“Scandoval” is the nickname for Sandoval’s affair with another cast member, which he had behind the backs of the show’s producers and his girlfriend of nine years. This wouldn’t be interesting or noteworthy except that in 2023, after being on the air for 10 seasons, “Vanderpump” was nominated for an Emmy for outstanding unstructured reality program, an honor that has never been bestowed on any of the network’s “Housewives” shows. It also became, by a key metric, the most-watched cable series in the advertiser-beloved demographic of 18-to-49-year-olds and brought in over 12.2 million viewers. This happened last spring, when Hollywood’s TV writers went on strike and cable TV was declared dead and our culture had already become so fractured that it was rare for anything — let alone an episode of television — to become a national event. And yet you probably heard about “Scandoval” even if you couldn’t care less about who these people are, exactly.
The story has continued offscreen. After the season aired, Raquel Leviss, with whom Sandoval had the affair, entered a mental-health facility in Arizona and started going by a different name. Ariana Madix, Sandoval’s now-ex-girlfriend, garnered so much national sympathy that she has had the most prosperous year of her career. In addition to being invited to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and to compete on “Dancing With the Stars,” she landed ads with Duracell batteries, Bic razors, Uber Eats and Lay’s chips, as well as a starring role in “Chicago” on Broadway this winter. Sandoval, meanwhile, became the most reviled man in America and the butt of a million jokes. Jennifer Lawrence made fun of his skin. Amy Schumer called him a narcissist. One of the hosts of “The View” called him “the Donald Trump of ex-boyfriends.” And Sandoval has just been here, in the Valley, trying to process it all. “I feel like I got more hate than Danny Masterson,” he told me, “and he’s a convicted rapist.”
When I arrived at his house late last year, Sandoval, who is 41, had just finished working out. He wore a black muscle shirt and a wide headband. His assistant, Miles, was at the dining-room table sorting through Sandoval’s utility bills on two laptops. “He basically does anything I don’t personally have to do,” Sandoval explained. We were also joined by Rylie, who’s on Sandoval’s new publicity team, which has a background in crisis P.R. I assumed Rylie would be an impediment, but my fears were put to rest when she didn’t flinch at the Danny Masterson comment. Rylie is 23, has watched “Vanderpump” since she was in middle school and seemed as interested in Sandoval’s life as I was. When Sandoval described how, despite their gnarly, nationally televised split, he and Madix have continued living together, sequestered in separate parts of the five-bedroom home and communicating via assistants, Rylie was curious to hear more. “So all of her stuff is still here?” Rylie asked.
Sandoval wasn’t sure, but he thought Madix might have finally rented a place. “She took the dog and the cat, and I know she wouldn’t do that if she was staying somewhere temporary,” he said. Sandoval wanted to buy out her share of the home, but interest rates are so crazy right now. He was considering getting a roommate to help with the mortgage. At least he thought Madix was finally open to the idea. “It took her a while to not be spiteful about the house,” he said. (A month after we met, Madix sued Sandoval in Los Angeles County to force him to sell the home and divide the proceeds.)
My tape recorder wasn’t on yet, and Sandoval wanted to make sure I was getting everything. “Do you want to, like, record this?”
Of course I wanted to record this. I couldn’t remember interviewing a public figure as eager to speak into a recording device. But then again, Sandoval is not a typical celebrity, nor is “Vanderpump,” which is currently airing its 11th season, your typical show. Early reality series like “Big Brother” and “Survivor” rotated casts in every season. Shows that didn’t, like “The Hills,” never lasted this long. Even its closest point of comparison, Bravo’s “Real Housewives” franchise, is more of a weekly cage match in which bloodied fighters are retired once they’re no longer useful. And Sandoval, the Midwest-bred son of a firefighter and a marketing executive, is not a Kardashian. What I mean is that although reality programming has been a dominant part of American culture for over two decades, we’ve never actually put a regular person on reality TV to live out much of their adult life and gotten to see what happens to them as a result.
