“It’s so easy to be like, ‘Oh, they’re just reality stars,’ ” says Summer House veteran Lindsay Hubbard. “But this is an entire year-round job.”
This sentiment proved particularly true this year as the Bravo reality show found itself embroiled in an all-consuming scandal.
A quick recap: Summer House revolves around the personal lives of a group of New York City friends as they spend weekends together in a Hamptons-area house share. Two weeks before the show’s season 10 premiere on Feb. 3, longtime castmembers Amanda Batula and Kyle Cooke announced their divorce and, just weeks later, on March 31, as the series was airing, Batula and another castmember, West Wilson, released a joint statement on social media announcing they had started dating. Complicating the situation further was the fact that fellow Summer House star Ciara Miller previously dated Wilson and was a longtime friend of Batula’s.
For viewers (a record-breaking 2.2 million per episode, in fact!), these revelations led to hours of time spent in front of the television, spamming group chats and deep-diving on Instagram. For the team behind Summer House, it meant all-hands-on-deck production meetings, late night edits and reconfiguring already plotted narrative arcs for a season that was in the middle of airing. All of this intrigue and work netted the show its first Emmy nomination, in the outstanding unstructured reality program category, since debuting in 2017.
Bravo audiences are particularly primed for the type of tumult that played out this season of Summer House. Two years ago, there was Scandoval — shorthand for the cheating scandal that centered on Vanderpump Rules stars Tom Sandoval and Ariana Madix, herself a first-time Emmy nominee this year for hosting the Peacock series Love Island USA (more on page 19).
Now, Summer House is the show feeding the great maw of the Bravoverse. And with the increased headlines and press coverage, the show was reaching far beyond the average reality television binger. (The New York Times had several stories explaining, dissecting and generally opining about the Summer House goings-on.)
“Clearly, there was a tremendous appetite for the story,” says Steven Weinstock, executive producer of Summer House and founder of production company Truly Original. According to NBCUniversal, the first part of the show’s three-part reunion brought in 3.1 million multiplatform viewers in seven days, a franchise record and a years-long audience high for Bravo. For producers, it was no longer a matter of keeping audiences interested in a show that was a decade into its run but delivering cathartic and conclusive storylines on a season that had to be reworked in order to incorporate information that was coming out in real time.
“We had no idea where it was going,” admits Weinstock, who in many cases was getting new details along with fans. It wasn’t just about building the plane while flying, Weinstock and the whole team were tasked with dismantling and rebuilding the plane midflight.
“We had to sit and look at the story arcs of the individuals that were involved and we had to consider ways in which we could bring that story to the audience that really made sense and didn’t cheat them out of the real drama of the story,” says Weinstock. “There were certain holes in the narrative and they needed to be filled; otherwise, the audience would become very frustrated.”
With an insatiable and invested audience, the questions had the potential to be endless. How did one relationship meet its end? How did another start? What is the potential fallout? Where can this group go from here?
In producing unscripted programming — Truly Original’s other series include several Real Housewives franchises — Weinstock says he takes pride in audiences getting to feel “as though they’re watching fiction.” But, at the same time, producers were mindful that, with this scandal, it was likely that “a lot of judgment was going to take place. Our job was not to be judges but to explain, in a nuanced way, the motivations behind why certain characters did certain things.”
The balance that needed to be struck, says the producer, was between “telling the story and giving people an opportunity to say their piece.” As for the practicalities of delivering on a season that was being partially constructed on the spot, Weinstock says that Bravo allowed the final episodes to be delivered “very close to air.”
The season’s big scandal certainly dominated the narrative, but the 10th season of Summer House also delivered complex conversations not often seen on reality television, including dialogues around mental health, grief and race. In a standout moment from the season, Miller discussed the unique pressures she faces as a Black woman on a predominantly white reality show and a largely unscripted ecosystem, alongside the unseen complications of pursuing interracial relationships in front of the camera.
Hubbard — who along with Cooke and castmember Carl Radke has been with the show since its inaugural season — says that the cast’s willingness to share personal highs and lows summer after summer is a part of the show’s lasting appeal to audiences.
“I’ve had boyfriends. I’ve been single. I’ve had boyfriends, again. I’ve had breakups. I had a miscarriage. I fell in love with my best friend, got engaged, then broken up with on television, in a very humiliating way. I got pregnant. I had a baby. I have been through so many adult things on television for everyone to witness,” she says. “It’s nice to be able to give people something to relate to.”
The 11th season of Summer House is currently in production — sans Batula and Wilson, whom Bravo confirmed in July won’t return. Coming off an impactful last season, Hubbard is confident of the show’s continued staying power. She jokes: “We always call it ‘the little show that could.’ We weren’t certain if we were going to last past season one.”
As for the takeaways from a chaotic, eventful and now Emmy-nominated 10th season, Weinstock says with a laugh, “The lessons are you just never know what’s going to happen.”
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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