[Vanderpump Rules] How Tom Sandoval Became the Most Hated Man in America - He turned last year's season of `Vanderpump Rules' into the best in reality TV's history - and ruined his life in the process.

[Ubiquitous]

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.

The resulting footage, which aired in May, is an incredible episode of
television. Madix, with damp hair and puffy, cried-out eyes, says, “I loved
you when you had nothing,” and “That girl is searching for an identity in
men,” and “I would have followed you anywhere.” Producers did not put cameras
down even as Sandoval screamed at them to stop filming him during the
subsequent reunion special, which was so brutal that Amy Schumer compared it
to the end of “Schindler’s List.”

No one — not Sandoval, or Baskin, or even the executives at Bravo — are quite
sure why the season resonated the way it did. Maybe it was that “Scandoval”
had awakened something in everyone who had ever cheated or been cheated on,
resulting in endless memes and diatribes on social media. Or that the affair
landed in the news while the season was airing, turning it into an
interactive murder mystery of sorts, with viewers searching for clues in
earlier episodes.

Now, it is easy to be cynical about these things. Isn’t it plausible that
when faced with the show’s uncertain future, producers got together with the
cast and cooked up a cheating scandal? This is a popular conspiracy theory.
But Baskin told me that the covert affair and continuing fallout was too
elaborate to manufacture. “I mean, Raquel left the state,” he said. When I
asked Sandoval, he insisted that if he was going to script a fake story line,
it wouldn’t have been one that destroyed his life. “I would’ve never
participated in that,” he said. Willingly, I said — you would have never
participated in that willingly, since you did technically continue to film
the show. “Right, willingly,” he said. “Hell, no.”

At Sandoval’s house, he made a cup of tea, and Rylie and I were listening to
what the past year of his life has been like. The thing with Leviss started
with what sounded like a midlife crisis. “You know when you just feel like
you don’t know what’s cool anymore,” he said, “and you’re past your prime and
a little bit of a joke?” (Rylie nodded.) He started to feel as though his
best years were behind him. He wanted to feel alive again. He and Madix had
grown apart. He planned to tell her about the affair after the season aired.
He didn’t want it to play out on the show. When he shouted at producers to
stop filming him, he couldn’t remember another time in the show’s history
that he’d done so, unless he was getting in the shower or something. “I just
wanted to not feel watched,” he said. “I wanted to take a breath.”

After he finished filming, he went on tour with his band, Tom Sandoval & the
Most Extras. He had to. His bank accounts were overdrawn, and he needed the
money. Crowds of people came out to hate on him. They showed up wearing T-
shirts that said, “Cheater” and “Worm With a Mustache,” a name one of his
castmates coined. Everywhere he went, people called him a loser or screamed
“Team Ariana” at him.

When he returned home, there were groups of strangers with cameras at his
house who seemed to be making fun of him. On the show, Sandoval had
complained about always being the one to replenish batteries and other
domestic supplies. Now, as Madix filmed her various commercial spots at the
home, it had become ad copy for Duracell (“I buy my own batteries now”) and
Bic razors (“I’m just starting a whole new unclogged chapter in my life”). In
June, a friend sent him a photo of Sweet Lady Jane, a popular bakery in Los
Angeles, selling cakes with “Sandoval Is a Liar” written in frosting.

Sandoval’s friends distanced themselves. His brother asked him to delete
photos of them together on Instagram. Sandoval says he was asked to stop
going in to Schwartz & Sandy’s, a lounge in the Franklin Village neighborhood
that he co-owns. The show’s fans tanked the bar’s Yelp reviews and were
harassing the staff. Somehow people got Sandoval’s cell number. His phone
started ringing at all hours with blocked numbers, with women pretending to
be Leviss and men asking how they could find her. He started to feel as if he
were in “Uncut Gems,” the nerve-jolting Safdie brothers movie in which the
protagonist is isolated and on the run.

