Summer House Is for the Girls

The Summer House girls just want to pose. This is an understandable desire for the five Bravo veterans, sick of having to constantly be “real” for cameras that, each weekend from late June to Labor Day, document their movements across every room of a sprawling Hamptons mansion. On Summer House, currently in its ninth season, we’ve watched them befriend, break up, and black out with one another for nearly a decade. They have been real enough. Now they just want to look pretty.

Which they are, obviously — even more gorgeous in person, all legs, cheekbones, and expensive-looking skin. We’re on a shoot at Swingers, the mini-golf-themed bar inside a giant Nomad basement, and the women are wearing yassified golf couture: thigh-high argyle socks, pleated miniskirts, heels that would puncture an actual green. Yet for the purposes of this shoot, they’re supposed to look like they are playing a casual game of golf. They begin to grumble among themselves: “Can’t we just pose?”

The professional model of the bunch, Ciara Miller, is particularly hungry to do so. She is fresh off the airing of her turn on The Traitors, where she lasted longer than the majority of her fellow Bravolebrities but had to endure a stint inside a closed coffin and having buckets of bugs dumped on her head. The current season of Summer House sees her navigating something even worse: the awkwardness of sharing space with her ex and co-star, West Wilson. So far she has called him a loser and a bitch and described his haircut as ugly. Naturally, she is a fan favorite.

Ciara is not the only Summer House cast member to suffer romantic indignities for our entertainment. Lindsay Hubbard spent all of last summer in a house with Carl Radke, whom she started dating in 2021, got engaged to in 2022, then got dumped by on-camera just two months before their would-be wedding. Season nine, which filmed in 2024, follows her pregnancy with her new boyfriend’s baby — in a house Carl also shares. Paige DeSorbo, meanwhile, is currently mired in a breakup that from the outset seemed to be of the “conscious uncoupling” variety but has, in recent months, gotten progressively nastier in the press. Earlier that day, Paige had to declare on her popular podcast, Giggly Squad, which she co-hosts with former Summer House cast member Hannah Berner, that she emphatically did not cheat on ex Craig Conover, despite what his Southern Charm co-stars have not-so-subtly implied on any talk show that will have them. Then there’s Amanda Batula, who is under near-constant criticism for the behavior of her husband, Kyle Cooke, whose habit of drinking too much and staying out late has persisted into his 40s, and Gabby Prescod, who, while so far having avoided the particular humiliations of a messy long-term relationship on-camera, was once filmed crying in a bathroom because she felt pressured to flirt with the guy they hired to blow up party balloons.

The Summer House girls, in other words, feel they’ve performed plenty of authenticity, and they have little patience for pretending otherwise. At Swingers, they know their angles, and no adult has ever really wanted to play a game of mini-golf. So they line up with their dainty clubs, draping their legs at just the right bent and shifting their shoulders, smizing toward the photographer. As Paige declares with the confidence of a woman who is used to winning, “This is more us.”

Summer House has always been a show about men fumbling beautiful women. Ronnie Karam of Watch What Crappens, one of the most popular Bravo-recap podcasts, describes it as “ultimately a Bachelor-type show, where the whole point is for them to be hooking up with each other.” This in turn set the tone for drama between the women, who would sometimes fight — explicitly or indirectly — about who is hooking up with whom. In one of the show’s most intense moments, Ciara threw a wineglass across a dinner table at Danielle Olivera over her defense of Lindsay in a love triangle involving Southern Charm’s Austen Kroll, while Paige once called it “brothel” behavior for Lindsay to have kissed one man and hooked up with another on the same day. Lindsay, meanwhile, was almost always feuding with at least one cast member (cue her famous line: “Don’t get me activated, because you have not seen me activated”).

Even with the standard Bravo fare of rocky relationships and shouting matches, the show took a few years to find its stride. “It was such a redheaded stepchild,” says Ben Mandelker, Karam’s co-host. Until season five, Noah Samton, now a senior VP of production at Bravo, says he had to fight internally to keep the show on the air because viewership wasn’t strong enough, a common struggle for new reality shows starring non-famous people. But another reason, Karam suggests, is that in its early seasons, the men were the main characters. “It was about those guys and who they were banging, basically,” he says. As Ciara points out, that led to a dynamic that still plagues the fandom to this day, wherein the men “get to run rampant and do whatever the fuck they want to do” and “hide behind the ‘I’m a good guy’ mask.” The women on the show, meanwhile, were scolded for staying with men who mistreated them, then criticized when they stood up to it.

Like so many beautiful disasters, Summer House started with a failed pickup attempt. In the spring of 2015, a reality-TV producer held an open casting call for a show about a Hamptons share house, and though he’d soon sell the concept to Left Hook, a more experienced production company, he had already found its star: Kyle Cooke, then 32, who’d attended the casting call — “for true shits and giggles,” he says — and who perfectly embodied the show’s “work hard, play hard” axiom. (Kyle is a serial entrepreneur; the rest of the cast grinded at media and tech-adjacent jobs in the city — PR, celebrity journalism, nebulous entrepreneurship.) Having summered in Montauk for a decade, he had to gently inform the L.A.-based producer that there was no way in hell they’d be able to rent a house to film that summer with such short notice, but they could reach out to him if they were interested in doing something for the following year.