Contrary to a popular misconception, “Vanderpump” is not about Lisa Vanderpump, a former Bravo Housewife. It started as a show about waiters and bartenders who lived in crappy apartments around Hollywood and, for the most part, wanted to be actors. That dream didn’t work out, but they became reality-TV stars instead. For a while, this ruined the show. It became less honest. The cast still worked shifts at a restaurant, but actually they drove nice cars and bought $2 million houses. Once the show stopped pretending that nothing had changed, it turned out that a reality show about reality stars was not any less interesting. On the last season alone, there was “Scandoval,” in which Sandoval, a reality star approaching middle age, proceeded to start a cover band, open a bar and sleep with Leviss, a former beauty queen. A couple that had been on the show since the first season finally decided to divorce, leading the wife to realize that she may never have kids. And a woman who once bragged that her private-jet lifestyle was financed by Randall Emmett, the direct-to-video film producer, left him and became a breadwinner as she fought for custody of their daughter.
Alex Baskin, an executive producer of “Vanderpump,” developed it as a spinoff of “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” which featured Vanderpump as the owner of several mediocre restaurants. Baskin noticed that SUR, which stands for “Sexy Unique Restaurant,” indeed had a 𝓈ℯ𝓍y unique atmosphere. In 2011, he sent a screenshot of SUR’s website — with Vanderpump on a throne surrounded by her good-looking staff — to Andy Cohen, who was then Bravo’s vice president for original programming. The network provided a small budget for Baskin to explore the idea. What Baskin found was an incestuous friend group in which everyone was either living or sleeping with one another. “It was everything you look for in a TV show,” Baskin told me. “It just hit me in the face.”
At the time, prestige TV was on the rise, and writers’ rooms across Hollywood became overly preoccupied with chasing critical approval, rather than audiences and revenue. In this context, “Vanderpump” was an appealing alternative. Yes, it looked and acted like reality TV, but at its core it was more like the great scripted shows of the 1990s in that it was about a group of friends living life, dating one another, giving up the hopes of their 20s for the realities of their 30s. It relied on time-tested screenwriting tenets: good, unexpected stories about original characters going through relatable cycles of jealousy, regret, insecurity and longing.
The show was also a brilliant premise, commercially speaking. The TV business shepherded crowds to the real-world business and vice versa. You could watch Sandoval and his friends on TV, then drop by and have him make you a “Pumptini.” The show’s main draw was the cheating scandals, of which there were three by the end of the second season. As the show took place more outside the restaurant, it went through an identity crisis. In 2020, it was further debilitated by the pandemic and the departure of four members of the cast because of past racist incidents and resurfaced social media posts. By Season 9, there were rumors that “Vanderpump” was on the brink of cancellation. “We were hobbling,” Baskin told me. The very next season, “Scandoval” dropped into Bravo’s lap.
The show’s producers treated it like a news story. Late on the evening of March 1, 2023, when principal filming for the 10th season was wrapped and episodes were already airing, Sandoval was performing a new single with his band when his phone fell out of his pocket. Madix opened it to discover an intimate recording of Leviss. The next morning, Madix notified the show’s talent producer, who called the showrunner, who called Baskin, who called Bravo, which scrambled to approve budgets. On March 3, crews were pulled off another Bravo set, and cameras were back up to capture the fallout as the cast processed the affair.
The resulting footage, which aired in May, is an incredible episode of television. Madix, with damp hair and puffy, cried-out eyes, says, “I loved you when you had nothing,” and “That girl is searching for an identity in men,” and “I would have followed you anywhere.” Producers did not put cameras down even as Sandoval screamed at them to stop filming him during the subsequent reunion special, which was so brutal that Amy Schumer compared it to the end of “Schindler’s List.”
No one — not Sandoval, or Baskin, or even the executives at Bravo — are quite sure why the season resonated the way it did. Maybe it was that “Scandoval” had awakened something in everyone who had ever cheated or been cheated on, resulting in endless memes and diatribes on social media. Or that the affair landed in the news while the season was airing, turning it into an interactive murder mystery of sorts, with viewers searching for clues in earlier episodes.
