Vanderpump Rules executive producer Alex Baskin denied Scheana Shay’s claims that the cast was encouraged to film with Tom Sandoval or the show would be canceled.
During the Vanderpump Rules TV FYC Fest, which took place on Friday, June 7, Baskin denied making a veiled threat about bringing the show to an end.
“We did get the entire cast together, and we thought we had hit a point in the season where I actually think that they were impacted by what was happening on social media,” he said at a panel, according to Variety. “We basically were telling them to drown out the noise, and to make the show that they had made over the previous 10 seasons — and that didn’t mean we asked them to manufacture anything.”
Baskin referred to Shay’s recent comments as a “pretty dramatic, heightened account” of what happened.
“It didn’t mean that we gave them any specific talking points,” he added. “It just meant that we had made a show that worked because it was everybody rowing in the same direction, and reacting to each other. And we’ve gotten away from that. So we thought that we had to intervene in that sense.”
After Vanderpump Rules season 12 was put on pause, Baskin said they will have “a clearer picture a few months from now” about the show’s future at Bravo.
“I think we will do an analysis of what else we need to consider for the show — and that’s who returns, and what the complexion of the cast looks like,” he concluded. “I think everybody needs a little bit of time to live their lives, and then we can pick back up on them in a different spot.”
Season 11 of Vanderpump Rules picked back up three months after Sandoval’s affair with Rachel “Raquel” Leviss made headlines. While most of the cast initially sided with Ariana Madix following her split from Sandoval, 41, their loyalties shifted as they kept filming the rest of the season.
“It was a whole season of feeling like we all kind of had to walk on eggshells. I know [executive producer] Alex Baskin has said that midseason, the show was not in a good place,” Shay, 39, claimed on her “Scheananigans” podcast last month. “It was, you know, ‘X, Y and Z needs to happen. Or we’re going to have a short season and the show’s going to be canceled and that’s it. Go live your lives.’”
Shay said the conversation affected how she and costar Lala Kent approached the rest of the season, adding, “I think Lala and I felt a lot of pressure after that day when it was like, ‘Well, we don’t want the show to get canceled.'”
Kent, 33, however, disagreed with Shay’s perception of the situation.
“Scheana is my friend — a dear friend of mine — and I love her tremendously. I am a lone wolf. I don’t share opinions with people. If I agree with you, that doesn’t mean that I’m blindly loyal. It just means I agree with something you said,” she said on the Monday, June 10, episode of the “Two Ts in a Pod” podcast. “I have never been a puppet to production. I in no way, shape or form felt that production was trying to get me to lean one way or the other.”
While addressing the mid-season cast meeting, Kent said she took away something different than Shay.
“What I gathered from that meeting was not what Scheana gathered,” she continued. “Was the show in jeopardy? Yes. And not because of anybody else except Tom Sandoval. You wrecked the group. The show’s based on the group, OK? And maybe we did need a little bit more downtime to process. I think that maybe would have been a smart move.”
