Valley Village is a Los Angeles neighborhood just across the freeway from
Studio City, near the southern edge of the area locally referred to with both
affection and derision as the Valley. There, at the end of a quiet, leafy
street of ranch-style homes stands what real estate agents have come to
describe as a �modern farmhouse,� which its current occupant, the reality-TV
star Tom Sandoval, has outfitted with landscaping lights that rotate in a
spectrum of colors, mimicking the dance floor of a nightclub. The home is
both his private residence and an occasional TV set for the Bravo reality
show �Vanderpump Rules.� After a series of events that came to be known as
�Scandoval,� paparazzi had been camped outside, but by the new year it was
just one or two guys, and now they have mostly gone, too.

�Scandoval� is the nickname for Sandoval�s affair with another cast member,
which he had behind the backs of the show�s producers and his girlfriend of
nine years. This wouldn�t be interesting or noteworthy except that in 2023,
after being on the air for 10 seasons, �Vanderpump� was nominated for an Emmy
for outstanding unstructured reality program, an honor that has never been
bestowed on any of the network�s �Housewives� shows. It also became, by a key
metric, the most-watched cable series in the advertiser-beloved demographic
of 18-to-49-year-olds and brought in over 12.2 million viewers. This happened
last spring, when Hollywood�s TV writers went on strike and cable TV was
declared dead and our culture had already become so fractured that it was
rare for anything � let alone an episode of television � to become a national
event. And yet you probably heard about �Scandoval� even if you couldn�t care
less about who these people are, exactly.

The story has continued offscreen. After the season aired, Raquel Leviss,
with whom Sandoval had the affair, entered a mental-health facility in
Arizona and started going by a different name. Ariana Madix, Sandoval�s now-
ex-girlfriend, garnered so much national sympathy that she has had the most
prosperous year of her career. In addition to being invited to the White
House Correspondents� Dinner and to compete on �Dancing With the Stars,� she
landed ads with Duracell batteries, Bic razors, Uber Eats and Lay�s chips, as
well as a starring role in �Chicago� on Broadway this winter. Sandoval,
meanwhile, became the most reviled man in America and the butt of a million
jokes. Jennifer Lawrence made fun of his skin. Amy Schumer called him a
narcissist. One of the hosts of �The View� called him �the Donald Trump of
ex-boyfriends.� And Sandoval has just been here, in the Valley, trying to
process it all. �I feel like I got more hate than Danny Masterson,� he told
me, �and he�s a convicted rapist.�

When I arrived at his house late last year, Sandoval, who is 41, had just
finished working out. He wore a black muscle shirt and a wide headband. His
assistant, Miles, was at the dining-room table sorting through Sandoval�s
utility bills on two laptops. �He basically does anything I don�t personally
have to do,� Sandoval explained. We were also joined by Rylie, who�s on
Sandoval�s new publicity team, which has a background in crisis P.R. I
assumed Rylie would be an impediment, but my fears were put to rest when she
didn�t flinch at the Danny Masterson comment. Rylie is 23, has watched
�Vanderpump� since she was in middle school and seemed as interested in
Sandoval�s life as I was. When Sandoval described how, despite their gnarly,
nationally televised split, he and Madix have continued living together,
sequestered in separate parts of the five-bedroom home and communicating via
assistants, Rylie was curious to hear more. �So all of her stuff is still
here?� Rylie asked.

Sandoval wasn�t sure, but he thought Madix might have finally rented a place.
�She took the dog and the cat, and I know she wouldn�t do that if she was
staying somewhere temporary,� he said. Sandoval wanted to buy out her share
of the home, but interest rates are so crazy right now. He was considering
getting a roommate to help with the mortgage. At least he thought Madix was
finally open to the idea. �It took her a while to not be spiteful about the
house,� he said. (A month after we met, Madix sued Sandoval in Los Angeles
County to force him to sell the home and divide the proceeds.)

