are made to be broken, everybody!”

It all adds up to a navel-gazing, chicken-and-egg scenario that, frankly, isn’t as fun as it used to be.