That September, Kyle invited the team to an annual party with a few hundred of his friends, while producers plucked potential talent from the crowd. They tapped twins Lauren and Ashley Wirkus, though the team was still looking for its “really big [female] personality.” For Kyle, there was only one answer: Lindsay, who he knew through friends and with whom he’d spent Memorial Day weekend in 2014 at a share house: “I wrote down this long email, being like, ‘If you don’t pick Lindsay, you’re crazy. She’s made for TV.’”

The premiere episode aired as part of a two-hour crossover special of Vanderpump Rules, Bravo’s other big hit about millennials navigating the opposing forces of work and play, this time on the East Coast and with an older, white-collar cast. The producers of both Summer House and Vanderpump arranged for the L.A.-based cast to come out to the Hamptons and spend a weekend at a $45,000-per-month share house, the pretext for this being that Vanderpump’s recently single Stassi Schroeder needed a birthday getaway, and Summer House’s Lauren Wirkus would provide the entertainment — and the men.

Producers hoped that at some point, there would be an interaction juicy enough where they could transition from a regular episode of Vanderpump Rules into the pilot of Summer House. That moment came when Stassi told a producer she thought Kyle was cute. Cameras followed them into the hot tub, where Stassi wore a turtleneck swimsuit and Kyle, slurring and near blackout, kept forgetting her name before comparing her to Steve Jobs and telling her he could see her nipple. She quickly got up and left in disgust. Producers thought they were watching a disaster. “Then it suddenly clicked,” Sampton says. “This is actually really funny, and it’s better that Kyle is not a smooth pickup guy. It’s more interesting to see him struggle.”

The season-three arrival of Paige and Hannah marked a turning point, in part because they were younger than the main cast and didn’t fit the finance-slash-tech-bro-adjacent vibe the original producers were after. As Kyle explains, “We had a really hard time attracting guys and girls who were career-driven, because the show wasn’t a success. It felt like too big of a risk. Most of my friends back then were in finance, and they couldn’t even film as an extra in the background of a party scene.” But it was also because their arrival coincided with the rise of Me Too, when watching a bunch of women fighting about guys who cheated on and lied to them began to feel less like fun escapism and more like a painful reminder of the permissiveness of heterosexual culture. The cooling cultural appetite for drunken hookups could have spelled catastrophe for Summer House, but viewers seemed enthralled with Paige and Hannah’s friendship even more than their romantic entanglements. “There’s something very relatable about Paige. She feels like she could be your friend and you could actually sit in that bed and gossip with her,” Mandelker says, referencing the fact that Paige spends much of her time onscreen in bed with Amanda and Ciara. (The latter two now appear in bedrotting ads for Kind granola bars.)

Over the past two seasons, viewers have tuned into Summer House less to watch disastrous situationships end in flames — though this is always a reliable draw — and more to watch a group of relatable women calling out the shitty behavior of men who don’t deserve them. The women, in other words, have become the main characters, the ones audiences are primed to root for. Perhaps it’s because they’ve been able to work through their differences and formed a real sisterhood; perhaps it’s because they all grew up a bit. “Finally, the girls were like, These guys are losers,” jokes Karam. “Even Amanda, who’s married to one of them, is like, This guy’s a loser.”

It’s a shift that’s paid off handsomely for the women involved. Giggly Squad is currently the 50th most popular podcast in the country. Ciara scored a spot on The Traitors, her official induction into the booming realm of reality-competition show-hopping. After years of playing the combative villain, new mom Lindsay has debuted a much more grounded and (slightly) calmer version of herself, and when her characteristic abrasiveness makes periodic appearances on the show, it’s a quality fans cheer rather than dread. With her new swimsuit line, Amanda has stepped outside of husband’s shadow (Rihanna once sent her a DM saying “my fave tbh”). Gabby has emerged as the show’s refreshing voice of reason, tossing relatable quips about her cast members as they make ill-advised decisions. Just a few summers ago, the women were embroiled in cliquish infighting while the men were busy finding themselves — in business, in sobriety, in love. Now, as Ciara says, “it’s our house.”

The season-nine premiere in February was the most watched in the show’s history, with 1.6 million total viewers in the first week. It is possible that many of them tuned in to witness the beginning of the end of Paige and Craig, who broke up a few months after filming ended. Both have denied infidelity, but at the end of the premiere, a teaser for the finale showed Paige referencing the fact that Craig, at one point, was “texting other bitches.” Of that moment, she now says, “Honestly, I don’t know if it was platonic or anything more, but there were multiple times in our relationship where I gave him so much grace. Like, should I have broken up with him a year and a half ago when I saw him texting hearts to a girl? Probably. But again, I loved him and I wanted to marry him.”

