Designing Social Conflict: Vanderpump Rules and Professional Wrestling

Vanderpump Rules is an institution of reality television. It’s a spin-off of another reality television institution: The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. The show focuses on the front-of-house staff at an upscale restaurant in West Hollywood called SUR (which stands for, I shit you not, Sexy Unique Restaurant), owned by a gorgeous Brit who acts as benevolent dictator, wise counsel, and momma bear for the characters of the show.

The cast is a group of 20 and 30 somethings who all moved to LA in the pursuit of fame. Throughout the seven seasons of the show, they try their hands at modeling, acting, and singing — whatever might make them famous. They believe they can do it because of their looks. And in a way, they did do it, but by being on a reality show about people who are pursuing fame. (This creates an odd web of psychoanalytic confusion that we won’t be delving into, but somebody should write a book about.) What they find themselves locked in, through circumstance and presentation, is an all too familiar format of “real” continual conflict.

In other words, Vanderpump Rules is professional wrestling. [1]

The Breeding Ground of Controversy

After binge watching every season of Vanderpump, I noticed a striking similarity in the storytelling between it and professional wrestling. In professional wrestling, characters are ordinally aligned based on card position, while laterally aligned based on character (heel and babyface: bad guy and good guy, respectively). Matches are given meaning (or heat) through ongoing interpersonal conflicts (or feuds). Stakes are raised because, as with legitimate fighting sports, there are championship title belts to win and, as with real life, pride is on the line.

Thus, a title match between a heel and a babyface that comes at the end of a long, personal feud will have a greater amount of heat than a match between two babyfaces with no feud and no belt for grabs (that is how things should typically work, never underestimate the power of bad writing to kill fan interest in what should, on paper, be a highly anticipated match). On the other side of matches and, more importantly, feuds is the rise and fall of wrestlers on the card. While it is not always the case that coming out on top of a feud with a bigger star will catapult you to their level or above, it is almost always the case that such a course will have to take place to send you there. Necessary but not sufficient.

Wrestling is able to generate drama with a slowly shifting cast for years and decades on end because the constraint of a sports promotion creates easily understandable characters, conflict, and stakes. To some degree, it writes itself.

Vanderpump functions in almost precisely the same way. Card position is essentially screen time and sphere of social control within the friend group. Heels and babyfaces are clearly defined through presentation and editing, and these definitions can change (as in wrestling) as certain events will cause characters to turn (move from one to the other). Once a character turns heel, by cheating on their girlfriend with a bottle service waitress in Vegas for example, they will be framed in a different light by the producers, and the candid confidential intercuts will show other characters scoffing at the new heel’s deeds. Characters will often feud as well, leading to weeks of conflict, forcing others to take sides and shun/embrace accordingly. And, as in wrestling, Vanderpump has a setting and conceit that naturally breeds drama: the front-of-house at a restaurant entirely staffed by young, attractive people hungry for fame.

Scheana vs. Stassi: a Case Study

To see how this works, let’s look at the central feud of season 1 of Vanderpump Rules. Scheana is introduced as the new waitress at SUR. The only thing current reigning champion Stassi knows about her is that she was the mistress of a married man tangentially related to the main cast. Stassi is in a rocky relationship with the permanently horny Jax, and so her confidence is low and her jealousy is high.

Stassi induces her allies (namely, Katie and Kristen) to turn their backs on Scheana. In response, Scheana begins to provoke Stassi further — one such incident: she applies sunscreen to Jax’s naked upper body, knowing that Stassi and her clique are watching from a distance. This feud developed Scheana as an outsider who is threatening to Stassi’s reign. As the opening season, it also helped describe the group dynamics at SUR. Jax is promiscuous and untrustworthy. Stassi is jealous and dominant. Katie is a quiet, loyal follower of Stassi. Kristen is a loud, emotionally unstable, though still (mostly) loyal follower of Stassi. By the end of the season, Scheana finally reaches out to Stassi after it was revealed that Jax had cheated on her with a woman in Vegas (Stassi’s friends had insisted this was just a rumor until Jax admitted it). This revelation created a rift between Stassi and her followers. Scheana’s embrace of Stassi showed us a new side of Scheana, turning her face. Consequently, Stassi’s loss of her social power base destabilized her regime, dropping her down in status.

As we can see, Vanderpump has incredible similarities to professional wrestling storytelling. Feuds help define and shift loyalties, with the outcomes shifting order on the card. The conceit of the show produces a “drama box” which achieves a unity of opposites (a force that compels the antagonists and protagonists to continue engaging with each other). Stakes are easy to recognize and add weight to the events and the outcome through more or less universally understood motivations.