He got down. Like, really down. His mind went to some dark places. Friends
suggested that he get on Wellbutrin. In April, he quit drinking, hence the
tea he was now sipping. He did it for Leviss. When she entered that facility
in Arizona, he assumed they would be together once she got out. But then
Leviss stopped talking to him and hasn’t returned his calls since June. “She
never even gave me any closure,” he said. “It was really hard. It still
messes with me.” He even tried reaching out through her publicist but got no
response.

When “Vanderpump” started filming Season 11 in June, Sandoval was off doing
“Special Forces,” the reality show on Fox that puts celebrities through
pseudo-military training. “I’m here because I wanna get punished,” Sandoval
says on the show, before he’s dunked in frigid waters and dragged across a
field on the former Nickelodeon star Jojo Siwa’s back. When Sandoval didn’t
win the competition, he felt robbed. He thought producers made it look as
though he got eliminated before Siwa, who voluntarily withdrew. “They said
she lasted longer than me,” he said, “but she most definitely did not.” He
was convinced that producers didn’t want him to win. “Who did they want to
win?” Rylie asked, incredulous.

In the fall, he thought things might finally be turning. He started his own
podcast and titled it “Everybody Loves Tom.” An early guest was Dr. Drew, who
dug into Sandoval’s childhood trauma and declared him not a narcissist, at
least as far as the D.S.M.-5 is concerned. The actor Jerry O’Connell came on
and apologized for having T-shirts made that said “Team Ariana.” But the
following month at BravoCon, the annual Las Vegas convention for the
network’s superfans, Sandoval arrived onstage to boos from the 8,000-member
audience.

I asked Sandoval why he thought the scandal got so big. “I’m not a pop-
culture historian really,” he said, “but I witnessed the O.J. Simpson thing
and George Floyd and all these big things, which is really weird to compare
this to that, I think, but do you think in a weird way it’s a little bit the
same?”

I looked over at Rylie, who was typing furiously on her phone. I think I knew
what he meant. He was trying to express the oddity of becoming the symbolic
center of a nationwide discussion and a major news story; what he
communicated instead was something more honest, which is just how much the
experience had made him lose perspective.

“I did what I did because I was in an unhappy place in my life,” he said. “I
got caught up in my emotions and fully fell in love. Like, for real.” He
sighed and drained his teacup. Then he got up, put on some upbeat music and
went upstairs to get ready for a night out. “Sometimes he says too much,”
Rylie said, “and the following day forgets what he says.” Then she went
upstairs to have a quick word with him.

The next day, I was supposed to attend the taping of one of Sandoval’s
confessional interviews for the show. I was about to get in my car when I
received a text from his publicist, Rylie’s boss. “He’d rather you don’t
attend today,” it read. “He’s not feeling the best.” The next morning, I got
a call from Baskin, and the day after that a Bravo publicist rang me late on
a Friday. Some of what Sandoval had said had gotten back to Bravo, and
everyone was concerned. What was it that he said about O.J. Simpson and
George Floyd exactly? Maybe Sandoval wasn’t ready for this. The Bravo
publicist asked if I really needed to see Sandoval again. Could the network
facilitate an interview with one of the show’s other stars?

Bravo said it would get back to me about next steps. While I waited, I
thought more about Sandoval. When you’re lost, sometimes it’s helpful to go
back to the beginning. Sandoval arrived in Los Angeles in 2004 with the hopes
of becoming an actor. When he was growing up in St. Louis, it was all he
wanted to be. “I loved to pretend,” he told me and Rylie. “I loved it more
than sports.” At 15, he started modeling. He briefly lived in Miami, that
swampy hub of male modeling, where he was photographed by Bruce Weber for one
of his infamous Abercrombie & Fitch campaigns. In Los Angeles, he worked as a
pool boy at the Mondrian Hotel and as a cater waiter, while booking ad
campaigns for Rock and Republic, Ed Hardy and Von Dutch, the early-aughts
brands that are apparently coming back now. (“Aw, Von Dutch — I love that
brand!” Rylie said.) “I had a versatile look,” Sandoval explained, “because I
could do this, like, ‘Daddy doesn’t love me’ emo look, and I could do a more
slicked-back look.”

