‘Summer House’ Is Reality TV’s Midlife Crisis

After months of scandal and speculation, and several weeks of extended reunion unpacking, the sordid mess of Summer House season ten has been excavated. There will be more details to examine and inconsistencies to probe in next week’s surprise episode, but the gist is clear: Amanda Batula slept with her friend Ciara Miller’s on-again, off-again boyfriend West Wilson while not yet divorced from Kyle Cooke. The reunion made repeated attempts to diagnose and assess the damage. Why did neither of them think of the consequences? Andy Cohen keeps trying to ask. They’ve ruined the sanctity of the friend group, West’s friend Jesse Solomon sobs. On the other side of the couch, Kyle sits staring at them both, alternating between anger and grief, and although Andy didn’t spend much time trying to peel back the layers of Kyle’s despair, his aimlessness is as much at the heart of this season as anything Amanda and West did.

Betrayals and scandals like this are endemic to reality TV; the Bravoverse in particular is still living in the long shadow of 2023’s Scandoval, the tectonic collapse inside Vanderpump Rules that was also fueled by inter-group infidelity. What makes the Summer House affair different is the context surrounding this betrayal. Unlike Housewives or The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, Summer House has more of a premise than just “here are a bunch of friends who get into fights.” The show follows a group of people who spend every summer weekend together in one giant house in the Hamptons, drinking and making out and raging. But ten years in, with the key players in this drama in their 30s and 40s, Summer House isn’t just about partying like you’re young anymore. This season may have been overshadowed by Amanda and West’s infidelity, but more than that, it is tinted by the original cast’s creeping consciousness that they’re not 22 anymore. Summer House has stopped being about fun summers and started being a sad, serious show about midlife crises and existential dread.

When Summer House began, original cast members Kyle, Lindsay Hubbard, Carl Radke, and Amanda were all young, horny, and unattached. As the seasons went on, production pumped the house full of young new singles to ensure the OGs could never slide into a staid routine of early bedtimes and board games. Ciara joined the show in season five, early enough to get embedded into the social dynamics of the original cast and watch Kyle and Amanda get married in season six. By the time West and Jesse joined in season eight, their fresh blood got caught up in the churn of old patterns. They’re in the house to fuel the fire, but Kyle has become the real keeper of the Summer House flame. His career is about partying; his three major professional decisions are being on a reality show about house parties, starting a beverage company that specializes in day drinking, and, most recently, becoming a DJ. Amanda has spent their nine-year relationship arguing with Kyle about how much he parties, resenting him for coming home late, and hoping he’ll eventually grow up. Their fights from the early seasons could play out as a fight from season eight or nine, with almost no change in dialogue — Amanda yelling at Kyle about coming home at 4 a.m. blackout drunk while Kyle throws things and sobs that no one understands him.

By season ten, Kyle and Amanda can no longer ignore how much time has passed. Even though their arguments are exactly the same, even though they’ve been stuck inside Summer House’s mirage of endless beach days and pool parties for a full decade, time has kept moving. Amanda has no idea what to do with herself now that she’s supposed to be happily married. She’s not in the flush of new love anymore, she’s not being pursued, she’s never liked spending time with her husband that much, and she’s been depressed since her wedding. Kyle, meanwhile, cannot stop mentioning that he’s in his 40s now, but neither can he reconcile the internal dissonance of staring down the barrel of 45 while also funneling all his energy into a beverage brand called Loverboy and dressing himself in merch that says “Summer should be fun” and “Thank you for drinking with us!” He wants to have kids and feel that his life is progressing toward something, but his perception of his own social value is wrapped up in being the life of the party. His social and economic futures are tied to the relentless expectation of hauling one’s whole life out to the Hamptons every weekend, performing increasingly rote acts of bacchanalia, then arriving back home every Sunday night wrung out, hungover, and sad.

It’s like an Edith Wharton novel, where people caught inside an oppressive set of social expectations make desperate decisions and then spend decades living with the miserable consequences. The Summer House cast is under a constant roiling strain of being perceived as likable by an unseen, ever-palpable Bravoverse viewership, especially West, who seems so terrified of looking bad on TV that he has fully disassociated from all of his actions. For Kyle and Amanda, there’s the looming sense that all these years need to have meant something. Kyle spends most of the season anxious about his career, and most of the reunion anxious about Amanda suggesting that the last decade has been a waste. If there’s no meaning, if this has all just been a decade of fighting in public for the purposes of societal amusement, then how do either Kyle or Amanda keep going? How long can you keep doing this?

Like any good novel, Summer House also provides Kyle and Amanda with a vision of what their lives could have been instead. Carl and Lindsay, ex-couple and once the show’s greatest wellspring of drama, have instead become separate beacons of self-aware maturity. After losing his brother, Carl confronted his substance-abuse issues and has spent the past two seasons embracing the fact that he’s over 40. He’s investing in an alcohol-free bar that reflects his values, and although he parties with the best of them, he does it sober and generally behaves like he’s grateful for his life. Lindsay, meanwhile, became a parent, and while she’s still one of the best reality-drama purveyors in the business, she now instigates conflict with the deft hand of a careful puppetmaster — she can always keep stirring the pot, but motherhood lets her escape Summer House’s quagmire of arrested development.

Carl’s and Lindsay’s comparative maturity makes Kyle’s situation all the more depressing. He’s a heavily drinking, mid-40s Peter Pan, and the key to Summer House’s appeal in this midlife era is that at least some of the time, Kyle knows this about himself. “I’m 42,” he keeps telling Carl in season ten. How old would he be when his hypothetical kid graduates from high school? How long does he have to stay shackled to this drinks company he clearly resents? Amanda knows it too. She’s nine years younger than Kyle, but when compared with Ciara’s confidence and beauty, Amanda sees the horizons of her own cool, young desirability closing in on her. So Amanda cast her lot in with Ciara’s ex West, and has tried to reframe herself as a wild, misbehaving girlfriend rather than a nagging wife.

A decade into its run, Summer House’s freewheeling mirage of perpetual youth has become the source of its most compelling tension. The producers keep trying to introduce hot, young cast members with names like Bailee and Bailey and Lexi and Levi, and every time, the drama they create feels insignificant next to the yawning maw of Kyle’s search for inner fulfillment, or Carl’s attempts to find love again after tragedy, or Amanda’s attempts to find an identity outside of wife and girlfriend. Ciara and her new friend Mia Calabrese come with their own self-confident, can’t-be-bothered maturity, but the Bailees and Levis can’t hack it. They’ve been cast onto a show that still claims to be about how summer should be fun, but that’s not what this is anymore. Summer House is a document of people trapped by patterns of behavior they do not know how to escape, confronting the reality of their own inevitable aging and the gap between how the world sees them and how they see themselves. It’s a seething pit of midlife crises, littered with regrets and empty cans of Loverboy.