2 weeks Ago By Brian Moylan
I’ve always dreamed of writing a scripted series about what would happen to Jax Taylor five years after Vanderpump Rules ended. That’s what would be interesting about it, is it would be the part we didn’t see, the sad reality after the fame faded and his ranking on Cameo descended week by week until he was at the bottom. As I imagined it, he would be washed up and angry, but nothing else would change: still partying, still lying, still flying into fits of rage, still self-obsessed, still a danger to everyone around him.
It turns out what I imagined and the truth aren’t that far off. What’s strange is that thanks to #Scandoval , this invisible part, the part of his life that was supposed to happen off-camera, is now right back in the spotlight. Now that I’m seeing it, it’s too real, too honest, too raw.
Also so predictable, like we all knew this end was coming the first time he ripped off his chunky knit in a Vegas strip mall parking lot to fight Stassi’s new boyfriend. While this episode is dominated by Jax getting ready to check into a mental health facility for two days, let’s first take a moment to visit two other relationships I don’t understand. The first is Zack and Benji, his boyfriend, who is still married to someone else and is either in Canada or about to be deported or maybe living in Los Angeles but with the ex-husband, and now he’s moving into Zack’s house.
I don’t know. I have so many questions about all of this, and they all start with, “Why does Zack have a Monster energy drink branded mini-fridge sitting on his kitchen counter?” Seriously, though, I don’t understand this situation at all. It seems like he is in the process of getting divorced, so he met Zack on a dating app, and they started hanging out.
Okay. That all sounds good. But what is up with his being deported? Did he lose his visa because he’s getting divorced? If he has a green card, that shouldn’t happen, so maybe they weren’t married that long? Maybe it was a sham marriage and the government found out? Also, with everything that is going on in this fair country of ours (that I don’t even live in currently, thanks U.
K. Home Office), he’s going to go on a reality show talking about how he might not be here legally? Oh, this is more dangerous than walking barefoot on Zack’s filthy floors. Now we’re on to Michelle and Jesse, which, regardless of what happens with Jax, is still the most fascinating scene of this whole episode.
They’re fighting over their childcare schedule, and Michelle says that Jesse agrees to things and then takes them back, which sounds exactly like something Jesse would do. The only thing that might possibly be worse than being married to Jesse Lally is divorcing Jesse Lally. This man is out to make this woman’s life hell and he will do it in ways big and small.
Like what? How about just flaunting his wealth and waste in her face? What am I talking about? When she comes over, he just finished a four-egg omelet and has a whole carton of eggs out on the counter. And not even the dozen egg carton, the 18-egg carton. The egg tall boy.
He must have spent about $874 dollars on those eggs. And an omelet that big? In this economy? With the tariffs? What’s next? He’s going to bathe in Dom Perignon and give himself a caviar facial? Seriously though, this man is the absolute living worst, but watching him work is a thing of wonder. Just look at how he handles the negotiation of who their daughter will spend the holidays with.
Michelle says they’ll take turns starting this year. Then Jesse, thinking about being left alone on both Thanksgiving and Christmas, tears up, thinking about how awful life would be apart from his daughter. That is until we hear that he was dating a woman for a week, and their daughter caught him having a sleepover.
Okay, so he’s going to behave like that any given week. How will he act on Thanksgiving? His daughter will wake up and walk right into a turkey-themed orgy. There are two great parts of this insane scene.
One is when Jesse says, in confessional, “I didn’t cheat on her. I didn’t lie to her. Yeah, maybe I was a shitty husband.
But I didn’t hurt her.” Um, what do you think being a shitty husband is? It hurts! It hurt her every single time and just because he didn’t do the absolute worst things he could do doesn’t mean his blithely terrible behavior every single day didn’t also hurt. The real kicker comes thanks to a discussion about the girlfriend, who seems like a real piece of work.
She’s sending Michelle text messages threatening to sue her and telling Janet at a party that she is going to send cease and desist letters (or as they call them in the OC, “ cyst and deceased ”). She sounds terrible. She sounds like the kind of hot but insane girl that Jesse would rebound with immediately just so that his bad decisions can continue to terrorize his ex-wife even after their separation.
During the conversation, Michelle tells Jesse that this GF told a friend of hers that she was sleeping with another guy. Jesse asks which friend. Michelle says, “Scheana.
” Oh, the way my heart skipped a beat, and I got a semi just thinking about Scheana Marie Shay getting involved in this. Jesse says to call Scheana to ask if she said that, and he calls, and Scheana, never the one not to answer the siren call of reality television, picks up. Jesse asks Scheana if his GF said that she was sleeping with other men and Scheana said yes.