“I will say — and you can kill me or not,” says Ciara, turning to Paige, “but she saved a lot of face in the beginning,” referring to the kindness Paige showed him on-camera and in interviews despite Craig’s behavior. “She did him favors that I was like, you probably shouldn’t.”

“I think a lot of us have protected Craig,” Amanda adds. “He’s lucky.”

“And now all bets are off,” says Ciara.

Meanwhile, former Bachelor and popular reality-TV podcaster Nick Viall called Paige “calculated,” while many an Instagram commenter has criticized her for “wasting Craig’s time.” Among viewers, there was a sense that eventually, as Paige describes it, “I was gonna come to my senses at some point and be a wife and a mom: ‘You’ll get to a certain age where you have to get married.’” The fact that she never did, and decided to end the relationship “to not get divorced in year two of being married,” has been empowering for viewers who no longer see their 30s as the age where they have to settle for the first good-enough dude who comes along. By speaking frankly on her podcast, in interviews, and on the show about, for example, freezing her eggs or refusing to compromise her career to shield her boyfriend from his own feelings of insecurity, it’s made the show more centered around the kinds of things women in their early 30s think and talk about, and less around the who’s-hooking-up-with-who drama of earlier seasons. Amanda, too, has discussed not being ready for kids after being married for nearly four years. “There was a time that I thought I’d be pregnant by 25,” she says in episode two. “When you’re 19, 25 sounds great. When you’re 25, having kids by 30 sounds great. When you’re 30, you realize you’re still a baby.” She also revealed this season that she’s finally found medication for depression that works for her, and she’s focusing on her own mental health rather than whether the drugs are compatible with a possible future pregnancy.

Still, like any Bravolebrity, the Summer House girls have their haters. “The people who are the most critical of us are the women our age or older,” Amanda says. “They have said the nastiest things about us, worse than we have ever said to or about each other. The hypocrisy is wild.” Paige is particularly disappointed by an appearance on Watch What Happens Live by Patricia Altschul, the 83-year-old matriarch of Southern Charm, for furthering the narrative that “all of Craig’s girlfriends are mean to him.” “Do we ever ask the reverse question of, like, ‘What did he do for two women to have the same exact reaction?’” Paige asks.

Though they describe their male castmates as “the most respectful of any Bravo show,” there is a caveat. “What I’ve noticed about the guys on our cast — and maybe I’ll catch some heat for this; I don’t give a fuck — they can’t handle any confrontation or negative feedback or press that comes with this job,” Lindsay says. (Who’s the main target for season nine? “Jesse,” they all say in unison.) This was clearly the case when West, last year’s goofy blond rookie who quickly became the show’s darling, started a flirtation with Ciara and scored a profile in the New York Times that declared him “the number-one guy in the group.” Though the reference is a nod to a 2016 episode of Vanderpump Rules, some of the cast read it as West pompously describing himself that way. A backlash against him swelled after the airing of the reunion, in which he admitted to having ended things with Ciara because of the attention he was getting from Bravo fans. “Unfortunately, we all knew eventually what was gonna happen,” says Amanda. “There’s no way you rise that quickly and just stay there.”

Years ago, cast members would have been discouraged from discussing how the world around the show affects the show itself, or acknowledging in any way that another reality exists off-camera. But nine years in, producers have realized the benefits of blurred lines. “I’m sure viewers would have loved to have seen that conversation with Paige and Craig, and they chose to do that off-camera, which I understand,” says Sampton. Lindsay’s boyfriend and father of her daughter, Gemma, is “a private guy” who won’t appear on the show, despite their relationship (and the requisite breakup rumors) being a hot topic in the press. Audiences, in turn, have come to accept this; if anything, the breaking of the fourth wall has bred an ever-growing network of commentators, Reddit sleuths, TikTok analysts, and Instagram news accounts devoted to putting together the pieces, rewarding the most obsessive fans with their own little Bravo empires.

Right now, the main buzz within the Bravoverse is whether Lindsay will return next season. The question of how long a new parent can realistically be a cast member of Summer House goes mostly unspoken onscreen, but Lindsay is clear that she’s “of course down to film this summer,” but that “obviously I’m not going to bring a 6-month-old to the house every weekend.” She may, however, soon be filming for a different show: Over the last few weeks, rumors have swirled that she could be joining the cast of The Real Housewives of New York, though Andy Cohen has said Bravo hasn’t “fully decided yet.” “The conversations are happening; I’m not involved with them,” says Lindsay, having told Decider earlier in March that “wherever they want me, I’m available.”

Perhaps the dividing line between “Summer House cast member” and “all-grown-up adult” doesn’t have to be so black and white. When I asked what it was like being pregnant in a Hamptons share house with parties every weekend, an ex-boyfriend in a room nearby, and a million secret cameras, Lindsay replies, without hesitation, “Best summer of my life.”