It's Time to Put 'The Valley' Out of Its Misery

Time​ Magazine

16 hours ago

Television has gotten pretty dark. Tech dystopias, from Black Mirror to Severance, are our water-cooler shows. The true-crime factory pumps out more real-life nightmares every day. Millions of viewers are bingeing on post-apocalyptic misery, whether it takes the shape of The Last of Us' fungal wasteland or Silo's crumbling underground city or the sterile billionaires' stronghold in Paradise. Even realistic dramas increasingly rely on a murder-mystery element to build suspense. And yet, somehow, the most depressing show on TV—with the exception of any news broadcast, at least—is a reality soap about bougie couples in the suburbs of Los Angeles.
I am, of course, talking about Bravo's The Valley, the Vanderpump Rules spinoff that follows some of the latter series' most notorious characters from the clubstaraunt to the cul-de-sac. Like the early seasons of Vanderpump, as well as the network's stalwart Real Housewives and Below Deck franchises, The Valley was introduced as light entertainment. In this case, the comedy inherent in the premise was that of hard-partying, adulthood-resisting millennial Angelenos adjusting to marriage, mortgage payments, and parenthood. (The original opening credits placed the couples in kitschy front-yard tableaux, hoisting trash bags or raking leaves.) Instead, viewers have spent two seasons looking on in horror as many of the cast members have torn their own lives and families apart, with public scrutiny only adding heat to the crucible. Far from entertaining, the show has become genuinely painful to watch. Now, as its second season ends in a trilogy of miserable reunion episodes, I wish Bravo would just pull the plug.
The series premiere, which aired last March, suggests what producers initially envisioned as the tone of the show. Like the Housewives, this docusoap would center on the big personalities and minor melodramas of a so-called friend group—a term of art for a reality TV cast that may or may not actually socialize off-camera. Vanderpump alums Jax Taylor, a supposedly reformed womanizer, and his wife Brittany Cartwright, a Kentucky-bred sweetheart whose years of saintly self-sacrifice had apparently redeemed him, were positioned as what Jax might call the No. 1 couple in the group. Also back on Bravo, years after getting fired from Vanderpump for racist mischief, was perennial pot-stirrer Kristen Doute, now trying to get pregnant with her boyfriend, soft-spoken L.A. outsider Luke Broderick. A selection of their associates filled out the cast. Jesse Lally and Michelle Saniei were married real estate agents with a toddler. Actor Danny Booko and former Miss USA Nia Booko had their hands full with three kids under two years old (now they have four under four). Janet Caperna was extremely intense and extremely pregnant; her husband, Jason, kept relatively quiet. Finally, we met Jasmine Goode and Zack Wickham, who were both queer but whose personal lives didn't seem to be part of the friend-group saga.
While Jax, surely at the urging of producers, tried to provoke Kristen by questioning her fertility choices, nothing major happened in the premiere. The couples bickered and complained about each other, as couples often do. The episode climaxed with Jax pantsing Danny, who turned out to not be wearing underwear, at a country-fair-themed birthday party for Janet. Earlier, Zack had made an observation whose accuracy was never in doubt but that would only seem more prescient as the show progressed: 'All these people move to the Valley, get a house, pop out a couple of kids, and then they think they're so grown-up. But these people don't grow up.'
As tends to be the case in shows like this, tensions between and among couples escalated as the season wore on. But unless you'd been following the ever-expanding constellation of tabloids, podcasts, and social media gossip accounts that track reality stars' every move, it was still jarring to see a six-month time jump in the finale that checked in with two couples—Jesse and Michelle as well as Jax and Brittany—who'd separated since production wrapped. Alarming reports trickled out during The Valley's hiatus, mostly about Jax: his cocaine addiction; his stint in rehab, during which Brittany filed for divorce; his diagnosis, after years of Bravo fans' armchair psychoanalysis, of bipolar and PTSD; a second rehab stay.
Much of the above was chronicled in this year's anhedonic second season, which opened with Brittany's account—and Jax's confirmation—of his violent, table-smashing response to his discovery of some racy text messages she'd exchanged with a friend of his, even though they were separated and free to date at the time. Viewers learned that he'd also been surveilling his estranged wife via home security cameras, and watched as he bombarded her with rage-texts from rehab. Repeating a pattern of behavior familiar to any Vanderpump completist, he sometimes lied, sometimes expressed remorse and promised to change, and sometimes played the victim, insisting it was Brittany who had destroyed their family by separating him from his son. (I mean, who could blame her?) Every episode seemed to bring a new, terrible revelation.
