Scheana Shay made a claim on her podcast recently about the last season of Vanderpump Rules.
On Scheananigans, she said that the cast was told mid-season the show was going to end up with a shortened season and it would be canceled if they didn’t do something.
Now, the show’s executive producer Alex Baskin is responding to her claims and setting the record straight.
Keep reading to find out more…
“I know Alex Baskin has said that midseason, the show was not in a good place,” Scheana said on her podcast. “It was, you know, ‘X, Y and Z needs to happen. Or we’re going to have a short season, and the show’s going to be canceled and that’s it. Go live your lives.’”
“Well, we don’t want the show to get canceled,’” she added. “Not just for ourselves and our families, but there’s a crew of 80 to 100 people who work on this show.”
While appearing at the “Reality Producers Tell All” panel at Variety’s TV FYC Fest, Alex confirmed there was a meeting, but clarified what the cast was told.
“We did get the entire cast together, and we thought we had hit a point in the season where I actually think that they were impacted by what was happening on social media,” Alex said. “We basically were telling them to drown out the noise, and to make the show that they had made over the previous 10 seasons — and that didn’t mean we asked them to manufacture anything.”
“It didn’t mean that we gave them any specific talking points,” he continued. “It just meant that we had made a show that worked because it was everybody rowing in the same direction, and reacting to each other. And we’ve gotten away from that. So we thought that we had to intervene in that sense.”
As you may have seen, Vanderpump Rules is taking a break from filming this summer to reportedly give the cast a break. They are set to reassess later this year to see where everyone is at and when they could start filming.
There is speculation that the pause is to ensure that Ariana Madix, who has been one of those at the center of “Scandoval,” will return. She is currently in Fiji to host the next season of Love Island. She will then head back to New York to return to the musical Chicago for another month of performances, so she has minimal availability to film VPR over the next few months. IF she does decide to return to the show.
“I think we will do an analysis of what else we need to consider for the show — and that’s who returns, and what the complexion of the cast looks like,” Alex said about the break. “I think everybody needs a little bit of time to live their lives, and then we can pick back up on them in a different spot.”
Need a Bravo fix? Several shows are premiering new seasons in the coming weeks, plus several other shows have been renewed!