This essay is part of an Avidly cluster on Vanderpump Rules guest co-edited by Olivia Stowell And Jay Shelat.
There is a moment in the otherwise-underwhelming eighth season of Vanderpump Rules when James Kennedy—British wannabe DJ and probably your asshole college roommate’s favorite asshole—wonders why fellow cast member Katie quit working at Sexy Unique Restaurant (SUR) Restaurant soon after making sure James was fired. He now wants his SUR ‘job’ back, a job that is ostensibly 20% DJing1 and 80% getting drunk (after promising not to) and then fat/slut shaming his co-workers.
One might wonder why James wants his job back when he clearly can DJ elsewhere; he mentions getting gigs in New York and other bars in LA. By this time, James has several seasons of TV fame under his belt (which means he can always just shill scam products on Instagram or make money off Cameos).
James’s desperation to get his job back, and his opinions about Katie’s voluntary unemployment, opens up a bigger question for me: If, as Ariana Madix noted in a recent interview, “no one” (from the show, that is) really works at SUR anymore, why are jobs, then, still a plot point in Vanderpump Rules?
Of course, it is clear that many, if not all, of the cast did actually work (and pay their bills) through waiting, bartending, or SURving once upon a time—a fact confirmed by their messy apartments and cheap outfits in earlier seasons—but at some point during the show’s decade-long run, working at SUR stopped becoming a payment device and instead became a call to cosplay.
Thus, James’s insistence to go back to work at SUR because he feels at home there only makes sense in a universe where hirings, firings, and suspensions are central to the plot instead of life. When we religiously marathoned VPR together, we kept asking each other, “Ok but what does Kristen DO now that she has been fired from SUR?”After three straight seasons, we realized that it never mattered. Adept in selling beer cheese and dropship t-shirts produced in sweatshops and repurposed boxed wines or running objectively horrendous fashion blogs, VPR’s cast is — for lack of a better word — omnilaboring. They are just a group of Barbies (and Ken, of course), all always searching for the next side hustle, all the while entertaining millions precisely by the virtue of having that superhuman ability to find one around the corner. We never found the answer to the question, “but what does Kristen DO?”
But perhaps we were asking the wrong question. Lisa Vanderpump’s own career is the model of VPR’s titular rules. Lisa also rules as our sovereign—a mother, boss,employer, friend, and therapist, depending on the time of the day. She acts as an enterprise unto herself and exhorts everyone around her to do the same.
Lisa’s joint venture with Tom Sandoval and Tom Schwartz, the restaurant TomTom (even if the Toms only have a measly 5% share in it) is, by that logic, a worthy achievement for the Toms, as now they too may become fake bosses, the destroyer of livelihoods. Questions like “Would I be fired?” “Do I need to take on extra shifts?” “What if I get suspended?” that once animated the world of Vanderpump Rules involved attacking (or saving) the cast’s livelihoods. From seasons one through six, such concerns were front and center in the narrative. The show, then, does not so much revolve around the work itself as it does around the idea of work.
What is at stake, then, is whether our in-reality-TV (but not always in reality) waiters are willing to present a certain kind of deference to work. And not just to work itself, but also to the boss, who notes again and again that she will not tolerate disrespect, even when she speaks to cast members who are not under her employment anymore. The supposed disappointment of not getting to work at SUR, James shows us, is actually a fear of not being on Vanderpump Rules; the former can be replaced with another precarious job, the latter cannot.
James’s very introduction on the show, by becoming Kristen’s post-Sandoval rebound in season three, came with accusations that he courted her for the screen time. This pattern repeats when Lisa auditions cast-member partners for jobs at SUR/Pump (Tom Schwartz, Raquel, or the CV-less Brittany). The song and dance of seeking employment is many things: a nod of approval from the mother/goddess/guardian-angel Lisa, a way for couples to “spend more time together,” but most importantly, a ticket to enter the televised world of VPR.
Maybe that explains the flatness of the relatively ‘weaker’ middle seasons of VPR before Scandoval upturned the show and our lives. The reality of reality TV looks and works differently under conditions of comfort than it does when its cast member workers can’t run their microwave and air conditioning at the same time for fear of blowing a fuse.
What makes for good TV is needing to work, needing the shifts and the tips. In other words, precarity. This fear of being converted into a surplus discarded by the show is clearly present at VPR’s start through these employment struggles. But the cast’s financial precarity needs to transform into some other kind of vulnerability if they are to successfully continue producing drama in their lives. They need to be personally insecure or psychosocially insecure for them to ‘work’ as VPR cast members. Already broken people can be relied on to break again in different ways.
Peter, probably the weakest regular feature on the show, owes his uninterestingness, then, to his managerial position and predictable health insurance. He doesn’t need the shifts like Jax does (or at least did, once upon a time). And the show ends up needing to contextualize these changes.
Towards the start of the show, Lisa tells us that she wants her employees to become famous and leave SUR, indicating the inherent temporariness of a SUR job. And later, after Lala gets engaged to the wealthy Randall, Lisa says that she can no longer work at SUR—implying that what she was doing was a shit job that is below Lala’s now-station in life —somehow still trying to convince us that working at SUR may really be a thing that Lala had been doing until now.
The post-2008 rise of the gig economy precaritized millions of American workers, and needing to cobble together multiple shifts became a hallmark of life. Vanderpump Rules starts with that logic and expands it into a spectacle of precarities of all other kinds. If Vanderpump Rules–the reality TV hallmark of this new world–was a form, then, it would be the IRS form 1099.
In our own real-world labor history, this jives with reality TV’s labor history and the recent calls for reality TV stars to unionize. But in carefully tiptoeing around the question of who works where and makes how much money in what way, and in folding that tiptoeing into the show’s plotlines, Vanderpump Rules narrativizes working in this era as an operation. We are told that we are watching a work show, but it is the idea of watching a work show that we actually end up watching. It does not matter if the cast works at SUR ; they have to feel like, and make us feel like, even when they are partying 24/7, that working is important. That, more than anything, is the narrative desire of VPR, where working is the narrative being forwarded.
It is probably, then, a good thing that, as Kim Kardashian reminds us, “[i]t seems like nobody wants to work these days.” Perhaps this lack of want is a place to begin.
Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal occasionally writes and professes while living in South Bend, Indiana. He is rarely the number one guy in his group (which consists of him, his wife, and his two cats). Sahana is a molecular neuroscientist. her postdoctoral project investigates the impact of metaphors on scientists’ conception of the central nervous system. Not bad for a girl with no talent.
