Prepare to say sayonara to all things #Scandoval for a spell. Per Deadline, Vanderpump Rules will be taking an extended summer vacation and will not go into production this coming summer, as it usually does.
On his SiriusXM show Andy Cohen Live, executive producer Andy Cohen addressed the decision to put VPR on a brief pause. “Yeah, we used to do this all the time with the Housewives,” Cohen said to co-host John Arthur Hill. “We would say, ‘You know what? Let’s put cameras down for, you know, four or five months and come back to them,’ and they will have lived, you know, life. Things will be different.”
Given the year Vanderpump Rules has had, a hiatus from filming may be just what the doctor ordered. After a few rocky seasons, the Bravo series’s popularity skyrocketed last year, when longtime cast members and romantic partners Tom Sandoval and Ariana Madix ended their relationship after it was revealed that Sandoval had been having an affair with their co-star Rachel Leviss. Much of that drama unfolded on camera as VPR went back into production to capture the cast’s immediate reaction to the #Scandoval. VPR‘s tenth season was a ratings juggernaut that earned the series its first-ever Emmy nominations, for outstanding unstructured reality program and outstanding picture editing for an unstructured reality program.
Season 11 of Vanderpump Rules, which premiered to record-breaking ratings in January, began shooting just a few months after news of the #Scandoval broke. But this season has received somewhat of a chillier reception from fans as it follows Sandoval, Madix, and their frosty relationship post-break up. (Leviss left the show after season 10 and began her own podcast, “Rachel Goes Rogue.”) “I was talking to Ariana [Madix] about this on the after show last night. I was saying, people do forget, especially as it relates to Ariana, who was the one cheated on, people forget that we picked up cameras a few, three months after she found out about that affair,” said Cohen. “So that’s why she’s still in the violently angry stage, and you can understand that.”
For those mourning VPR going off air for a bit, there are still plenty of places to get Vanderpump-adjacent content. There’s Peacock’s The Valley, a VPR spinoff which follows former VPR stars Jax Taylor, Kristen Doute, and Brittany Cartwright, as they mature out of the messiness of young-ish adulthood serving at SUR and into adulthood with marriage and children. And there’s Vanderpump Villa, which finds VPR matriarch Lisa Vanderpump opening a chateau in the South of France with a brand new batch of reality TV ready staff on Hulu.
The VPR hiatus comes at a great time for Madix, who’s fresh off a stint as Roxie in Chicago on Broadway. She will be taking over for Sarah Hyland as the host of Love Island USA, which reportedly begins shoots this summer in Fiji. Cohen and producers reportedly believe that VPR‘s brief hiatus will ultimately be beneficial for the show, which has been singing the same #Scandoval tune for almost a year now. “Look, sometimes you want to pick cameras right up quickly because there’s stuff happening and you want to get in there right away and sometimes you do want people to live their lives and see how things develop and you know, so, I think it’s a very good idea,” says Cohen. So for now, it’s so long to summers spent in the parking lot of SUR.
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