He signed up for “Vanderpump Rules” because he thought people should see what
it’s like being an L.A. “mactor” — a model-actor. “Like, driving down the
405,” he said, “changing clothes, comp cards and head shots splayed all over
my back seat.” When the show became known instead for his girlfriend’s
sleeping with his friend Jax Taylor, Sandoval didn’t mind. “When I punched
Jax,” he said, “that sent it into the stratosphere.”

Rylie remembered watching that episode with her middle-school friends. “We
were like, ‘This show is epic!’” she said.

“Dude, it was,” Sandoval said.

“It was so cool,” Rylie said.

A decade later, Sandoval, who had a boyish innocence about him in those early
seasons, has morphed into a unique Los Angeles species. He’s late to
everything, his publicist never seems to be able to reach him and his face
has that taut sheen that celebrities get from anti-aging protocols. He talks
about his life not in years but in seasons and episodes. Sometimes he pauses
midsentence and stares into the middle distance, like a doll whose windup key
has jammed, until whatever ambulance, helicopter or other sound-interfering
entity has passed, and then he continues as if nothing happened, even when
there are no mics or cameras on him. The ceiling lights in his home are taped
over with sheets of paper to diffuse light and make it optimal for filming.
He used to remove them during the off-season, but now he doesn’t bother. “We
leave them up there, because otherwise they’ll just do it again,” he said.

Sandoval can’t always tell if he’s living for himself or the show or both.
Sometimes he really has to talk to his best friend and co-star, Tom Schwartz,
but he knows he shouldn’t via text, so he will call producers and ask how
quickly they could have cameras on him to film it. He feels terrible when he
has to bring up something that he knows could be damaging to his castmates.
But that is part of the job. The worst thing Sandoval says you can hear while
filming is the dreaded, “Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?” That’s when
you know you’re about to be called out for something. Baskin calls this
“hyperreality.” In real life, you might go to a dinner party and then go home
and gossip about your friends; on a reality show, you’re encouraged to say
those things in the moment. Sandoval is so well trained at narrating his
innermost thoughts out loud that he sometimes has to remind himself not to do
it outside of filming. “You lose track of what a normal conversation would be
like with people that aren’t on the show,” he said.

Despite the year he had, he told me that he was really honored to be on
“Vanderpump.” “The scandal has made the show so big, it’s kind of cool and
crazy,” he said. “Even though it’s negative and at my expense.”

Unlike actors, reality-show participants are not protected by the Screen
Actors Guild, at least not for unscripted work, meaning they’re not entitled
to residuals or union pay minimums. When Sandoval joined “Vanderpump,” each
cast member made $10,000 for the entire first season; today the original cast
makes closer to $35,000 per episode. As the genre has grown, participants can
make almost as much from other revenue streams, like books, podcasts and
brand partnerships, some of which can pay upward of $250,000. Because of
this, what’s good for “Vanderpump” is generally good for Sandoval, monetarily
speaking, even if it can also make his life more difficult.

Opportunities often grow directly out of plot lines. When Sandoval and Madix
were bartenders in love, they published a book with a co-author called “Fancy
A.F. Cocktails” and were hired to mix drinks in sponsored videos for brands
like Alka Seltzer. Since their breakup, their fates have diverged. She’s the
betrayed woman, courageously rebuilding her life, while he’s the villain
endlessly atoning for his sins. In December, Madix released a new book,
“Single A.F. Cocktails,” and scheduled events with Live Nation (“An Evening
for Bad Bitches”) to promote it.

Playing all of this up riles the fans and keeps the machine turning. When
Madix said at BravoCon that she still hadn’t gotten a meaningful apology from
Sandoval and the audience erupted in applause, it reminded me of professional
wrestling. You know when the face and the heel talk smack to each other to
drive crowds wild? It felt like that. Except that I’m pretty sure that
Sandoval is not pretending. Pro wrestling has always been staged, and the
audience knew it but didn’t care. But “Vanderpump” is sort of the opposite:
While fans on some level expect reality TV to be fake and think of Sandoval
as just another TV character, it’s all very real to him, leaving him trapped
inside these story lines indefinitely. “Tom Sandoval is Tom Sandoval in Tom
Sandoval’s life,” Baskin told me, adding, “Someone might say he is putting on
a performance — but he is the performance. His entire existence becomes about
processing and talking about what happened.”

