‘Vanderpump Rules’ Season 11 Premiere: Is This It?

The Vanderpump Rules Season 10 finale, aptly titled “#Scandoval,” concluded with a dramatic exchange between Tom Sandoval, two-timing paragon of Angeleno scumbaggery whose five-percent ownership stake in one of West Hollywood’s seediest bars made him think he was the second coming of Steve Rubell, and Scheana Shay, an aspiring pop star/vlogger who will fall head over heels for you if you mount a TV in under seven minutes.

During this coda, we saw Scheana — tears streaming down her face, because of course — read Sandoval for filth over his clandestine affair with Raquel (now Rachel), a failed beauty pageant contestant and close friend of both Scheana and Ariana Madix, Sandoval’s live-in girlfriend for close to a decade. It sorta made sense on paper: Scheana and Sandoval are the last remnants of the O.G. VPR cast who started out together at Villa Blanca (“where you take your wife,” according to Lisa Vanderpump), migrated over to SUR (Translation: Sexy Unique Restaurant, or “where you take your mistress,” sayeth LVP), and have absorbed all the slings and arrows of the messiest friend group on television. Given Scheana’s astonishing lack of loyalty, however, the entire scene felt off, like bad theater.

As I wrote at the time, “Why is the final scene of an otherwise gripping hour-plus of television between Sandoval and Scheana? Who cares about the two most self-serving people on Vanderpump Rules having a heart-to-heart?”

In the weeks and months since, we’ve been inundated with reports of Scheana (and Sandy’s lapdog, Schwartz) hanging out with Sandoval during filming and partying in his hotel suite during BravoCon. DJ James Kennedy even seemed chummy with Sandoval at the Vegas extravaganza, engaging in a shirtless, homoerotic display of strength with his ex-mentor. All of this seemed to fly in the face of everything that happened in that finale sit-down, and the subsequent shouty three-part reunion. Cue “We’ve Been Had” by the Walkmen.

Which brings us to the Season 11 premiere of Vanderpump Rules, which dropped the night of Jan. 30. And yes, Scheana is still making other people’s business all about herself (but more on that later).

We learn that Sandoval and Ariana are still living together, mired in a horror-movie scenario (they only communicate via his assistant); Scheana and Brock’s daughter, Summer Moon, is incredibly cute; and DJ James Kennedy and Ally the Astrologist have moved into a house of their own in the Valley that came with “a catch”: airplanes constantly flying overhead. Perhaps that buzzing sound is karma for DJ James Kennedy’s past treatment of women.  

Tom Schwartz talks to his many plants — “my only friends now” — like Mark Wahlberg in The Happening, Katie is still Ariana’s partner-in-sandwich/ride or die, Sandoval is in New Zealand shooting the Fox reality-competition series Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test, and Lala’s mother lives with her (and her brother, Easton, is in the same apartment complex). Plus, she’s still embroiled in a custody battle with her seedy ex, movie producer Randall Emmett, over their daughter Ocean. She’s on high alert at all times, and skeptical of Ariana’s new long-distance boyfriend, Dan, a personal trainer in New York whom Ariana met at her friend’s wedding in Oaxaca, questioning his “motive.” This is the first hint we get of simmering tension between Lala and Ariana, whose friendship always seemed borne of convenience and/or opportunity.

While Katie gushes how “everything has been falling into place” with their WeHo sandwich shop, Something About Her, which was designed by none other than Jon Hutman, Nancy Meyers’ production designer, Vanderpump Rules die-hards know that it still isn’t open despite the duo raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to bankroll its opening. What in the Jill Stein is going on?   

Back to Ariana and Sandoval’s waking nightmare.

“What I think is psychotic is that he wants to buy me out and stay here,” Ariana tells Katie. “I’m sorry, but then you don’t have to move, and I do? What are you going to do, bring your little pen pal over here? I don’t fucking think so.”

The “pen pal” she’s referring to is Rachel. She and Sandoval “are still very much together,” Ariana says, since they’ve been sending mail and packages back and forth while Rachel is in an Arizona rehab, and Rachel even sent him “a postcard with lightning bolts all over it.” (The lightning bolt has long been their special symbol.)  

