Vanderpump Rules Season-Premiere Recap: To SUR With Love

The hardest thing about watching the premiere of this Vanderpump Rules reboot is not to compare it to the original. Version 1 point oh-no-you-didn’t gave us a spectacular run of seasons that (after a calamitous dip) rewarded us with #Scandoval, one of the greatest story lines ever to grace our TikTok feeds, meme pages, TV screens, and whatever the hell it is we call Peacock. It’s nearly impossible to watch this first episode and not think, Was Jax already a monster? Was Stassi already a villain? Was Scheana making it all about her? Doing so is a fool’s errand. Comparison is not only the thief of joy but also the ex-boyfriend of growth. (Bear with me, I am still workshopping this metaphor.)

What we can talk about, however, are the factors that are different going into this reboot. When Vanderpump Rules debuted in 2013, reality television was not a career and certainly not a career for young people. (All the subsequent young people who have made it such have the staff of SUR and a certain family in Calabasas to thank for that.) Instagram was still on its rise, and there certainly weren’t influencers as we know them back then, certainly not people who were hoping to get on reality TV only to boost their follower count and become walking lifestyle billboards for brands. The Witches of WeHo signed up for the show as a lark and maybe to break into the entertainment industry. They were here without role models, hoping this was a stepping stone.

That is no longer true for these newbies. They know what is expected of people on reality shows — the drama, the lies, the hookups, the transactional relationships. Reality-TV fame is still a means to an end but not for a career as a singer, comedian, or “mactor” (or model-actor as the forehead-shaving Tom Sandoval would say in the first season). It is a means to a career in advertising and affiliate marketing. The idea is to sell themselves so they can sell us more and more and more on their Amazon Lives and OnlyFans.

Should we worry about this, and will it affect the show? I don’t know. It’s clear that new staff members Jason and Chris, half-cousins because their mothers are half-sisters, are here to get famous. They’ve taken jobs at SUR just so they can be on the show. They’ve already used their good looks to make money on OnlyFans (based on my, ahem, research, they seem to show everything and engage in some solo action but no penetration). Is the show just a play for more fans, more ways to make money? I don’t know. Probably. No one goes onto a show like this to help humanity. Does it matter? Scheana was lifted out of Villa Blanca to work at SUR because she slept with Brandi Glanville’s ex-husband. That turned out fine — why won’t that happen again? That said, the scene where Jason and Chris go surfing, disclose their OnlyFans accounts, and talk about their past working as male strippers is somehow the most boring scene in the whole episode.

Their presence worries me the most because it seems, at least as far as this episode goes, they’re the most detached from the group. Like the original SUR-vers, it seems most of the cast have some organic connections either as co-workers, friends, lovers, ex-lovers, or ex-lovers of the same terrible boyfriend who clearly didn’t sign a release. The episode smartly starts with a shift at the restaurant, rooting the show once again in the place that once gave it an identity. We meet Venus, a long-haired waiter who has been at the establishment for a couple of years, and Demy, who has been there close to a decade as a server and now an assistant manager. She has waited the longest for her reality-TV dreams to come true.

Chris and Jason (who, like Meredith Marks and Lisa Barlow in their early episodes, I can’t yet tell apart) are being trained by Natalie and Marcus, respectively. Natalie is a self-styled crazy person who was recently suspended for freaking out on her ex-boyfriend, who also worked at SUR and is also Demy’s ex-boyfriend, while she was dining in the restaurant with her father and brother, who were visiting from her native Florida. (She grew up near Ariana Grande, but her vocal range did not.) She gives a list of reasons she shouldn’t be in trouble, and one is that she and her ex hadn’t had sex in months, so she would be happier if she were getting laid more. Wait, she’s fighting for a man who wouldn’t even sleep with her? Get it together, sister.

Marcus is training Jason and tells him not to work so hard, then shows him how to do shots with Venus while on the clock and also sneak the brunch sangria out of the walk-in. Marcus’s girlfriend, Kim, also works there, and I have high hopes for her because some of the greatest practitioners of the reality-television arts and sciences share her name. Marcus also introduces us to his friend Shayne Davis, a model who doesn’t work at SUR and is so hot he’s allowed to laugh like a cartoon dog. He and Natalie have been making eyes at each other, and she made him promise he would never bring another girl into “her” restaurant. He shows up on a first date because he is already producing.