Appearing on “Special Forces” was part of Sandoval’s attempt at a redemption
narrative. When we drove to West Hollywood that first night, his Mercedes
wound its way through Laurel Canyon and emerged on Sunset Boulevard, not far
from the huge billboard that showed him commando-crawling across a rope
suspended high above the ground. These are the perverse economics of being a
reality-TV star. If it weren’t for “Scandoval,” Sandoval said, “I could have
probably gotten on that show, but I wouldn’t have been on the billboards.”

Contestants on “Special Forces” were reportedly paid several hundred thousand
dollars, but for the most part Sandoval hasn’t been able to capitalize on
“Scandoval” as much as he would like. “There are minimal brands that want to
be associated with someone who’s thought of as a cheater,” Sandoval’s
manager, Ryan Revel, told me. This winter, Sandoval was hoping to do a
residency at Chippendales in Las Vegas, but talks stalled. Sandoval was
disappointed. “I’m in really good shape right now,” he said, adding: “It’s
frustrating because, you know, everybody cashed in. Everybody won on this.
The cast, the execs, the network — everybody made so much money. But I try to
put it on myself, to make the best opportunity out of it that I can.”

We pulled up to Tom Tom, a bar and restaurant that Sandoval has invested in
and that is part of the “Vanderpump” universe, along with SUR, Schwartz &
Sandy’s, Jax’s Studio City and Something About Her, a forthcoming sandwich
shop that Madix is opening with another cast member. For the fans, this
landscape is like a Disney World populated by their favorite characters. When
I stopped by SUR in August, the food was terrible, but there was a line of
people out the door and around the block. No matter what part of the
restaurant you sat in, you had a view of cameras filming the cast, which
seemed to be the point.

At Tom Tom, Sandoval gave me an insider’s tour. “There’s the men’s room,
women’s room,” he said. “This table is really cool, but you gotta watch your
knees.” He took me out back by the trash cans where he says Madix ripped his
chain and split his lip the night she found out about the affair. “She beat
my ass,” he said. (Through a representative, Madix declined to comment on the
incident; she has denied tearing his necklace off in the past.) With the show
not in production, the place was quiet, except for a couple drinking wine in
the corner and two eager-looking women, one of whom eventually approached.
“Sorry to bother you,” she said, “but I just wanted to say this place is
awesome!”

We sat at a table and were soon joined by Kyle Chan, a jeweler who appears on
the show and is one of the few people who didn’t drop Sandoval as a friend.
When I asked what it was like being around him last year, Chan compared it to
watching “Game of Thrones,” in which a character named Theon Greyjoy becomes
psychologically broken after being tortured and castrated. Sandoval likes to
say that as a reality star he has to live through each event in his life
three times: First when he’s living it, second when he’s taping confessionals
months later and third when it airs and he has to answer to the fans. In the
real world, he would be able to heal and move on, but that’s difficult to do
on reality-show time. “After Season 11 airs,” Chan said, “you just have to
relive it one more time, and then you’ll be free.”

A couple of weeks before I met with Sandoval, I visited the offices of
Evolution Media in a converted shipping warehouse near the Hollywood Burbank
airport. Bravo, which is owned by NBCUniversal, distributes “Vanderpump” via
its cable channel and the streaming service Peacock. But Evolution is the
production company on the ground for “Vanderpump,” as well as others, like
“Real Housewives of Orange County” and “Botched.” As Baskin showed me around,
random objects caught my eye: a can of gasoline, bottles of Tums and
sunblock, a blown-up diagram of the female reproductive system atop a file
cabinet and a few moving boxes labeled “Bitch!!”

The office used to be bustling. In the years leading up to and during the
pandemic, streaming was at its peak, and Evolution was considering leasing a
third building to keep up with demand for new content. But the market had
changed, and people were working remotely. “Now we just don’t need the
space,” Baskin said.