There’s a whole lot of fat in this episode. We see DJ James Kennedy (California sober now) and Ally the Astrologer building furniture in their backyard and discover that Sandoval’s best friend dating all the way back to high school, Ali, has tragically passed away. This prompts Scheana to reach out to Sandoval, only for her to discover that she’s been blocked on every platform. He even blocked Scheana’s daughter, Summer Moon, on IG. Justice for Summer Moon!

Schwartz, still an emotional infant — who’s resembling Crispin Glover’s weird cousin more and more with each passing day — gives DJ James Kennedy some housewarming gifts, including a plant and a candle that he says is an “olfactory delight,” and whines about how he’s still being shunned by Ariana for his active participation in the whole Rachel affair ruse. In fact, Ariana has blocked Schwartz over his shambolic Watch What Happens Live appearance where he told viewers to show grace to Sandoval and give him a hug, leading to the episode’s funniest moment (other than Summer Moon getting blocked), as Schwartz reads Ariana’s last text to him out loud before she blocked him:

“It says, ‘Fuck you. I’m blocking you. Go choke on Sandoval’s dirty-ass dick somewhere.’”

The Season 11 premiere is named “Notes on a Scandal,” and frankly, it could’ve used some sociopathic-Dame-Judi-Dench energy. Its big centerpiece is a DJ James Kennedy set at TomTom, the aforementioned train wreck of a bar owned by Lisa Vanderpump that Sandoval and Schwartz have a teeny-tiny stake in. But Sandoval is still on the other side of the world, so a montage of TomTom moments set to sad music doesn’t quite land. TomTom is also the place where Sandoval transformed into a douchebag before our very eyes, lashing out at Stassi over her book party, and where Ariana found the mutual-masturbation video of Sandoval and Rachel on his phone. The notion that she’d have fond memories of this place seems like a stretch.

Lisa Vanderpump, once the grand doyenne of Vanderpump Rules, is now more or less an afterthought on the show she birthed. Now that none of the cast members work for her in her restaurants and can’t be dressed down in staff meetings, Notorious LVP is seemingly devoting most of her time to Vanderpump Villa, her upcoming Hulu reality series, and her Vegas restaurant Vanderpump à Paris. She pops up briefly to listen to Lala — who once coined the term “Bambi-eyed bitch” and turned it up to 11 during the three-part reunion — express remorse over her treatment of Rachel, relating it to her own treatment during the Randall Emmett affair fiasco. So, she leaves Rachel a friendly Voice Note, presumably at the urging of LVP. Now, if you’ll allow me to speculate a bit, it seems as though a large part of this can be chalked up to Lala’s tenuous position on the series at present. With her one close friend in the group, DJ James Kennedy, playing house in the Valley with Ally, and the drama with Emmett mostly in her rearview, what is there for her to do other than stir shit up? And we know Lala loves stirring shit up.

That comes over girls drinks at The Den, a bro-y hellscape of a bar in WeHo, when Lala tells Ariana that she’s reached out to Rachel — much to Ariana’s chagrin — and a scenes from the next clip of Lala bemoaning how Ariana has become a “god” in the wake of #Scandoval. This all builds to Sandoval returning home from New Zealand to an empty home, and another scenes from the next bit of Schwartz telling everyone that he made out with … Scheana. Because if there’s one thing we can rely on when it comes to Scheana it’s that she’s unreliable.

It’s worth noting that filming on Season 11 of Vanderpump Rules began June 28, 2023 — only a few weeks after the third reunion episode aired — and ended in early September. With all the podcast interviews its various players have done, their much-ballyhooed BravoCon appearance in November, and the way its fans have feverishly documented the shoot on social media, all of this drama feels rooted in the past. What made the Season 10 finale (and the reunion) so explosive is that they picked up filming in the spring and rushed them out. That recency, that sense of urgency, is gone.

Overall, “Notes on a Scandal” was a pretty uneventful hour of television that begs the question: Did Vanderpump Rules peak with Season 10? And where does it go from here?