Welcome to SUR, a restaurant that boasts only three paltry stars on Yelp and a waitstaff with absolutely no inhibition, shame, or concerns about how their lives might be negatively impacted by this infamy once it all finally goes away. Owned by my favorite Real Housewife of all time, cheeky goddess Lisa Vanderpump, the place apparently serves fried goat cheese balls with dipping sauces made out of heightened misery and most of the people who work there have aspirations of becoming stars. There are hopeful musicians and aging models and ravaged writers and jewelry designers who believe that each and every necklace should always have at least one more heavy stone thrown in and SUR is the place where they gather to earn the money to pay for their rent and (I’m guessing) their drugs. Most of the waitresses and the bartenders have known one another for years at this point and so they all have a deep and complicated history with one another that includes minor sh*t like infidelity and betrayal and yet they all show up in the same places all the time because, well, that’s where the cameras are.
It seems that most of last season’s cast is back for more, including a couple of people who don’t even work at the restaurant anymore. For you Vanderpump Rules virgins (lucky bastards!), here’s a brief summary of our players to help you set up your bracket of who you’d perhaps most want to vote off the stratosphere – though you should know that transporting these people out into space will send terrible messages about earthlings to our alien counterparts and could very well spark intergalactic warfare.
Jax is a bartender at SUR and one of the most vile creatures to ever stand upright. He’s a sometimes model and an always douchebag who lies (on camera), cheats (on and off camera), and is the reason chastity belts should be the new uniform for female SUR employees.
Tom Sandoval is also a bartender and one of Jax’s best friends in spite of the fact that Jax slept with Tom’s former girlfriend…in Tom’s living room…while Tom was sleeping in the bedroom. He has forgiven Jax for reasons that defy comprehension and has finally gnawed himself free from his lunatic ex-girlfriend to find happiness with his new girlfriend.
Ariana is Sandoval’s girlfriend now. Also a bartender at SUR, Ariana comes off as normal and rather intelligent. She has dealt with verbal threats from Sandoval’s ex – you know, normal stuff like how great it would be if a Mack truck hit Adriana in the face at full speed – and she is best friends with Scheana, a girl with more vowels in her name than is probably necessary.
Speaking of Scheana, she’s an aspiring singer but I think that her aspirations are more about her liking attention than having any sort of commitment to her art. Scheana’s kind of ridiculous in that she got married in a wedding dress that had a crop top and she makes comments like, “None of my other friends have a husband!” She also insists on showing a level of decency to the girl who has wished upon skies filled with stars for the spontaneous destruction of her very best friend, and that kind of disloyalty would probably be a deal breaker for me. Still, Scheana is not so bad. She can form full sentences and she seems to know when people are being assh*les, even as she continues to associate with them.
Katie is another waitress at SUR and she gave her boyfriend, Tom Schwartz, an ultimatum last season about how he needed to propose to her. Katie used to be rather meek and boring, but she summoned up some moxie last season and started to stand up for herself. I have decided that as long as she never goes back to the terrible orange hair she had during season two, I will root for Katie’s happiness.
Stassi used to be Katie’s best friend. She also used to be Jax’s girlfriend. She also used to work at SUR, but then she moved to New York and found a new boyfriend and decided she was so over all the bullsh*t – until the new season started up and then she landed back in LA and back on the show. Stassi runs a style blog and she wears terrible jewelry that I think she makes herself but what she fashions way better than enormous statement necklaces are insults. The truth (shhhh…) is that I kind of like Stassi. Sure, I think she’s a total assh*le who has lived her early adulthood like a girl who desperately wanted to be elected Prom Queen in high school and wasn’t, but she is articulate and somewhat self-aware and I would have written a book about her perfection had she not made the choice to come back on a show she publicly declared she was done with because now it just feels like she’s slumming and that’s a look that’s never flattering.
Tom Schwartz is Katie’s boyfriend and one of the cutest boys in the whole world. He strikes me as a bit of a wuss since he doesn’t seem to easily stand up for himself and he deigns to continue to be friends with Jax, but I forgive him for everything the second he slips on his adorable glasses.