Bravo is one of the few cable networks that still bring in a loyal (and
affluent) audience, but even unscripted programming has not been immune to
the contraction currently plaguing the TV industry. In 2007, when the Writers
Guild went on strike, networks rushed to greenlight unscripted shows to plug
holes in programming, leading to a reality-TV boom. In 2023, despite
predictions otherwise, the boom never came. Networks and streamers, which
already had a stockpile of programming, held onto their cash, and with media
companies consolidating into entities like Warner Brothers Discovery, there
were simply fewer buyers in the marketplace. Baskin estimated that when all
is said and done, the unscripted business would be roughly two-thirds of what
it was.

Over the years, various network executives have consistently asked Baskin for
their own version of “Vanderpump.” Baskin would love to find it. “But it
doesn’t necessarily exist,” he told me. Not that others haven’t tried. There
was E!’s “What Happens at the Abbey,” about the bar a few doors down from Tom
Tom, and MTV’s “Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club,” about the staff at her venture
in Mykonos. Each lasted exactly one season. This spring, Hulu will premiere
“Vanderpump Villa,” yet another attempt to mimic the formula, and Bravo will
introduce “The Valley,” a “Vanderpump” spinoff featuring some of the cast
members who departed the show in 2020.

Baskin told me that in some ways he wished “Scandoval” never happened. The
national attention made it much harder to film the show. Production always
had a few onlookers, but during Season 11, paparazzi and fans were
everywhere. While the show was filming in Lake Tahoe, someone snapped a photo
of the cast that whipped fans into such a frenzy that it became a plotline on
the show. Producers used to be strict about not breaking the fourth wall, but
now they have no choice but to let the outside world into the frame. “It used
to be that the real story was not that there are people watching a TV show,”
Baskin told me. “But part of Tom Sandoval’s real experience in life right now
is that he’s not just facing an ex-girlfriend or a friend group upset with
him. He’s facing the entire nation.”

As filming for the new season got underway, Bravo had a problem. The cast had
turned on Sandoval; Madix refused to interact with him altogether. In July,
Baskin and the network brought the cast into Evolution’s offices for what he
called a “Come to Jesus” moment. But he was no longer talking to 20-something
waiters. “We can still squeeze a great season out of it,” he said, “but going
forward, I don’t know.”

Leviss was the only primary cast member who didn’t return for Season 11. Her
team inquired about a pay increase and floated the possibility of Leviss’s
getting a development deal with Bravo. (Through a representative, Leviss
emphasized that mental-health protections were her primary concern.) Then in
August, after spending 90 days in the Arizona facility and changing her name
from Raquel back to her birth name, Rachel, Leviss appeared on Bethenny
Frankel’s podcast.

Frankel is a former Real Housewife of New York. Last summer, she declared
what she called the “Reality Reckoning,” accusing Bravo and other networks of
profiting off a harmful environment created by their shows without properly
compensating their stars. She invited others to join her and teamed up with
two prominent attorneys, Mark Geragos and Bryan Freedman. (No actual lawsuits
have been filed, but NBCUniversal subsequently issued updated guidelines for
its production companies, including additional psychological support for cast
members.) Part of Frankel’s arsenal was a three-part interview with Leviss,
who described how she felt exploited by Sandoval and Bravo for ratings
without seeing “a single penny.”

Baskin told me that Leviss was paid $19,000 per episode for 18 episodes and
that news of the affair came out after the season wrapped. “Are we supposed
to give her retroactive payment for having a clandestine affair for eight
months?” he asked.

Frankel would basically argue: Yes. As SAG members went on strike in July,
joining the writers, she called for reality stars to unionize so they, too,
can collect residuals and benefit after the fact from a successful season.
But while everyone I talked to agreed that regulations would be a good thing,
no one was sure how it would work exactly. Part of the appeal of reality TV
is that it’s relatively cheap to make: as low as $250,000 per episode versus
$2 million for scripted TV. The draw for all parties involved is that its
stars are often plucked from relative obscurity. “It’s probably good for the
business to have some protections,” Revel, Sandoval’s manager, told me. “Will
it happen? I don’t know. But no one is walking off set.”

