Vanderpump Rules Recap – 1/12/15

There exists a world, it seems, where the highest aspiration one can possibly dare to dream is that one day you will become a server Sur, a Los Angeles restaurant that I think serves Mediterranean cuisine, but the only thing I’ve ever seen anyone order from the menu and then consume is a fried ball of goat cheese.

Now, I’m not a crazy person; there’s probably nothing more delicious than a fried ball of any kind of cheese, but I’m also pretty sure that it would be to the benefit of your immune system to never nibble from a morsel of food that has ever been handled by a few of the servers at Sur who also moonlight as the stars of Vanderpump Rules.

For the uninitiated, please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Nell Kalter, and I firmly believe that Vanderpump Rules, the spinoff of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills that airs Monday evenings on Bravo, is perhaps the greatest television program of our time. I feel relatively comfortable making such a claim since Lost has been over for a while now, Mad Men is sadly drawing to a close, and the newest incarnation of Twin Peaks won’t be on for another year. Into the void, as though a gift from angels who fly through the silvery heavens, plopped Vanderpump Rules, and I am delighted to be your guide through recaps of a show starring people with very few personal boundaries, absolutely no desire to maintain any semblance of privacy, and the staunch unwillingness to ever conceive of the day when their participation in such a televised-for-posterity trainwreck might hamper their future plans.

Before we begin our descent into the vodka-drenched happenings of the “stars” of the show, I want to take a moment to thank Guru Steve for allowing me to recap my newest favorite show on his stellar site. (I have decided to call him my guru because I think that if he had a cult, I’d totally become a follower – as long as there were no weird animal sacrifices involved. I’ve got me some limits.)

A little background first to the show at hand: Vanderpump Rules follows a bunch of waitresses and bartenders who work at a restaurant owned by Lisa Vanderpump, that cheeky minx who became a breakout star of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. I’ll happily go on the record and say that I think Lisa Vanderpump is as close to walking perfection as a member of the human species can be. She is intelligent and snarky and can identify an assh*le in three notes or less. She might also be the most gorgeous woman over the age of fifty who regularly appears on my television screen, though it’s awards season now so Helen Mirren is about to give Ms. Vanderpump a run for her money.

Lisa owns Sur, and she breezes in and out of the ridiculous happenings with frequency, raising an eyebrow here and dropping a pithy putdown there, but the focus of the show is on her staff, a bunch of people in their twenties and thirties who should probably know better than to hitch their future to fleeting reality fame. But until they come to their senses, let’s take a look at the key players:

We should probably start with Jax, the bartender. I’m all for betting that the guy’s given name is not actually “Jax,” though if it is, that should tell us a lot about the creatures who raised him. However, I think his real name is something like “Lucifer” or maybe “Mephistopheles” because the guy might be the closest thing to the devil that has ever graced basic cable. He is in his mid-thirties and I thought he was good looking before I heard him speak, but now the only things that come out of his mouth are badly-told lies. If he’s called out, he likes to take down everyone in his path and yet the rest of the crew remains his friend. My guess he has a ton of dirt on each of them and they’re all afraid of the repercussions of bailing on the sweaty guy in their midst.

Jax is best friends with Tom Sandoval, another Sur bartender with a penchant for wearing beenies and for falling into heaps of tears, the kind that make the weeping that Jason Mesnick exhibited in his Bachelor finale look restrained. Sandoval doesn’t seem like a bad guy; it’s pretty clear from his evident disgust for Jax’s behavior that he’s got some kind of moral center buried underneath the unfortunate tank tops he wears. But he’s in a bit of a quandary this season. As he’s enjoying a healthy relationship with his new girlfriend Ariana – another bartender at Sur – he might have to join the witness protection plan to get away from Kristen, his former girlfriend, who is a waitress at Sur and the prototype for why some men fear women in general.

See, Kristen is out of her fuc*ing mind. It’s difficult to adequately describe crazy, so let me instead just give you a brief rundown of some things Kristen has done on this show: she slept with Jax (who was the boyfriend of her best friend Stassi) while Sandoval, her boyfriend at the time and Jax’s best friend, was asleep in the other room; she regularly tells her ex’s new girlfriend that Sandoval is cheating on her though she has, at best, questionable proof that an infidelity ever took place; she cannot stop the evil look of glee from flashing across her face when she hears that anyone besides her is in pain; she went to Sandoval’s house to pick up her mail wearing a dress with a neckline so plunging, her nipples served as accessories to the outfit; and she got herself a rebound relationship with a guy who busses tables at Sur. His name is James and he’s twenty-one and he watches his mentally unstable girlfriend get dolled up to go get her mail at her ex-boyfriend’s apartment while pretending that he’s fine with it all.

Kristen used to be close friends with Katie, another Sur waitress, a girl who strikes me as simultaneously articulate and boring as hell. Katie cut Kristen out of her life because of the cheating episode and now focuses her attentions on repairing her relationship with another guy named Tom. Tom2 is very cute but has a hard time standing up for himself. If he and Katie end up breeding, I’m imagining the world will be blessed with a nice but bland toddler who might get beaten up in daycare by a kid whose parents have backbones.