There are differences as well, of course. In wrestling, all interpersonal conflict is settled in an officiated bout of physical violence, and all roles are clearly defined through a sports analogy. In Vanderpump conflict is settled through manipulation, rumor spreading, and finally squashing the beef through new terms of friendship, and all roles are defined through friend group hierarchy. This difference points, however, to another similarity. Both forms are highly gendered to the toxic subspecies. A chair shot to the head of a rival is a fairly obvious form of toxic masculinity, just as using physical intimacy with a rival’s partner to make your rival jealous is a form of toxic femininity. Both forms are coded in the gender stereotypes of the same culture. Wrestling is Vanderpump for boys; Vanderpump is wrestling for girls. (Don’t yell at me, we all can see the bad gender politics at play.)

“Reality” in Reverse: the New Kayfabe

You might be saying to yourself that while, yes, both reality TV and professional wrestling share certain dramatic contrivances and narrative tropes, the same could be said for any long running sequential storytelling — from soap operas (the most commonly compared media with professional wrestling) to comic books. But the most important feature that Vanderpump and professional wrestling share is this: the insistence of reality in the presentation.

Kayfabe is professional wrestling speak for the canon-world. In kayfabe, what goes on between the ropes is a legitimate sporting contest. What is caught on camera behind the scenes is video footage of true events. Ric Flair is a philandering party boy (this one is actually true). The Undertaker is a man risen from the dead to do battle in the squared circle (this one is likely not true). While kayfabe used to be protected at great lengths (some members of the industry even going so far as to perjure themselves in court to “protect the business”), the last three decades have seen the complete unveiling of the business — i.e. that (I hope you’re sitting down) wrestling isn’t real. That being said, there is still a deep protection of the suspension of disbelief during the show. Wrestling television does not list writer credits at the end of its broadcasts, and at the end of a wrestling show, wrestlers do not step out arm-in-arm with their in-character enemies to bow for applause. (Well, not usually.)

Reality TV has not yet been completely unveiled as an artifice. Despite the clearly scripted nature of events, impossible-to-film situations, and revealing editing gaffes, viewers of reality TV are by and large willing to convince themselves that what they are seeing is filmed reality. Yes, you can find a number of articles that expose reality TV as a form of fictional storytelling, but the audience is still holding onto some shred of hope that it’s mostly true. This is reminiscent of wrestling fans in the 70’s, who would often say things like, “Some of that stuff is fake, but this match is real.” Despite the bad acting and worse writing, viewers of reality TV can still buy into the kayfabe.

Something happens inside the alchemy of a presentation that pretends to be real that does not happen otherwise. Now, most television shows do not break the fourth wall, but the presentation is coded as a written, directed, and acted presentation. When the presentation is coded as a documentary or live sporting event, we get a form of storytelling that seems to be filling a similar role. But what role is it exactly?

The Joys of Trash

Why do we love these forms of storytelling? Because they are gendered in the extreme, they act as both release valves and information receptacles for learning how to perform our genders. Because this form is tacky and low brow, we protect ourselves from over-relating. And because this form is supposedly “real”, we read it as closer to how the world works than other forms.

The social expectations of males are so obvious and up front in wrestling that fans both play through their fantasies of violence and glory while not identifying so much that they become violent and vainglorious. Wrestling exists in a realm so distant from their own lives that there is no fear of learning too well and becoming untenably abusive people. On the other hand, wrestling also gives its fans lessons in the expectations of masculine worlds (expectations that are often coded and never explicitly laid out in the real world, creating a challenge for mastering them). It is through wrestling’s simplified dramatic artifice that fans can distance themselves from the idea that they are confused as to their own masculinity. But among the larger than life characters and the instant feedback of the crowd, they learn about the male world.

Vanderpump works the same way, although here it is flipped to the gendered realm of the feminine. Here we see interpersonal confrontations and disagreements based on the most tenuous grounds and paranoid suspicions — feelings and intuitions we all have from time to time, but that most of us are trained to ignore, redirect, or suppress (deep, deep down). When the characters act on these impulses we forbid ourselves to act on, the private reactions of others in the social group are interspliced moment by moment, providing live social feedback. By watching Vanderpump we can live out the impulses with devilish joy while getting a read on how people would perceive it if we did. And we can simulate it without ever facing consequences (Stassi said it, not me) or fearing that we will succumb to them in our own lives. The setting and presentation are far enough from our experiences to distance us from repeating that behavior, though similar enough to translate.

Both formats inform our gender performance and provide release valves. There are conflicts in everyday life where you might like an open licence to commit violence against your boss or to spread destructive rumors about the person dating your ex. As adults, we know that we should not do these things, but we can’t help wanting to do these things.

