Vanderpump Villa Series-Premiere Recap: Chateau No You Didn’t
It seems like Vanderpump Villa, the latest of Lisa Vanderpump’s many spin-offs, really wants to be Below Deck but at a chateau. There’s only one group of eight guests who love inexplicable themed parties and stay for about 48 hours, the crew gets a day and a half off between “charters,” and the producers seem to be doing everything in their power to make the attractive young employees get it on with each other. This is the vision: Lisa Vanderpump is the captain of a ship but the ship is really a house in the South of France. It’s a recipe for success.
The problem is that Below Deck is a show about people who are in yachting and think that doing reality television will be a silly lark. That does not seem like the cast of Vanderpump Villa. They seem like unhappy servers who wish they were famous and are getting on a reality show to jumpstart some other career. This isn’t Below Deck on land. It’s Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club without the ocean.
(Just like Lindsay Lohan’s Beach Club, Vanderpump Villa is made by Bunim/Murray Productions, the studio behind The Real World and many other reality staples. Yes, it is strange that this show is on Hulu and not on Bravo, the home of Lisa’s other shows, or a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, which owns Bravo. It is also strange it’s not made by Evolution Media, the company that makes both The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and Vanderpump Rules. This means either that neither Evolution nor Bravo wanted the show or that Lisa was so burned by her departure from RHOBH that she found a new production company and a whole new streaming service for this venture.)
Since all of these yahoos seem eager to be on reality television, it seems like they’re not only cleaning the guest’s toilets and bussing their tables, but they’re also clocking in for their other jobs. However, these amateur professionals need to learn that there is more to the reality television arts and sciences than fighting. Because everything thinks there needs to be conflict at every moment (and they don’t nearly have as much of a real job to do as the stews and deckies of Below Deck), all they do is get into fights so stupid that they’re practically comatose.
Speaking of stupid people having stupid fights, meet Hannah and Marciano, exes who have both wound up working at Lisa’s establishment. I have a lot of behind-the-scenes questions about these two. Were they cast together as a couple and then broke up before filming could start because Mariano cheated? Were they already broken up before they were cast? Either way, I can see Lisa drumming the tips of her fingers together like Mr. Burns, just thinking of how she can manipulate these two into creating even more drama.
At the first staff dinner, they’re playing a game of “truth or drink,” and Marciano has to describe his best date, and he says it’s when Hannah gave him the best hand job of his life. He might have said blow job. It was bleeped out, but one thing is for sure: it is the only job that will be finished satisfactorily during this entire series. But that’s not even the worst thing he does early. He goes to the bar, splashes a bunch of brown liquor in a glass, throws some Sprite over it, and says, “That will do.” This Dollar Tree Jax Taylor has got to go.
The first fight happens after the first guests, Jeremy and Shirin, arrive so that Jeremy can pull off a secret proposal to his girlfriend of four years. Before service even starts, servers Marciano and Hannah, as well as mixologist Telly, are taking shots straight from the bottle behind the bar, even though Lisa told them that the bar in the chateau is off limits for staff drinking. Also, who does that? Eric, the chateau manager, does it at the end of the third episode, too. I mean, are all of these hotties far too uncouth for even the most simple of glassware?
The fight starts when Marciano and Hannah are mad that the drinks aren’t coming out fast enough. How do they want to serve the guests? By screaming about it to each other within earshot so they can totally understand that there is drama. When they go inside to confront Telly, who is the only bartender on duty, Marciano tells her never to talk to him again, just to get his drinks as he orders her to. She then tries to clear everyone from the bar, but Hannah tells her that’s where they work, and Telly shouts, “Shut the fuck, you stupid bitch.” When Marciano steps up to her and gets aggressive again, she shoves him, and the rest of the staff have to break up the fight.
Yet again, the guests see and hear this whole thing going down and probably wish that if there was going to be a fight like this, they would do it tableside so that their dinner would also come with a show. The next morning Lisa calls everyone together to chastise them and tell them it’s not Chateau Shit Show, which was the name of my Fire Island share house for nine summers running. When Lisa brings it up, Marciano tells her that it didn’t affect service. Say what? They saw and heard the whole thing. Lisa also chastises Marciano for making 11 shots when there were only eight guests and sucking up the remaining liquor like he’s some kind of Dust Buster on a bender.