After their shift, the crew goes to a bar where Jason and Chris try to fit in with the group while everyone else tries to start a fight for the cameras. The only one that sticks is between Kim and Marcus. She’s upset that Natalie is texting Marcus all the time because they’re developing a friendship. She says they’re not that close and shouldn’t be communicating that much; the rest of the staff tries to convince Kim that they are actually close and she’s missing the point. It’s 2025. Why can’t men and women be friends? At the end of the night, Venus, who is besties with Marcus, even tries to convince him that he should have stood up for Natalie more when Kim was screaming at her.

This is how reality television warps our minds. First of all, has Venus ever met a human woman? He’s going to tell a man that he should defend a woman other than his girlfriend while fighting with that girlfriend? How many times did that work out for Tom Schwartz? Remember when Katie Maloney Schwartz Maloney told him he had a small dick that didn’t work? That was probably because he defended someone else, and she was absolutely in the right. (It took Vanderpump Rules getting rebooted for me to realize that, from about season five on, Katie was always right.)

But apparently my mind has been warped too. I initially believed that, yes, Kim is overreacting. Natalie wants to be friends with Marcus, and Marcus just wants to be friends with her. But then I was reminded that Natalie totally stole Demy’s boyfriend and will do it again. Natalie is not here to make friends. Natalie is here to make brand deals. Natalie would see an opening for a story line and bust it open like Target shoppers on Black Friday trying to get a $300 Switch 2. Kim is right: Her man should not be texting with a known boyfriend thief. That everyone was trying to convince her otherwise is insane.

And apparently, it gets even worse after everyone goes home. Kim and Marcus continue to have a drunken fight about it, and Kim says “typical Marcus” ignored her and her feelings and then “typical Marcus” went home in the middle of the fight. She calls him 100 times, and Marcus tells Shayne that, while working out at a sad Crunch in the Valley, he didn’t answer on purpose because he knew if he didn’t, she would just show up at his house (and probably sleep with him in the morning). My only question is, What is Kim doing? If these are his typical behaviors, why is she fighting to be with him? Are young, straight men so trash that she doesn’t think she can find better out there? (That is a rhetorical question. We know the answer.)

Don’t worry. A powerful woman is coming for Marcus. When Lisa gets to SUR, Nathalie, the co-owner who is one consonant away from being her worst bartender, says she was searching the security footage for something she’d lost (a story line, no doubt) and she discovered Marcus, Jason, and Venus were drinking on the job. She calls a staff meeting so she can ream Marcus in front of his peers. Lisa starts the meeting by talking about how business has been difficult, how nightlife in West Hollywood hasn’t rebounded since the pandemic and SUR is struggling. I appreciate this honesty, and I wish we got more of it, used it to create more stakes for the SUR-vers — either they step it up or they’re all out of a job, not just their fake service jobs but their very real TV jobs.

Then she turns to Marcus, whom she yells at not only for drinking but also for training someone that it is okay to drink on the job. She turns him out and says he’ll face his punishment later. We next see him skulking through the SUR alley, a future UNESCO World Heritage Site, and then standing there on the sidewalk right across from Dogpound, right next to Something About Her. Katie is out front of her sandwich shop wearing an adorable apron tied over a denim skirt. Her hair is up in a bun, but it’s still loose around the ears. She looks relaxed and happy. She’s holding a broom and sweeping the dust, dried leaves, and abandoned Abbey wristbands off her stoop. She’s thinking about her day, what time the batch of bread will finish baking, and whether that shipment of mayonnaise the tariffs have delayed will ever make it to the store. She’s mid-sweep when she looks up and sees a stranger looking lost with cameras pointed at him. He doesn’t know where to go, what to say, or who this woman holding a clipboard and firing questions at him is. Katie knows the scene all too well. She leaves her little pile of detritus right there on the sidewalk and hustles inside. She locks the door and lowers the blinds, her fingers twitching, asking her brain if they can’t pry apart the blinds for a peek. Just a little peek. Just a little peek won’t hurt.