That release valve is precisely why wrestling and reality dramas are so dangerous to the middle brow mind. They are considered low brow because the characters in them are uncultured, dramatic, highly reactive people. Their behavior just would not do at the country club. They represent all of the drives and impulses suppressed by the WASP, middle class culture that turns its nose up so high on approach. Middle class repression dismisses these forms because it is so afraid of the drives and impulses they depict and even celebrate.

When we enjoy trash TV, we are enjoying the undeniable, ever present features of human psychology that bourgeois values shun. Trash TV is necessarily working class culture. That is not to say that all working class people enjoy it and all middle class people loathe it, but rather these highly charged reactions are driven by class dynamics and class experience.

To top it all off, enjoying these forms requires admitting to some level of credulity. Critics will point to pro wrestling or Vanderpump and exclaim, “You think this is real?” So nervous are they to be considered duped by trash TV, that they have to insist that enjoying it requires buying into the kayfabe, making sure no one believes the same is true for the middle class critic. In fact, these are easily enjoyable forms even (and in some cases especially) if you know they are fictional presentations. But again, the middle class anxiety around appearances can not bear to be mistaken for believing these programs are real.

Thus, there is a kind of reverse-class gate keeping going on. These are cultural spaces structurally made to repulse (and so exclude) anyone with the middle class attitude. It is the popular made exclusive for the populous. It is the mass keeping out the few. And above all: it’s really fucking entertaining.

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Notes

[1] Yes, I am aware that WWE produces reality TV shows starring female members of its locker room. These shows cater to a female audience and are broadcast on networks grasping at the female demographic. I am using Vanderpump Rules for comparison because: (A) it isn’t produced by a wrestling organization and so the similarities are less expected, and (B) Vanderpump Rules is an incredible show that I would much rather talk about than Total Divas or Total Bellas.

The Show's Too Long: The Superfan in the Era of the Seven Hour WrestleMania

The wrestling community is in recovery from another WrestleMania weekend and its centerpiece seven hour event. The fan consensus appears unanimous: Mania is too long, a sentiment echoed by performers inside the company and wrestling commentators alike. The criticism strikes on a major problem with WWE in general: they make too much wrestling.

A recap of their production schedule is head spinning. Mania seems to grow longer every year along with the rest of the big four (each accompanied by a Takeover special that same weekend and a pre-show the evening of). These mega-weekends punctuate a weekly schedule with five hours a week of prime time storytelling (for some perspective, Raw’s scheduled runtime exceeds that of WrestleMania XII, which comes in at a tidy two hours and forty-eight minutes, even with an hour-long Iron Man match as the main event). And there’s more: 205 Live, NXT, and NXT UK collectively produce three hours week, there are a few stadium supershows a year for the benefit of a totalitarian regime, the occasional tournament series on the Network, reality shows, and a couple of hyper-disposable syndicated broadcasts.

But it isn’t just the WWE. Even if you remove their output, there’s too much wrestling and wrestling-adjacent media to consume it all. Podcasts, YouTube videos, articles, social media battles—not to mention the countless other wrestling promotions putting out weekly content themselves, many available on proprietary streaming services.

That’s why it might be time for wrestling fans to change their habits and relationship to the art form. While it seems like WWE’s content production is irrational, perhaps there are very good reasons (or at least, reasons too good for WWE to change), and the fans need to adjust, if only to preserve their passion for wrestling before they let it burn them out forever.

The Superfan’s Maladaptation

The complaints of WWE’s content glut mostly come from a certain kind of fan (that of the vocal, well-informed variety — the superfan). These superfans masochistically consume as much wrestling as they can. This completist instinct is a hand-me-down gene from a time when wrestling video was scarce, the field not just mercifully less bloated but nearly barren. In those decades of scarcity, fans went so far as to create subterranean networks, forced to trade bootleg VHS tapes to see anything outside their regional TV market. Surely those fans dreamed of a searchable library of wrestling, all available at the touch of a button. That informed nerd culture of so-called “smarks” continued, but the world of wrestling content is now inside-out. Perversely, now that the dream of superfans came true, it threatens to crush the joy of wrestling for that same set of fans.

It might be, as many online superfans would have it, that WWE is sadistic with their production schedule. They might be out of touch with the audience (some evidence of this is read into their booking and written dialogue). But it might be that the highly successful WWE is acting rationally in light of the recent changes in the entertainment world, and maybe superfans need to change as well. Just as the nineties’ internet fandom forced the industry to change, so the current internet media landscape might force the fandom to change.

