I have been thinking deeply about Bravo's "Vanderpump Rules" lately. In my defense, the show broke its agreement with us — to not ever make its fans think too deeply — first. Like much of the internet and several of my group chats, it started with the off-camera reveal in March that veteran cast member and bartender turned lounge owner Tom Sandoval — he of the midlife crisis cover band and mustache — had been cheating on his partner of nine years, castmate and preternaturally chill peacemaker Ariana Madix, with her much younger "best friend" Raquel (née Rachel) Leviss, the pageant princess slash ex-fiancée of haunted Victorian doll-turned-DJ James Kennedy.
Far from a simple drunken hookup — the fuel that ran this show in its youth — Sandoval and Raquel carried on a full-blown secret love affair under the nose of Bravo's production team (and, as the cast euphemistically refers to themselves as, "the friend group") in the Valley Village house where his long-term girlfriend was grieving the deaths of her beloved grandmother and dog between trying to open her own business and to get Sandoval to stay sober long enough to fertilize her frozen eggs. Pass the Pumptinis, this is some bleak adult s**t!
