You are condemned to wander SUR without a purpose, pretending you really like the goat cheese balls and the wine, a walking, mic’d up ghost, until you are ultimately let go for good. If, heaven forbid, you are fired from SUR, your shade remains, as Kristen Doute’s does after her antics go a bridge too far (she instructs a manager to “suck a dick”). “Do whatever you bloody want,” Vanderpump often chides, “just don’t do it at my restaurant!” They are also, however, in constant danger of being expelled at any moment from her good graces should their behavior prove too onerous or unforgivable. Occasionally, British Demeter will reach down and bless her favored children, upgrading their hotel rooms to lavish suites on a whim. They are offered glimpses of Olympus, occasionally summoned to Vanderpump’s Villa Rosa, a palace on a hill with a moat populated by white trumpet swans. No one bats an eye when they call themselves “broke,” nor does anyone quite believe them when they say it, knowing well what is meant: These are mortals. In season one, Shay and her castmates occupy a rung in the American caste system common in our pop culture mythos-enough money for boozy brunches at buzzy restaurants, not enough to qualify as wealthy or even rich.
It’s also an introduction to the themes of the show. Scheana Shay, waitress at SUR, aspiring pop star, former cheerleader, and spurned “other woman” introduces us to the world of Vanderpump Rules after a confrontation with Housewives’ Brandi Glanville, whose husband was having an affair with Shay. “It’s the restaurant where you take your mistress,” Lisa Vanderpump, grande dame of this little realm, frequently says of her West Hollywood fixture. At its center is SUR, short for Sexy Unique Restaurant, one of the House of Vanderpump’s many properties. Vanderpump Rules is a serialized, ongoing Tolstoy novel airing on Bravo. Even as the Greek chorus warned him, singing from their lofty cloud directly above his head, “these are the best days of your life.” So he drank, and he philandered, and he took with little regard for what the taking might cost, the portrait of American id, never once imagining (one imagines) that he’d ever have to close out the tab. There was only nectar, and the desire for nectar, urges in perfect symmetry with available vices. Or wherever spent entertainers go to dream of those false, golden yesterdays that seemed like they would never end but did.įor Jason, born in Michigan but born for California, consummate American, consummate consumer, model, actor, mactor who’d made it onto network television, there would have been little to doubt, nothing to question. That there would always be a party to attend, always a photoshoot to book, always an infinity pool stretching into mock eternity with attendant nymphs dipping their shiny copper legs into sapphire blue waters, making kissy faces at their iPhone 4s.įor Jason Michael Cauchi, Los Angeles’ most perfect son, there would have been no cause to interrogate the sweet, Venus flytrap promises of the Sunset Strip, or to look twice at those enticing mirages that have lured many chiseled bodies into jaded afterlives as used and wrinkled spray-tanned cynics in Santa Monica. It must have seemed, and it wouldn't have been an unreasonable assumption on his end, that West Hollywood would never run out of sunny afternoons or beautiful women or shots of Don Julio.
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