It’s taken me some time to process the fallout from the final installation of the Summer House reunion. Having spent years watching reunions, sometimes it can take a day or two to get a feel for the narratives that emerge after such a highly-anticipated finale. And like clockwork, since the reunion wrapped, we’ve heard the discourse surrounding Amanda Batula’s commitment to the damsel in distress bit, pondered the impact of the beta blockers West Wilson admitted to taking before the reunion and we all seem to be in a communal state of worry over Jesse Solomon, well, crying his eyes out over the utter betrayal of it all.
Now that I know what everyone else is thinking, though, I’ve been trying to compile my own thoughts. And for some reason, that’s proving to be more difficult than usual, and I think that’s due to a few things. The first is that to Lindsay Hubbard’s point, this reunion, despite the anticipation and the build-up for it, read a bit hollow. The second is that the bar for what it will take to be stimulated by reality TV continues to get higher and higher.
And the last thing is that the show, much like many of its peers that last this long, is having a bit of an identity crisis, making it difficult to decipher between what constitutes actual entertainment versus us just all bearing witness to people’s childhood and lifelong trauma and how that plays out in their interpersonal relationships.
Many online agree that there was something about the third installation of this reunion that felt unfinished. I don’t think that the audience, and certainly not the castmates, got the sense of resolution we were looking for. This is important because this is quite literally the point of these reunions – to bring resolution and to have the group reset ahead of the next season. But with West and Amanda clearly lying through their teeth about the timeline of their relationship, the depth of their feelings for one another, and whether he was actually in an exclusive relationship with Meija, business is still largely unfinished.
At one point during the production, all of this is brought to light by Lindsay, who returned to the couch from lunch to let Andy know how she felt – which was as if she hadn’t learned anything new. And I think that hit for a lot of audience members, too. Because there wasn’t a whole lot of new information. And that’s in part to the deceit, but also to the current function of reality TV.
The thing is, by the time these reunions air, months have passed from the scandal breaking, and even more time has passed since filming. Thanks to internet sleuths and reality TV blogs and social media pages and podcasts, ones where stars of the show often go to share their account of things, it’s getting easier and easier to learn everything there is to know between then and now. So reunions almost always fail to present new information – despite being promoted and teased as if there’s some sort of exclusive bombshell to drop.
This is where reality TV finds itself at an interesting crossroads. I mean, you’ve got fans and sleuths doing full-on stakeouts, spotting and photographing West and Amanda all the way in Italy, FFS. And for the first time this season, we even dealt with a leak, which I wrote about here. So while the hype is certainly an integral part of the ecosystem of reality TV, it’s also costing these three-part grand finales their exclusivity and deflating a lot of the mystery of whatever might be exposed during any given reunion.
On the topic of the leak, which was very much a first for the Bravo network and for a reality TV reunion, it’s rare that we get to venture into that kind of unchartered territory anymore. This begs the question of how much of the current shock value we experience when scandals like Amanda and West’s affair break is actually sustainable?
Every time a new reality show launches, there’s got to be something that makes us watch. Let’s take Real Housewives of Salt Lake City for example. The fact that Mary Cosby had married her step-grandfather was insane. And it was strategically used in the promotion of the show because it’s so outrageous. On Real Housewives of Rhode Island, we’re dealing with Rulla’s husband’s very obvious affair and the fact that some castmates are being accused of having multiple sex partners and one of them of having a literal sugar daddy, in addition to another partner. Over on The Valley, last season fans were sounding the alarm and expressing concern over what many felt was actual emotional abuse and manipulation playing out on screen at the hands of Jax Taylor. And we’re seeing similar concerns this season between Danny Booko and his wife Nia.
In moments like this, we realize that it’s becoming more and more difficult to just launch a show without some level of insane scandal. This is why In The City launched at the perfect time because it picked up right where Summer House left off. And had the season not ended with such a bang, there would have been so much less fan investment in the new show.
This brings me to my last point about the identity crisis reality TV shows often experience this long into their run. This is when we start to see the spinoffs like In The City or The Valley start to surface. Each of these shows came to us after their predecessors hit their tenth season.
This indicates that production knows that things are getting “stale” in a way that doesn’t necessarily reflect a lack of new material, but a lack of non-toxic new material. And when you’re ten years into chronicling a toxic marriage, like we see with Jax and Brittany or Kyle and Amanda, or ten years into anything, really, it’s harder to put on a front for the cameras. So we all just sit there and bear witness to everyone’s ugly truth, substance abuse issues, and in this case, infidelity starts to come to the forefront.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I have to repeat that none of this will stop true reality TV fans from watching. We’ve just been handed a platter of new personalities to dissect and analyze and some of them have kids and have moved women to New York under the guise that they want actual partnership but are already giving us every indication that they, like Kyle, have no intention of giving up the frat boy lifestyle.
For all the toxicity that plays out on screen, you’d think it would be easier to recognize that perhaps, we, too, are in toxic relationships. But our aggressor is not so much a person, and instead a show, a cast and a long-standing love for using other people’s realities to escape our own.