I didn’t see Sandoval for about two weeks. Then, on a Monday in December, I
drove to a soundstage in Burbank where he was taping his next confessional
interview for the show. Rylie wasn’t here this time. Instead, we were joined
by a Bravo publicist and Erica Forstadt, a senior NBCUniversal executive. My
clue that this wasn’t typical was when Forstadt introduced herself to
Sandoval. “You once made me a wonderful mocktail at Schwartz & Sandy’s,” she
said.

Sandoval was in a small dressing room, applying dabs of makeup to his
forehead. In front of him were three caffeinated beverages: a Red Bull, an
iced coffee and a Dr Pepper. He sipped each intermittently. Sandoval said he
was feeling depressed. He said the same thing the last time I saw him. When I
asked if the depression was show-related, he had said: “Somewhat show-
related. Just life. Business stuff. It’s hard.”

Sandoval began to perform loud vocal exercises. He applied pomade to his
hair, combing it back with his fingers, and changed into a light blue women’s
suit from Zara, which he said he preferred to the store’s men’s wear. The
suit looked good, but the sleeves barely reached his wrists. As he emerged
from the dressing room, there was something about the suit’s feminine cut
combined with Sandoval’s physique and slightly hunched posture that reminded
me of Heath Ledger’s Joker in the scene at the hospital where he wears a
nurse’s uniform.

It’s hard to tell how Sandoval feels about filming the show. Sometimes he
sounded down on it. (“It has its fun moments, but for the most part it sucks.
I’ve been buzzed through most of it.”) Other times, he told me he would do it
for as long as he possibly could. There was a point last year when he
considered quitting, but he was glad he didn’t. He wasn’t at all envious of
Leviss, who walked away from the cameras, albeit not very far, as she has
started her own podcast, “Rachel Goes Rogue.” (So far the primary theme has
been “Scandoval.”) Sandoval figured she would be back in a season or two.
“What else is she going to do?”

The Evolution set where confessionals are taped is designed to look like
another room in SUR. There are deep purple curtains, a mirrored dresser and
lots of gold and velvet. Production for the new season wrapped in September,
but interviews are taped for months afterward to get the cast’s reactions to
what occurred. The showrunner began by asking Sandoval about a tasting led by
a water sommelier that everyone attended in August. Had Sandoval ever heard
of a water tasting?

“I have never even remotely heard of a water tasting before in my life,”
Sandoval said. He tried again. “I have never heard of, or been to, a water
tasting, but here we are.”

Sandoval hoped his luck would turn this season. It’s probably why he agreed
to speak with me in the first place. When I last talked to him, he was
feeling optimistic. He’d been meditating and was about to go back on tour
with his band. Plus, he was single now, which could be a whole new story line
for him on the show. “It’s the first time I’ve ever been single as a
celebrity,” he told me. “I’m not saying I’m a favorite celebrity, but still
just having some notoriety and being single, it’s a cool muscle to flex.”

Though he had come to Los Angeles to be an actor, he was proud of what he
became instead. Did he become the next Brad Pitt? No. But he didn’t want to
be that anymore anyway. It turned out reality TV is where the real stakes
are. Actors were just pretending, playing roles. “I had no respect for
reality TV before,” Sandoval told me, “and now I don’t have very much respect
for actors. I’m like, ‘Y’all try doing this.’”

Of course he knew it wasn’t going to last forever. But if he kept at it and
rehabilitated his image, there could be life beyond his first show. There
were brand deals to be had, as well as reality spinoffs and competition
shows. Though if he was going to do another reality series, he would like it
to be something more feel-good. “Our show can be toxic to film,” he said,
“and very stressful.” Despite this, he was as committed to it as ever and
hoped it would continue for a while. “As long as people are interested,” he
told me, “and we’re being honest in our feels.”

That’s what he was doing now: sitting in front of the camera, in a powder
blue suit and sunless tanner, being honest in his feels. I watched him on a
monitor as he peered into the lens, with one eyebrow slightly raised. Then
the camera rolled, and his face lit up with a big, genuine smile.

--
Let's go Brandon!