Bravo is never suffering from a shortage of drama—on-screen and off. The latest source of it, however, is somewhat surprising: The wildest Bravo fights and gossip are happening, of all places, on podcasts.
In recent weeks, the Bravo universe has been overrun with podcast-fueled drama. We’ve got divorce gossip on Vanderpump Rules, salacious family slander on The Real Housewives of New Jersey, and cheating rumors on The Real Housewives of Potomac. It seemed like exciting content for any Bravo fan hungry for all the latest developments in their favorite (or most despised) stars’ rumors and feuds.
As social media came into power in the 2010s, Bravo stars quickly understood how essential these tools were to the stories of their lives. Rather than leaving everything in the hands of editors and producers, they could just start posting, sparking drama and leaking gossip, knowing how it would rile the fan base and their fellow castmates. Fans knew if they weren’t following the Housewives, they were only getting half the story. This has never been clearer than this past weekend, when infidelity news broke about members of the Vanderpump Rules cast and everybody spent hours refreshing Lala Kent’s and Kristen Doute’s Instagram feeds to hear their latest biting updates.
With podcasts, Bravolebrities saw yet another chance to control their narratives, and another means of income that didn’t require much effort or skill. Podcasts are an ideal medium for sharing your story, with the earbud intimacy forging a stronger parasocial bond for the listener than any TV program could, making listeners feel like they’re getting to know a realer version of these stars. It was a promising opportunity for fans to discover even more drama as loose-lipped Bravo personalities overshared and let their walls down in ways that just don’t happen when a camera is on them, and suggested they were going to be just as necessary a part of the Bravo diet as these stars’ social media feeds had become.
But, after giving these podcasts a whirl myself, I started to realize what might really be going on.
On this season of Vanderpump Rules, Scheana Shay is stirring the pot from behind the microphone with her podcast, Scheananigans With Scheana Shay, on which she interviewed fellow cast member Tom Schwartz about his recent divorce from another star of the show, Katie Maloney. In a recent episode of the Bravo series, viewers saw Scheana and Tom curled up to record on the couch in his new, sad apartment. They dished about Tom’s feelings post-divorce, and Scheana asked a list of leading questions about his interest in yet another member of the cast, Raquel Leviss. Later that same episode, we saw Katie seething about the whole affair as she listened to the podcast while doing her makeup, inspiring what looks to be one of the major feuds of the season between herself and Scheana.
The drama continued apace this weekend as news broke that Raquel, who we believed was chasing after Tom Schwartz, has actually been secretly rendezvousing with a different Tom in the cast, Tom Sandoval, for the past seven months. Sandoval was in a long-term relationship with yet another cast member, Ariana Madix, until she discovered evidence of the infidelity on his phone last week. Thankfully, Bravo has already picked the cameras back up to document this drama, and Scheana has even booked Lala Kent and Kristen Doute, members of the Vanderpump Rules universe past and present, for an upcoming episode of her podcast.
This semi-incestuous co-mingling of exes (Raquel’s ex James Kennedy also appears in the cast) is a delightful part of reality TV, which should have made Shay’s podcast a juicy listen, but Scheananigans contains no such thrills.
There’s just not enough in her episode with Schwartz to inspire any feeling besides boredom. Tom drones on in a pitying monotone, while Scheana keeps serving banal questions and anecdotes that neither drive the conversation forward nor draw anything insightful out of her guest. Their vacuous conversation was so numbing I had to keep reminding myself to pay attention, and it left me longing for an editor to step in and make some cuts. It’s easier to imagine Katie’s anger coming from production forcing her to listen to the podcast so they could film the scene than from any actual words uttered by Scheana or Tom.
The podcast mics are hot over on New Jersey, too. Teresa Giudice is fighting on camera with her brother, Joe Gorga, and sister-in-law, Melissa, over comments the couple made on Melissa’s podcast, On Display With Melissa Gorga, following last year’s reunion. She’s angry because Joe and Melissa claimed on the podcast that they helped keep money coming into Teresa’s household while she was in prison by filming with her then husband, Joe Giudice, because he wasn’t otherwise working. While it might be gross to imply you’re the reason your nieces aren’t homeless, their explanation sort of makes sense in context. The problem is, it’s buried deep in the podcast, surrounded by so much Gorga soapbox propaganda that it’s ultimately hard to parse.
Despite the fact that these podcasts are now adding yet another platform for Bravolebs to air their grievances and start drama, the quality of them is shoddy, at best, with no care shown toward what’s being made or why they’re making it. The conversations are unedited and unending, the planning is minimal, and the post-production a joke.
On Display With Melissa Gorga served me ads in the middle of sentences multiple times. The hosts just sit down and assume they’re spinning gold. The Gorgas’ lives have been on screen for so long they seem to believe they are inherently interesting people, rather than people made to look interesting by TV producers and editors. Even listening to episodes at 2x speed, it’s a wonder how production manages to edit these exceedingly empty people into engaging and dramatic personalities on screen.
In Potomac, the situation is a little different. Where the other two shows have podcasts baked into their season’s plots, Robyn Dixon and Gizelle Bryant are igniting the drama in real life.
A few weeks ago, Robyn revealed on her and Gizelle’s Reasonably Shady podcast that a woman approached her claiming she had been intimate with Robyn’s then fiancé, Juan, and that she had receipts. Gizelle admitted that she knew about this, too; however, neither of them talked about any of it on the show this season. Then Robyn committed what Bravo fans and employees are regarding as the biggest sin: putting the details of this alleged infidelity behind their Patreon paywall and encouraging listeners to subscribe to get the full story.
When this news broke, all of the blogs blew up. Every gay man with a Real Housewives podcast started yelling about Robyn and Gizelle withholding things from production. And Bravo itself even jumped on it, with Robyn appearing on Bravo’s late-night show Watch What Happens Live to get grilled by Andy Cohen for how he felt she’d betrayed the company.
The reunion, which had already been filmed prior to these revelations, was framed so the editors and producers could lean into juxtaposing Robyn’s comments before and after this news broke. Sunday night’s third part of the reunion was an extended 90 minutes, with additional footage of Andy’s confrontation with Robyn.
Regardless of your stance on the case of Robyn v. Bravo, it’s clear that Robyn and Gizelle have a firm grip on their own lives. They made conscious calculations about what information to withhold and when to deploy it, and moved intentionally in a way their fellow Bravo podcasters do not. They understand that they’re performing life for us, not just living it, which is the same savvy that has cemented the Real Housewives of Potomac as a centerpiece of the latest generation of Bravo reality. The same cannot be said for their podcasting compatriots.
Neither Scheana nor the Gorgas have Patreon-style subscription models for their podcasts, and neither seem very involved in the actual production either. Robyn and Gizelle address their producers on mic, have distinct segments and structure to their show, and a healthy onslaught of ads every few minutes that indicate they’re interested in making the podcast a genuine success on its own, rather than a vestigial part of their reality TV careers.
Scheana and the Gorgas just blather into microphones and leave the production work to somebody else, unaware or uninterested in the extreme mediocrity they’re putting into the world. They’ve been on reality TV for so long it’s like they take their popularity and ubiquity for granted, because they don’t remember not being famous, and expect fans to guzzle that bland emptiness down even after the cameras stop following them around.
Robyn and Gizelle are under no such illusions, always keeping an eye on life post-Bravo. So while Robyn and Gizelle are busy converting their fans to paying subscribers and planning for financial success outside of the Bravo machine, Scheana and the Gorgas are happy to just keep letting somebody else pull the strings. Be angry with Robyn and Gizelle if you want, but at least they’re paying attention.
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