Online communities are a safe space for obsession. They welcome specialists and hobbyists from every discipline to compile information, share opinions, and envelope themselves completely in a given topic. Whatever one’s pleasure, an online community surely exists for them to examine and discuss its intricacies in excruciating detail, with similarly interested people from every corner of the globe.

A common interest, or obsession, of our modern era is with celebrities, and celebrity itself. In fact, fascination with celebrities and notable figures dates back millenia, to the days of Plato, when Olympic champions became household names among ancient Athenians. Back then, of course, there was no internet, so stories of these notable figures spread, presumably, by word of mouth, or perhaps, in crude pamphlets. In the 16th and 17th centuries, westerners began to take an interest in actors, playwrights, and humanists – some of whose fame even earned them stalkers. (The Long and Strange History of Celebrity, n.d.) Today, the definition of, and methods for attaining notoriety continue to evolve. Celebrity no longer requires outstanding athletic ability, dramatic talent, progressive thinking or spectacular beauty. More and more, celebrities are ostensibly normal people; some of whom gain fame simply by positioning themselves as celebrities, and others who fall into the role unintentionally. Their successes and follies are witnessed by onlookers in real-time thanks to social media and the internet, and this makes them, perhaps, all the more interesting.

In a growing corner of reddit.com, an online community has developed whose interest lies with a group of some of these “normal” celebrities. The subreddit r/VanderpumpRules is devoted to the Bravo TV show of the same name, which follows a group of twenty-somethings in Los Angeles working at a bar and restaurant. Vanderpump Rules, or “VPR,” as its abbreviated by members of its subreddit, spawned as a spin-off of another Bravo show, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, on which Lisa Vanderpump, the restaurant’s owner from whom its name is derived, is a featured character.(Cunningham, 2023) The show, which premiered in 2013, is now in its tenth season. In the ten years that have elapsed since it first aired, many characters have come and gone and many dramas have played out. While some members of the cast still occasionally play as servers or bartenders for the camera, it’s speculated that none of them actually work at Lisa’s namesake establishment anymore. VPR’s focus is not so much on the goings-on at the restaurant, but rather on the messiness of the cast’s lives; we get to watch their fights, love affairs, and drunken bouts play out on screen, and while some of what takes place is a form of play-acting, more of it is real and has real consequences for the people involved.

Most recently, a scandal took place that has the cast and, perhaps to a greater extent, the online community devoted to their show in a frenzy. The drama is well timed; many viewers have complained of being bored during Vanderpump’s last two seasons. Safe to say that is no longer the case. The most recent shock to the VPR ecosystem is an affair, which, of course, we’ve seen before; the difference is that this affair involves three members of the principal cast. Tom Sandoval and Ariana Maddix are a mainstay couple on VPR; their relationship began in 2014, just 1 year into the show’s life, and they were widely considered by fans as one of the show’s strongest, most stable couples. The revelation of Tom’s affair with Raquel Leviss, who first appeared on the show in 2016 and was previously engaged to yet another member of the cast, has sent tremors through the friend group and the subreddit, where activity has not slowed down since news of the affair broke on March, 1 2023.

While it may seem convoluted and inconsequential to some, there’s a substantial swath of people interested in the events in question. News of the affair even became a headline on CNN.com, a space usually held for important domestic and world news as opposed to reality TV drama. On r/VanderpumpRules, the community’s roughly 133,000 members have hardly stopped re-capping, investigating or making jokes about the affair since it became public information. Posts to the subreddit are organized into various categories with “Flairs,” which allow users to filter posts by type; ‘discussion’, ‘unverified tea,’ and ‘shitpost’ are some flairs users employ to denote conversations about the drama, spread rumors about what we’ve yet to see or what may be taking place off camera, or share joke-tweets and memes at the cast’s expense. In the past month, comments on the subreddit have jumped from an average of around 200-300 per day, into the thousands, peaking on March 4th at nearly 10,000 comments. All the fuss is drawing new eyes to the show and the subreddit, where there is so much content to digest. One user, u/iamacryptid, took it upon themselves to create a powerpoint presentation to catch the uninitiated up on everything one must know to enjoy watching the drama currently unfolding. The top posts, in the past month, however, are mostly jokes, memes, and “hot-takes” or opinions on everything going on around the show.

So, why do so many people report to this page to discuss the lives of these “normal” people who happen to be on a television show? Why, also, have nearly 40,000 more reddit users subscribed in the last few weeks to this subreddit? What can we gather from the fact that most of the recent top posts are jokes about the very real, and for some, devastating events of these people’s lives? Like watching a train wreck, it’s difficult to avert one’s eyes. I think many of us have a latent, even secret desire to be famous, and seeing that these people who, a decade ago, were not much more than kids working in a restaurant, we see ourselves in them. Their mistakes laid bare, we can laugh at them and forget about our own follies and shortcomings, even if just for a moment. While the characters of Vanderpump rules may not be particularly talented or brilliant, they give us something to talk about, which sometimes is all we need.

Works Cited
r/vanderpumprules. (n.d.). Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/vanderpumprules/
The Long and Strange History of Celebrity. (n.d.). Columbia Magazine. https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/long-and-strange-history-celebrity#:~:text=When%20does%20fame%20become%20something,Rousseau%2C%20Byron%2C%20and%20Voltaire.
Cunningham, K. (2023, March 27). Horny, horrifying and unhinged: why Vanderpump Rules is the best reality show of all time. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/mar/14/horny-horrifying-and-unhinged-why-vanderpump-rules-is-the-best-reality-show-of-all-time