And then there’s Kristen. Kristen is Sandoval’s ex-girlfriend, Stassi’s ex-best friend, Lisa Vanderpump’s ex-employee, and the single craziest woman ever captured by Bravo cameras – and I used to watch The Real Housewives of Atlanta during the days when NeNe needed to be retrained from punching Kim on a tour bus. I don’t understand Kristen and I don’t really want to understand her. She desperately wanted Sandoval back and blames Ariana for their breakup despite the fact that she also cheated. She continued to work at SUR after the demise of her relationship alongside her ex and his new girlfriend and shot glances that, had they been actual daggers, Ariana would have bled out on the floor of an eating establishment that probably has Board of Health guidelines. She snared herself a rebound boyfriend in the form of an English DJ/busboy named James, a guy who looks about twelve and has a dimple in his chin so deep that I’d hide in there when the apocalypse arrives. Last season, Kristen told her boss to “suck a d*ck,” smiled creepily upon hearing news that could destroy Sandoval’s happiness, and connected online with a girl who alleges to have slept with Sandoval – and then brought her to SUR to watch the action go down like it was the World Series. (Sorry, Mets fans. Too soon for a World Series reference?) Unless Kristen has spent the show’s hiatus locked in a sanatorium, my guess is that she’ll be bringing the crazy again this season. After all, why would she not? That insanity is what got her back on this show even though she doesn’t work at the restaurant where much of the action goes down. Like the obese woman who stars on My Big Fat Fabulous Life who would probably lose her show if she got skinny, Kristen has no real impetus to change, even if she’s actually capable of doing so.
Now that the basics have been covered, it’s time for the new season. I expected the action to begin with Jax enrolling himself in college to enrich himself with a double major in Finance and Philosophy. Alas, we begin instead with all the regulars arriving at SUR for a staff meeting led by Queen Vanderpump, a woman I think I’d vote into office just because I can’t stop myself from adoring her crisp demeanor. I love her so much that I’d stop writing this recap right now so I can get started on her inauguration speech, but I can do no such thing because Jax has just appeared onscreen for the first time all season and he is rocking a bandage over his nose and something yellow that might be gauze shoved inside of his ear. Seems Jax is undergoing round three of his nose job to finally get it right and he looks ridiculous, which means this season is starting off on precisely the right foot.
Shocking absolutely nobody who has at least one working brain cell (which maybe leaves Jax out) is the fact that Kristen has been causing disturbances at Lisa’s other restaurant, Pump. She’s been showing up to do some day drinking and to spend time with her toddler boyfriend at the place where he’s been working as a DJ and she apparently tossed a glass of wine while she was there. She’s not the only one Lisa is concerned about, though. According to her calculations, Sandoval hasn’t worked many shifts in the last few months – which nicely lines up with when the cameras vacated the place – but Sandoval refutes her theories and says he has been there and his eyes fill with tears for the first time all season.
Not a chance in hell that it’ll be the last.
After the meeting, Scheana and Katie bond briefly while they apply makeup in the bathroom and they appear to be good friends now. I’m happy for Katie that she has a friend in spite of the fact that she briefly murders language when she says, “Stassi and I’s friendship is done,” but it does make me cringe a little bit watching her gossip so freely about her former best friend with Scheana. Her story is that Stassi and her boyfriend have decided to live apart after sharing an apartment – but who can worry about that when Katie’s got her proposal countdown ticking away inside of her head like it’s an estrogen-fueled egg timer?
Locked away from the public eye so he won’t terrify the townspeople while he heals, Jax polishes glasses in the back of the restaurant and James comes in. Jax launches into some advice for the young boy about his lunatic of a girlfriend, the same chick Jax slept with when she was dating his best friend. Jax’s warnings are that Kristen could screw things up for James over at Pump and that Kristen is a time bomb who just so happens to be spending many of her days with Carmen, the girl Jax cared about deeply and showed her that affection by cheating on her constantly. It bothers him that Carmen has tried to move on with her life, something James confirms with a smile, and it’s there that the conversation between these guys ends. The camera stays on Jax as he quickly bangs out a text message that I’m guessing is intended to berate a girl for trying to live her life after the guy who tattooed her name on his arm broke up with her because he just wasn’t feeling it anymore.
And just when I felt like things were appearing rather sedate, Kristen calls James while he is sitting in an alley in the most apropos bit of location scouting I’ve seen in forever. She’s not calling to tell him that she loves him or to apologize for the wine-tossing incident. No, she demands to know what James told Jax about Carmen and James denies saying anything – after doing it on camera. The two of them scream on the phone and call one another words of endearment like “assh*le” and I hear that these two have already broken up, but there’s a perverse part of me that hopes these crazy kids can make up and make it work because I’m very curious to see if the antichrist they create will also have a chin ass.