judge city

Set atop a cabinet of DVD’s, which includes an Agnes Varda four disc collection, my television casts an orange glow of spray-tanned skin belonging to SUR waiters and waitresses. Yes, my television that rests upon hours of footage from one of France’s most influential Nouvelle Vague directors, transmits to me a drug known as Vanderpump Rules and makes my brain feel all warm and numb for a half-hour each week.

It wasn’t always this way.

As a lover of Bravo I have endured almost everything Bravo has tried to sell me, even going so far as to watch the entire first and only season of the Real Housewives of D.C. Bravo shows are my sports. They are my soap operas if I grew up in the Golden Age of soap operas. And now that Real Housewives of Beverly Hills has TWO soap opera stars, my brain can’t help but start to write some academic paper on the official passing of the melodramatic torch from soaps to reality.

I stayed away from Vanderpump Rules from the get-go because let’s face it: it is a garbage show starring sewer waste. The show follows the Predator from Predator’s spawn, who have all adopted Los Angeles-specific human forms and work at Lisa Vanderpump’s popular Hollywood restaurant, SUR.

Me when I realized I love Vanderpump Rules

The show reeks of obvious market-y/cross-promo with Real Housewives of Beverly Hills since Lisa Vanderpump is a central character of both franchises. Though she takes a backseat in Vanderpump Rules, her bejeweled specter looms over each episode and once in an x-number-of-mandatory-Lisa-shots, her stiletto-ed self  doles out the “rules”–though we quickly learn that the only rules in Vanderpump Rules are that there are no rules.

It’s hard to try to pinpoint why I am so captivated by Vanderpump Rules. The show is mind-numbing to the point where it just recently struck me that I look forward to a show every week where its 30+ year old cast members still describe things as “sick.”  It’s not even candy for my brain, it’s a novelty size Baby Bottle Pop. It’s disgusting and fake, but sugary and there. I was correct in my original assumptions that it’s “pure trash,” only I didn’t realize that I would be the rabid raccoon who would eat it all up.

So when I think, I mean really devote more time than I should, as to why I love this show, it simply falls within the fact that–I’m willing to admit–I am totally fascinated watching a group of people who have zero redeemable qualities. When a cast member of Vanderpump Rules is at their most moral, it is only because they are pitted against another cast member who is truly acting more gross. No one is ever right. Everyone is always wrong. Frankly, there is just something so…captivating about that.

No truer words have been spoken on Vanderpump Rules

The cast members are not only shameless and destructive, but delusional to the point of delirium. It is bizarre and exciting to watch a show in which you are literally rooting for no one. I mean no one. Maybe Giggy, Lisa’s alopecia-stricken dog, but that’s it. Not even Lisa, who is the most successful and arguably the most “real,” because if she wasn’t just a little bit terrible, she would have fired Kristen (and pretty much the whole staff) ages ago. No one is a hero. No one is even an anti-hero. It’s a show about villains of various wine levels and evils who waste most of their free time drinking straight out of vodka bottles and ruining each other’s lives. They hardly even have time to finish the “free”-SUR-drinks-Lisa-scolded-them-for-drinking during their breaks before someone is crying. What else could anyone want out of reality television?

Not to mention, as a huge fan of camp, this show is just about as Melrose Place/Dynasty as reality can get. I live for lines like the one Stassi recently spit out, “I’m not sure what I’ve done to you, but I’ll take a pinot grigio.” Or for the limitless lengths Kristen goes to make her ex, Tom, miserable, such as dolling herself up to pick up “old bills” at his apartment–six months after she moved out. I would have to watch Showgirls two times a week to get the campy drama Vanderpump Rules delivers to me weekly. Plus, it saves me from having to watch Elizabeth Berkeley lick a stripper pole.

You can’t write lines like this.

Some people might say I’m “wasting my time,” but they’ve never watched Jax lie in agony after his nose job as Scheana and Schwartz mistake the blood pouring out of his nose for jelly from the jelly doughnut Jax just ate.

So instead of being ashamed, I rejoice this glorious schadenfreude-ridden, gluttonous pile of terribleness. And, as the Vanderpump Rules theme song goes, “Just raise your glasses high/ This one’s for you tonight.”