The Road to Seven Hours Is Paved with Good Intentions

So what is the justification for all this programming? Think of a much-maligned phrase from Titan Towers regarding concerns about All Elite Wrestling, or about Total Nonstop Action so many years ago, or about the popularity of mixed martial arts, or about the lack of competition after the fall of WCW and its effect on creative. They repeat, “We are in competition with all entertainment, not just sports, not just wrestling.” The superfan rolls their eyes and calls it rationalization, deflection. But consider again what WWE is saying. As the only mainstream wrestling company, they are the only vessel for wrestling in pop-culture at large, where competition is fierce, and for them to draw fans, they have to convince the prospective viewer to turn off other content and focus on pro wrestling. These viewers aren’t interested in wrestling just because it's wrestling or they’d already be watching. And just as wrestling has experienced a content explosion, so too has film, television, music, video games, and so on. There is near infinite entertainment for the individual, and WWE has to compete with all of that content for attention. They really do see themselves as competing with all possible entertainment, and they're right.

So their strategy begins with an assumption that is fundamentally true: this content explosion means people can find enough content within their niche interests, and they will gravitate to those options. We see everywhere the trend of audiences narrowing into more and more specific interests, now that there is plenty of entertainment to go around. But WWE doesn’t want to be limited to one niche — they want to attract millions of eyeballs to one product, they want to fill stadiums. How do they do that? By satisfying multiple niches. So what do you have to do to satisfy an expanding set of niches? Expand the amount of programming. If every niche needs, say, thirty minutes of content a week to be satisfied, every niche you attempt to satisfy expands programming by thirty minutes a week.

This is related to the reason for WWE’s other oft-maligned refrain during investor calls and interviews, this one to address falling ratings. They repeat, “Ratings matter less and less, and you have to factor in other forms of engagement to get the full picture.” Why do they say this? Because they don’t expect any one fan (save those of the “super” variety) to watch all of Raw — only the segments that appeal to that specific fan’s niche interest. They expect most fans to wait till Tuesday to watch the segments that interest them because that’s where media is moving and has been moving for some time (i.e. from broadcast to on-demand). Raw presents three hours of content in order to cannibalize it on social media and YouTube over the next week. That their TV broadcasts somehow still garner enough viewers to command hundreds of millions in rights fees is a serendipitous side effect.

In short: WWE’s goal is to make a slice of programming for as many niches as they can. The more niches they serve, the more total programming they have to create. And so WrestleMania is seven hours long (including the pre-show) because it serves as the climax and inciting incident of the year for every niche they serve. You as an individual fan are not expected to watch all seven hours. That’s a major aspect of the Network for WWE as they sail forward with this strategy, because now viewers can move directly to the matches and angles they care about. The major conflict with this feature is that it only works after the event is held, and this has to live alongside the desire of fans to see events as they happen, but even then, you can watch like you would if you were in the live audience, judiciously choosing your bathroom breaks and beer runs to overlap with the matches you don’t care to see. (Another major conflict with this strategy is that the appeal of live television programming is also a major part of WWE’s promise to deliver millions of viewers to networks for big money, and that is in direct tension with the sheer amount of programming if TV isn't geared for live broadcast viewing — we’ll see how that tension develops in the future. The billion dollar deal with Fox suggests the tension will continue for some time.)

A Superfan Survival Guide

If you have friends who are casual fans, you’ve probably seen how this strategy of picking and choosing the wrestling you watch works. Casual fans follow on social media and YouTube. Maybe they only watch the women’s matches, or they only watch segments with Finn Balor, or they only watch the WWE and Universal title storylines, or maybe they watch some combination. What they don’t do is sit down and chug three hours of wrestling every Monday night and then two or three on Tuesday and so on. (WWE’s success with platforms like Youtube reveal how a large portion of the audience engages with the product in the casual way described above, far outperforming their sport league cousins.)

These casual fans are where WWE sees its growth, not in appealing to the superfans who will watch wrestling until they die, who can’t help but watch anything they can get their hands on. And since the casual fans don’t participate in the same online discussion spaces as superfans, many superfans don’t recognize what the appeal of so much programming is. The superfan discussion is made up of themselves as well as commentators whose job it is to sit through everything WWE puts out—the two groups who burn out from all the content.

If only superfans could choose to watch less and to watch more judiciously, they might not resent the company that is the undisputed flagship (like it or not) of the art form they love so much. That being said, many issues that arise from so much programming cannot be solved by superfans reducing consumption. The exhaustion of unique match-ups, the head-scratching creative that passes in the desperation to fill airtime, the repetition of presentation, the premature peaking of storylines — these cannot be so easily fixed and are ongoing, serious weaknesses for the WWE. One wonders how much better they might manage these drawbacks if they focused on making one or two great hours of wrestling a week, but that has to be weighed against the potential loss of certain niche audiences. This reduction in quantity would certainly serve the superfan better, giving their eyeballs a rest. And if this reduction in quantity led to an increase of quality, they could create more superfans. But that isn’t the strategy WWE is taking, and they appear to have no interest in changing.

And as long as they take this approach, superfans will have to deal with a seven hour WrestleMania.