The problem with Vanderpump Villa is that it is a show about a bunch of (mostly) American yahoos mucking up the French countryside with their drama and not a show that exclusively follows Eric’s best friend, a sheep named Bernard. Wouldn’t you much rather watch him wandering about the provincial fields eating grass, pooping out little pellets, and carousing with his fellow sheep getting ready to be shorn? I know I would. And, bonus, Bernard scored higher on his SATs than Hannah did.
I’m joking, but one of the real problems with the show is that too many damn people work in this villa. There’s about the same number of staff on a season of Below Deck, which this show desperately wants to be, but no one has to drive the villa and ensure it is safely tied to a dock with a bunch of other villas. They don’t even have one bartender on the USS Captain Sandy, but Lisa needs two? Also two events people? She says, “We put a lot of thought into the signature events.” You do? You put all that thought into it and the best you could come up with is a Great Gatsby–themed party, the scourge of Housewives parties everywhere?
As the episode starts, Lisa loses a staff member, Priscilla, who would rather return home than look at the enormous pimple right next to Hannah’s mouth for even one more second. Immediately, she hires a new girl, Nikki, who is giving major Tawny Kitaen vibes. Why do we need her? They did a fine job with Emily, one of the housekeepers, on service with Hannah and Marciano. Also, there are only ever eight guests at a time. How many servers could you possibly need?
Lisa calls a staff meeting, but she says that she’s too busy to run it, so she deputizes Stephen’s earring to run the show. Eric, who is supposedly the villa manager, is a little bit pissed because he thinks that Stephen is coming for his job. Not quite. He’s so bad that he’s losing his job to Stephen’s earring, which is just there to pick up the pieces. (Those pieces are the little back of a stud that you always seem to lose, but the earring is so big it has 182 of them.) Eric says, “I have to show Lisa I’m doing my job as chateau manager.” Okay, but what is that job? Like, what does Eric do? He doesn’t manage the staff because none of them respect him. He doesn’t seem to be taking much care of the grounds other than corralling the animals. Sure, he looks great flexing shirtless in a mirror, but do you even need Eric? Isn’t Lisa doing the job of a manager quite effectively?
That’s what I mean about this show having too much staff. What makes Below Deck great is that the staff has drama that they have to address in between work and the work creates drama on its own. They run those kids ragged! With so many staff members in the villa, none of them are stressed out, and they have plenty of time to do whatever they want. There are no constraints, and constraints always make drama. She should have hired five people and had them running around all day and then shagging all night. That is a show I would watch.
The guest of honor this week is Sara, a woman who just got divorced and wants to celebrate by burning her wedding dress. That is a cute idea, but do you know how many noxious fumes are released by burning sequins? Someone should submit an OSHA violation. Lisa also talks to Sara about why she wanted to divorce her husband and makes Hannah listen in, hoping that it will jog Marciano out of her brain for good. The problem is that presupposes Hannah has a brain.
That night, when Sara burns her dress, Eric is standing around talking to the guests about how much he hates the party because his divorce was bad. He says to one of Sara’s friends, “I wonder how [her ex] would feel if he knew this was going on.” Who the fuck cares, Eric! The one thing you do not express at a divorce party is regret for the ex. Fuck that dude!
We see a brief bonding moment between Eric and sous-chef Caroline (again, how many chefs are there on Below Deck for just as many people?) because they’re both divorced, and Eric mentions that his divorce was acrimonious. He says that he and his wife started to have “different opinions,” and he tried to make it work even though she started to hate him. I need to know way more about what really happened, but the way he’s saying it makes me think it is either one of two scenarios. The first is that she got Q Anon–ed or something like that (NXIVM, maybe?), and their different opinions were so unsustainable they had to get divorced. The second is that the differing opinion was that Eric was of the opinion they were in an open marriage and his wife was of the opinion that he was cheating on her.
The next day, after the party, one of the guests asks for a massage, and Eric goes jogging up to the room to rub all up on a woman named Meghan while she lays on a messy bed next to Sara. Lisa acts like he was trying to sleep with them both, which he could have, but there was someone else in the room. What could have gone so wrong? Also, the logical extension of this format where the staff is forced to hang out with the guests all the time is that someone is going to fuck a guest. It’s just going to happen, and contrary to how she wants us to feel, she is essentially condoning it.
After this happens with Eric, she tells him that he will be fixing things around the villa (that’s his job?) and won’t be interacting with the guests anymore. Great. Okay. Fine.
At the same staff meeting, Lisa introduces hottie Nikki to make all of Marciano’s nightmares come true. As soon as the meeting is over, Hannah goes outside to find Marciano playing a game of chess on a board left by a giant. She asks if Marciano thinks the new girl is hot and if they’ve hooked up before. Remember, this is the woman who sells herself as secure and all the other women as insecure and jealous. Um, is this how a secure person behaves? Nikki has been there ten minutes and Hannah is threatened. God, she sucks.
Marciano knows he’s in a terrible situation because no matter what happens with Nikki, Hannah is going to grind up his balls, overbake them in a croissant, and leave the charred remains on Marciano’s bed. He tells the guys that he’s going to pick a fight with her, saying that Emily should have been promoted and she should have been made a housekeeper, because that is the only thing that will save him with Hannah.
After everyone has been drinking that night, he says exactly that to her when she asks if he’s happy she’s there. His response makes her feel totally unwanted. Hannah then takes her outside with Marciano to talk about it and tells Nikki that she “keeps bringing it up” when Hannah is the one who brought her out there and forced her to talk about it. Now they are fighting for no reason other than booze and the cameras being on. Hannah is screaming, Nikki is crying, Marciano is scratching in his boxer briefs because that’s all he does. Everyone else is hiding and thinking about what a bully Hannah is, considering she has screamed at every single person on staff at this point, of which there are far too many. Fire half of them and let Stephen’s earring run the whole place. Him and Bernard. They’d make an excellent, drama-free team.