Jax wasn't the only man in the group whose actions went beyond the pale—even for reality TV. Though he and Michelle both had new partners and were co-parenting… well, not peacefully, but at least more functionally than the Cartwright-Taylors, Jesse became obsessed with the idea that she'd been cheating on him with her current boyfriend before their separation. He called her a 'hooker' to her face and spread an unsubstantiated rumor that a billionaire was paying her for sex. The exes went back and forth over whether Michelle could take their daughter on a trip to visit her dying mother. Less predictably, it came out that nice-guy Danny had drunkenly groped Jasmine and her fiancée, Melissa Carelli, at a Halloween party between seasons. Although he apologized and they forgave him, the incident fueled a season-long arc that divided the cast over whether they believed he had a drinking problem that Nia was helping him hide.
Whether or not you're inclined to invoke loaded and in some cases legal terms—domestic violence, emotional abuse, sexual assault, stalking, slander, slut-shaming, etc.—to describe these behaviors, only a sadist could enjoy watching real people inflict and endure such a litany of tortures. It's particularly disturbing to see them normalized within the conventions of a TV format designed to escalate petty slights and rivalries into social wars so stupid, they're funny. Real suffering is kryptonite to rich-people-problems entertainment (which is probably also why The Real Housewives of New York City imploded, this past January, in a season finale where one cast member accused another of insensitivity towards the former's traumatic experience as a rape survivor). This is not the stuff of juicy gossip, to be gleefully dissected with Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live. Yet there Cohen and The Valley cast members often were, on his post-game talk show, polling viewers about whose side they were on in the Jax-Brittany breakup or how they felt about Janet labeling Danny's blackout transgression sexual assault.
As the RHONY meltdown illustrates, The Valley isn't the first Bravo docusoap to get darker than the genre is equipped to go. But the sheer number of horrible storylines and moments in its second season suggests something uniquely rotten at the show's core. I think it's the focus on the specific varieties of dysfunction that can arise within heterosexual marriages and families. While husbands and kids are part of all the Housewives menageries, they're never the main characters. Frequent girls' trips, among other contrivances, keep the focus on female friendship, which for all its discontents does not usually conceal sexual violence, abuse, or infidelity. Cheating has been a constant source of drama in Vanderpump (before Scandoval, Jax was the resident recidivist cad) and other coed 'friend group' shows like Summer House. The thing is, those casts tend to be younger, unmarried, and childless; the stakes of their drunken antics are lower, less likely to land them in court or rehab and their kids, who in the case of The Valley families are too little to be consensual participants in the Bravo universe, in therapy.
Which is why, as unlikely as its cancellation seems at this point, I'm convinced there's no fixing The Valley. Sure, Taylor's recently announced departure from the show is a relief, especially for Cartwright and their son, whether or not he's capable of staying out of the spotlight or maintaining what he enumerated in a statement as 'my sobriety, my mental health and coparenting relationship.' No one's livelihood should be contingent on interacting, on camera or off, with a person who caused them pain. Yet Brittany isn't the only cast member in that boat.
Even if she were, what would be left to salvage of a show whose central clique has no real chemistry, whose cast has no charming breakout star (much has been made of Vanderpump villain Doute's emergence as the most likable of the bunch), whose episodes are devoid of the silly hangout shenanigans found in the best seasons of Vanderpump and Housewives? (The slapstick comedy of Jax pantsing Danny was immediately followed by Nia bursting into tears over her husband's humiliation.) The producers of The Valley were right to presume that chaos would ensue when people who'd been partying for 20 years tried to settle into more tranquil, suburban existences. They just didn't anticipate what a tragic form that chaos would take.