“She even told me specifically who,” Scheana says. “The guy from Baywatch .” I’m sorry, but it’s “the guy from Baywatch ” for me.
First of all, we’re all thinking the same thing, and that is, Is it The Hoff? It may be, but it probably isn’t. It could be! But I doubt it. That makes it even sadder and funnier.
Jesse is getting cucked by a “guy from Baywatch ” who isn’t even David Hasselhoff which means he is both somehow more famous and more washed up than Jesse all at the same time. Scheana Shay has never delivered a line better, and if this is all she does this season of The Valley , she should still be invited to the reunion. Okay, so Jax and Brittany.
Jax spends most of the episode having a series of mini interventions in his house, which is still littered with ill-conceived wall art that says “Cauchi Homestead.” First is Kristen, and I don’t even need to say anything because Jax said it perfectly: “I know I’ve hit rock bottom when Kristen Doute shows up at your house before noon to talk about your fucking issues.” Next up is Danny and Jason, the Bland Squad.
They’re trying to convince Jax that he shouldn’t lose everything he’s worked so hard for and he’s just like, “Yeah, I’m sorry, I’ve had like 50 of these conversations and I’m about to get a call from the mental health facility so will you both please just fuck straight off.” They do, and then they go sit in a park and drink Monster energy drinks they stole from Zack’s mini-fridge and just flex their muscles at each other for a while. Finally, Brittany comes over so that Jax can see their son before he checks into the facility and when Jax picks him up and hugs him, Brittany tells him not to kiss him on the face because Jax had a girl over the night before and she doesn’t want him to catch anything.
Okay, there is slut shaming, and then there is whatever Brittany is doing here. That’s not how STIs work. Production also does Jax no favors.
They pull up a picture of his “friend” Paige that was over the night before, and it is the single boobiest picture ever taken off Instagram. Even I, a well-known advocate for Sluts Rights, was like, “Damn, she looks skanky.” The fight between these two makes no sense.
I shoudn’t say that. Jax’s constant defense makes no sense. He just continuously accuses Brittany of sleeping around and fucking his friend when it seems like she was within her rights to hook up with someone while they were separated, though it is a little low that it was a friend of Jax’s.
Is that lower than anything Jax has done on even a tame Tuesday morning? No. But low nonetheless. Jax keeps using the ultimate loser’s only defense, saying, “No, you need help,” just deflecting everything back at Brittany as if he has been so wronged that he’s been backed into this corner.
Everything out of Jax’s mouth is so deplorable, like when Brittany says she isn’t hooking up with anyone, and then he says, “That’s okay because I have people watching.” Dude, is that a threat? Is that even real? What is this man saying? Brittany really gets right to it, though, saying, “If you don’t stay the full 30 days [in treatment], I am filing immediately, I am getting full custody, and I’m getting a restraining order against you. And you’ll lose your job.
” She then says, on camera what we’ve all known for more than a decade, that he has a cocaine problem and she hopes that he’s honest with the doctors about it. He tries to turn it back on her, saying she’s done it too. She says, “I have, but if I took a drug test right now I’d pass.
Would you?” The answer is clearly no because he gets up and walks away. Brittany goes out and gets into the car with her nanny, Zuly, who is truly the hardest-working woman in Los Angeles County. Jason arrives to drive Jax to the facility and Jax is a nervous wreck.
He’s thinking about all of the things that he’ll miss when he’s away, mostly his son, and how he’s going to keep growing without him. But while Jax is thinking about his son, I’m thinking about Jax’s father. During his mock intervention with Jason and Danny, Jax says that his father was always yelling and screaming, so was his grandfather.
That’s just how the men in his family are. But he also said something else I can’t stop thinking about. “My father is rolling in his grave right now,” Jax says, intimating that his father would hate him getting help.
You know what? He probably is. And you know what else? Good. Let him.
He sounds like an asshole. He sounds like he fucked Jax up royally with this idea of what a man should be, that he should be all domination and rage. He sounds like the kind of guy you shouldn’t listen to, the kind you should disappoint.
I hope his father is in hell seething that Jax is trying to end it, trying to be a better man so that his son won’t turn out like his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather, paragons of asshole masculinity who ruin people’s lives for their petty egos. That’s what Jax says he wants. As he’s driving toward the facility, his legs pumping aimlessly in the passenger seat of Jason’s SUV, as he stares out the window, grinding his teeth and imagining the worst, I hope that Jax saying he wants a better life for his son is the first honest thing we’ve ever seen him say.
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