My tape recorder wasn�t on yet, and Sandoval wanted to make sure I was
getting everything. �Do you want to, like, record this?�
Of course I wanted to record this. I couldn�t remember interviewing a public
figure as eager to speak into a recording device. But then again, Sandoval is
not a typical celebrity, nor is �Vanderpump,� which is currently airing its
11th season, your typical show. Early reality series like �Big Brother� and
�Survivor� rotated casts in every season. Shows that didn�t, like �The
Hills,� never lasted this long. Even its closest point of comparison, Bravo�s
�Real Housewives� franchise, is more of a weekly cage match in which bloodied
fighters are retired once they�re no longer useful. And Sandoval, the
Midwest-bred son of a firefighter and a marketing executive, is not a
Kardashian. What I mean is that although reality programming has been a
dominant part of American culture for over two decades, we�ve never actually
put a regular person on reality TV to live out much of their adult life and
gotten to see what happens to them as a result.

Contrary to a popular misconception, �Vanderpump� is not about Lisa
Vanderpump, a former Bravo Housewife. It started as a show about waiters and
bartenders who lived in crappy apartments around Hollywood and, for the most
part, wanted to be actors. That dream didn�t work out, but they became
reality-TV stars instead. For a while, this ruined the show. It became less
honest. The cast still worked shifts at a restaurant, but actually they drove
nice cars and bought $2 million houses. Once the show stopped pretending that
nothing had changed, it turned out that a reality show about reality stars
was not any less interesting. On the last season alone, there was
�Scandoval,� in which Sandoval, a reality star approaching middle age,
proceeded to start a cover band, open a bar and sleep with Leviss, a former
beauty queen. A couple that had been on the show since the first season
finally decided to divorce, leading the wife to realize that she may never
have kids. And a woman who once bragged that her private-jet lifestyle was
financed by Randall Emmett, the direct-to-video film producer, left him and
became a breadwinner as she fought for custody of their daughter.

Alex Baskin, an executive producer of �Vanderpump,� developed it as a spinoff
of �Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,� which featured Vanderpump as the owner
of several mediocre restaurants. Baskin noticed that SUR, which stands for
�Sexy Unique Restaurant,� indeed had a sexy unique atmosphere. In 2011, he
sent a screenshot of SUR�s website � with Vanderpump on a throne surrounded
by her good-looking staff � to Andy Cohen, who was then Bravo�s vice
president for original programming. The network provided a small budget for
Baskin to explore the idea. What Baskin found was an incestuous friend group
in which everyone was either living or sleeping with one another. �It was
everything you look for in a TV show,� Baskin told me. �It just hit me in the
face.�

At the time, prestige TV was on the rise, and writers� rooms across Hollywood
became overly preoccupied with chasing critical approval, rather than
audiences and revenue. In this context, �Vanderpump� was an appealing
alternative. Yes, it looked and acted like reality TV, but at its core it was
more like the great scripted shows of the 1990s in that it was about a group
of friends living life, dating one another, giving up the hopes of their 20s
for the realities of their 30s. It relied on time-tested screenwriting
tenets: good, unexpected stories about original characters going through
relatable cycles of jealousy, regret, insecurity and longing.

The show was also a brilliant premise, commercially speaking. The TV business
shepherded crowds to the real-world business and vice versa. You could watch
Sandoval and his friends on TV, then drop by and have him make you a
�Pumptini.� The show�s main draw was the cheating scandals, of which there
were three by the end of the second season. As the show took place more
outside the restaurant, it went through an identity crisis. In 2020, it was
further debilitated by the pandemic and the departure of four members of the
cast because of past racist incidents and resurfaced social media posts. By
Season 9, there were rumors that �Vanderpump� was on the brink of
cancellation. �We were hobbling,� Baskin told me. The very next season,
�Scandoval� dropped into Bravo�s lap.

The show�s producers treated it like a news story. Late on the evening of
March 1, 2023, when principal filming for the 10th season was wrapped and
episodes were already airing, Sandoval was performing a new single with his
band when his phone fell out of his pocket. Madix opened it to discover an
intimate recording of Leviss. The next morning, Madix notified the show�s
talent producer, who called the showrunner, who called Baskin, who called
Bravo, which scrambled to approve budgets. On March 3, crews were pulled off
another Bravo set, and cameras were back up to capture the fallout as the
cast processed the affair.