Now, it is easy to be cynical about these things. Isn’t it plausible that when faced with the show’s uncertain future, producers got together with the cast and cooked up a cheating scandal? This is a popular conspiracy theory. But Baskin told me that the covert affair and continuing fallout was too elaborate to manufacture. “I mean, Raquel left the state,” he said. When I asked Sandoval, he insisted that if he was going to script a fake story line, it wouldn’t have been one that destroyed his life. “I would’ve never participated in that,” he said. Willingly, I said — you would have never participated in that willingly, since you did technically continue to film the show. “Right, willingly,” he said. “Hell, no.”
At Sandoval’s house, he made a cup of tea, and Rylie and I were listening to what the past year of his life has been like. The thing with Leviss started with what sounded like a midlife crisis. “You know when you just feel like you don’t know what’s cool anymore,” he said, “and you’re past your prime and a little bit of a joke?” (Rylie nodded.) He started to feel as though his best years were behind him. He wanted to feel alive again. He and Madix had grown apart. He planned to tell her about the affair after the season aired. He didn’t want it to play out on the show. When he shouted at producers to stop filming him, he couldn’t remember another time in the show’s history that he’d done so, unless he was getting in the shower or something. “I just wanted to not feel watched,” he said. “I wanted to take a breath.”After he finished filming, he went on tour with his band, Tom Sandoval & the Most Extras. He had to. His bank accounts were overdrawn, and he needed the money. Crowds of people came out to hate on him. They showed up wearing T-shirts that said, “Cheater” and “Worm With a Mustache,” a name one of his castmates coined. Everywhere he went, people called him a loser or screamed “Team Ariana” at him.
When he returned home, there were groups of strangers with cameras at his house who seemed to be making fun of him. On the show, Sandoval had complained about always being the one to replenish batteries and other domestic supplies. Now, as Madix filmed her various commercial spots at the home, it had become ad copy for Duracell (“I buy my own batteries now”) and Bic razors (“I’m just starting a whole new unclogged chapter in my life”). In June, a friend sent him a photo of Sweet Lady Jane, a popular bakery in Los Angeles, selling cakes with “Sandoval Is a Liar” written in frosting.
Sandoval’s friends distanced themselves. His brother asked him to delete photos of them together on Instagram. Sandoval says he was asked to stop going in to Schwartz & Sandy’s, a lounge in the Franklin Village neighborhood that he co-owns. The show’s fans tanked the bar’s Yelp reviews and were harassing the staff. Somehow people got Sandoval’s cell number. His phone started ringing at all hours with blocked numbers, with women pretending to be Leviss and men asking how they could find her. He started to feel as if he were in “Uncut Gems,” the nerve-jolting Safdie brothers movie in which the protagonist is isolated and on the run.
He got down. Like, really down. His mind went to some dark places. Friends suggested that he get on Wellbutrin. In April, he quit drinking, hence the tea he was now sipping. He did it for Leviss. When she entered that facility in Arizona, he assumed they would be together once she got out. But then Leviss stopped talking to him and hasn’t returned his calls since June. “She never even gave me any closure,” he said. “It was really hard. It still messes with me.” He even tried reaching out through her publicist but got no response.
When “Vanderpump” started filming Season 11 in June, Sandoval was off doing “Special Forces,” the reality show on Fox that puts celebrities through pseudo-military training. “I’m here because I wanna get punished,” Sandoval says on the show, before he’s dunked in frigid waters and dragged across a field on the former Nickelodeon star Jojo Siwa’s back. When Sandoval didn’t win the competition, he felt robbed. He thought producers made it look as though he got eliminated before Siwa, who voluntarily withdrew. “They said she lasted longer than me,” he said, “but she most definitely did not.” He was convinced that producers didn’t want him to win. “Who did they want to win?” Rylie asked, incredulous.