The next fight is, once again, thanks to Hannah, who is made with equal parts stupidity, aggression, and lip fillers. She sees one of the servers, Priscilla, sitting beside Marciano on the couch with her legs crossed. She tells Priscilla that her “spread eagle” next to Marciano makes her uncomfortable and not to do it. What? These women need to police their behavior around this jackass of a man so that Hannah can feel comfortable? There are not enough “No”s in all of France for my opinion on this. If Hannah doesn’t like it, she should tell Marciano to get up and leave, or, frankly, she should get the hell over it. Priscilla owes her nothing.
Later, when all the staff is hanging in their quarters together, Gabriella, one of the event planners, is sitting spread eagle and just as close to Marciano. Priscilla then approaches Hannah and asks her why it’s okay for Gabriella to do that but not her. They dissemble a bit but go to their separate corners. Then Hannah walks past Priscilla and says, “I’m mad at you. That was weird to call out Gabriella.” No, sis. What is weird is that you want other women to behave a certain way around a man that you currently have no relationship with. That’s what is weird.
Hannah starts shouting at Priscilla and says she’s “being real.” This is a common reality television fallacy. Just because you are loud, awful, and confrontational does not make you “real.” It makes you an asshole. And there is no way Priscilla was being “fake” but pointing out to Hannah, right to her face, that she was enforcing a silly double standard. Then, in her confessional, Hannah says, “If I’m having a breaking down, it’s like, why am I the drama?” Because you are having a breakdown for a silly reason completely of your own fabrication. If that’s not drama, then what is? Later in the episode, Hannah says she hasn’t really clicked with anyone on the staff. Hmm. I wonder why. Could it be, I don’t know, because you’re just shouting at everyone and creating dumb fights for sport?
Marciano is no better. Caroline, the sous chef, is talking to Eric, the super hot manager of the chateau, about how she doesn’t like his management style. She forgets that she has a batch of croissants in the over. Marciano is sitting nearby and smells the burning pastry but doesn’t do anything about it. He then goes downstairs and says to Caroline, “Hey, dumb dumb, have you forgotten something upstairs?” She asks him if he took them out or shut off the oven, and he says, “That is your shit to handle.” No, dude. You work on a team. That is all your shit to handle.
Marciano then goes upstairs and puts the charcoal briquette of a croissant on her bed. He says, “You want to be a smart ass, sorry.” Um, didn’t he start by calling her “dumb dumb?” When she approaches him to tell him it’s not cool and calls him an idiot he then accuses her of calling him names as if he didn’t invent this whole fracas out of nothing just so that he could, what, get more screen time? Turn into a villain? I don’t get it at all.
That’s what I can’t understand about these people. Are they that terrible? Are they playing a role? Is this Lisa just hiring people she knows are going to create drama? Why are they behaving like this when it is completely unnecessary? Are there people like this in the world? Even if they are, it seems too much, it seems too hard. Meanwhile, there are two housekeepers named Emily and Grace (I think?), and they seem sweet as tarte tatin and just as delicious. Why can’t we get more like them?
That brings us to the fight between hottie manager Eric and Stephen, the events coordinator who was fired from Vanderpump Cocktail Garden for being mean to the other staff. (See, this is what I mean. Did Lisa say, “Give me the shittiest employees you ever had; they’ll be great for my show”?) Stephen, whose right ear is being constantly devoured by some kind of jeweled cockroach, wants to be hired as the manager, and so he tells Eric that he needs to step it up because he moved Lisa’s breakfast from a veranda to under a tree. Yes, Eric was wrong to move it, but let Lisa handle Eric being bad at his job. No matter what you think, Eric is still his boss.
Later, Eric starts yelling at Stephen about doing his job and screams in front of the guests while Stephen is doing his job quite well. Stephen then has to go inside and tell Eric how good he is at his job, and Lisa has to break the whole thing up as if it’s some kind of improv class gone wrong. And off the staff at Chateau Rosabelle (which I believe is the name of a horror series about a haunted doll) go into the night to please their guests. They fix their hair before the cameras, they set their targets in their sites, and they grit their teeth, waiting for the moment to shine when the fireflies are in the meadow, and the clouds are sailing over a turgid moon. It’s like a spell has been cast on them, like they’re all possessed by the ghosts of the chateau, or maybe it’s just the specter of easy fame.