“It’s so easy to be like, ‘Oh, they’re just reality stars,’ ” says Summer House veteran Lindsay Hubbard. “But this is an entire year-round job.”
This sentiment proved particularly true this year as the Bravo reality show found itself embroiled in an all-consuming scandal.
A quick recap: Summer House revolves around the personal lives of a group of New York City friends as they spend weekends together in a Hamptons-area house share. Two weeks before the show’s season 10 premiere on Feb. 3, longtime castmembers Amanda Batula and Kyle Cooke announced their divorce and, just weeks later, on March 31, as the series was airing, Batula and another castmember, West Wilson, released a joint statement on social media announcing they had started dating. Complicating the situation further was the fact that fellow Summer House star Ciara Miller previously dated Wilson and was a longtime friend of Batula’s.
For viewers (a record-breaking 2.2 million per episode, in fact!), these revelations led to hours of time spent in front of the television, spamming group chats and deep-diving on Instagram. For the team behind Summer House, it meant all-hands-on-deck production meetings, late night edits and reconfiguring already plotted narrative arcs for a season that was in the middle of airing. All of this intrigue and work netted the show its first Emmy nomination, in the outstanding unstructured reality program category, since debuting in 2017.
