This is the inaugural installment of “Just Like Us,” a new monthly Substack-only column on celebrity and online culture, by Grazie Sophia Christie.
When a woman is no longer in love with the man she lives with, whether she is simply biding her time until a better moment for leaving or extracting from him a cold, sarcastic and usually justified revenge, often she begins to radiate an overwhelming sexuality. Her affect, her laughter, her new way of hugging old male friends, crushing her breasts against their pectoral muscles to open up a secret between them: all sorts of ambient men will perk up and gravitate, as if following the enticing, dreadful click, click, click of a Geiger counter.
On Season Ten of the reality show Summer House, which sees a circle of friends take the long drive every weekend of July and August to drink in a house share in the Hamptons, longtime couple Amanda Batula and Kyle Cook play this game exactly. Amanda, who spent Seasons One through Nine emotionally prostrate, deferential to Kyle, accommodating of his alcoholism and infidelity, performs what is called in jiu-jitsu a “trap and roll,” maneuvering the situation so that she is suddenly on top, with her hands around Kyle’s throat. She initiates skinny-dipping. Dirty jokes, then ones at the expense of her husband. Lounging with her shoes on the sofa, she invokes the specific sensuality of Marilyn Monroe pushing soiled plates around her bed. Amanda permits constant touching, but never, ever from Kyle. The final impression she leaves is that of a pair of eyebrows, waggling conspiratorially, showcasing her Botox injector’s fashionably light hand. Kyle, approaching bankruptcy but way past whatever crisis induces a man to become a DJ after forty, decompensates. He erupts, cries, behaves abusively and erratically, his outbursts chalked up by their castmates to paranoid bleating. For Amanda’s own violence is always done under the table, where love starts with holding hands and ends with shin-kicking.
She is cruel in a way that is hard to notice from the outside, so their castmates don’t. It’s the glacial derision of a person whose body lies near but whose mind has long since counted you out entirely. By the end of the season, Amanda has rallied their shared friends to her side and installed castmates West Wilson and Ciara Miller as her valiant protectors. By the time the season airs months later, Amanda and Kyle have separated. Amanda and West have admitted via Instagram to a secret relationship of less duration than we and their castmates suspect, and more importantly: despite West’s status as the ex-boyfriend of Amanda’s supposed best friend, Ciara, a nurse/model of uncommon dignity and beauty.
Only the postseason reunion, the third and final episode of which aired last Tuesday, revealed the extent of her miscalculation. Amanda had been poised to become that which the internet most loves—a newly single woman, so fed up as to have finally freed herself. Instead she became a symbol of what the internet most despises: a vampire, feeding coldly on the blood of love objects, friends and fans.
On the 22nd of April, the evening before the taping of Summer House’s Season Ten reunion, cast member West Wilson’s step-grandmother was shot dead on her couch in Missouri. The alleged shooter was another grandson, called Dakota, resembling his cousin West more than a little in his mugshot. The same unobjectionable nose above the same horseshoe mustache above the same grim, downturned mouth. Dakota and his grandmother had sat in companionable silence for thirty minutes, after which shots rang out.
This murder has nothing to do with a reality show, but the contemporary American reality show has everything to do with murder: castmates take turns engaging in character assassination, or reputational suicide. The point is both to never be the villain and yet for villainhood to exist as an inevitable fact. You spend several seasons shoving fellow castmates into villainhood as if into the path of an oncoming semi, only to eventually hire the right PR firm to choreograph a very graceful falling-on-the-sword-sequence yourself, once your offscreen bad behavior has come to light or you’ve exhausted all other mechanisms for producing onscreen drama. If you win at a reality show, if you accrue enough followers for the job description under your name to change from “Marketing Expert” to “Influencer”—in what an alien may assume is a demotion but us poor human beings know to be a lottery win—it will be by playing the victim or the oppressor, and if you’re very good at it, alternating between them.
Season Ten unfolds in a Shakespearean way, with Amanda playing Iago. What has gone on between Amanda and Kyle in their years together is not so complicated, an old story, really. The start of the relationship lacked momentum, too much standing water, resentments laid and hatching like mosquitos, annoying on their own but cumulatively draining. She liked him too much. She had to hassle him into seriousness. She wanted him to stop partying. To curb his tendency, when angry, to yell at her. Sometimes he’d wake her up in the middle of the night to argue, like a form of torture employed in overseas American detention camps. The clock was ticking on the baby front and now he’d become a DJ. Only months ago viewers urged her to get gone. But she plays a game that is not the audience’s style, that is not the style of reality television, in general. She slights Kyle, freezes him out. She mocks him into predictable, albeit unacceptable, public tantrums (he calls Amanda a “dumbass bitch,” among other obscenities), after which she professes helpless confusion. She appeals to their friends. “Go talk to her,” they tell each other, then grill Kyle, intervening in a fashion I’ve not seen since the breakup of the popular girl in high school. “If you all don’t fucking see the fucking fact that she hates me,” Kyle says, “then I don’t know, I’m blind.” But he isn’t, and we aren’t either.
That the moral outrage of this season’s viewers found its target in the psychological maneuvering of Amanda, and not the conspicuous abuses of Kyle, suggests the season’s true innovation, its contribution to the annals of real evidence of real people behaving badly: we all recognize the degrading company of someone who won’t admit they don’t love you anymore. Of that sliding eye contact, that scornful laugh, your soul speed-dialing their soul like usual but the call keeps dropping. With each moment that passes that person’s accumulating moral failure to admit disenchantment only makes them hate you more. They just hate you, in the hateful way you can hate a human when you know all the things that they hate about their hateworthy human selves: their stinky human breath and the way they tell that same story in that same way, with the guffaws and the pauses. It is a unique psychological torment to notice a lover or friend has checked out: out of the relationship, the honeymoon suite, the summer house, forever. Viewers watched Kyle grow up, watched him enjoy the crest that is the first half of a lucky human’s life. Now they watch him reach that stretch of existence where doors begin to close. Where things don’t shake out as expected, regardless of the boyish enthusiasm or effort applied. The national mood, it turns out, is not one that enjoys seeing a man sob unsupported over finding himself in four million dollars of debt for a soft-drink company he founded, and for which we have witnessed him work hard and long hours. Especially not as his wife contrives to come out of their marriage as the PR victor.
But this is not, in the audience’s eyes, the worst of Amanda’s manipulations. When it comes to what men and women can do to each other, nothing really surprises us anymore; their betrayals are somehow both inventive and cliché. But the female friendship is our last bastion of morality. For all our games of moral limbo, there, at least, the bar still clears the floor. Between Ciara and Amanda, Amanda reveals an outdated understanding of what it means to grow up, move on, be declared the winner, in life and friendship; she wants to be selected, handpicked by a roundly desired love object; she is “male-centered,” in modern internet parlance. “There’s a lot of nails that go into a coffin,” Kyle tells Amanda, but for viewers, what Amanda does to Ciara proves the final and most damning.
Ciara joined Summer House in Season Five, where she was brought on as the potential love interest of a male cast member. She went on to reject him for having humiliated his ex, thus crystallizing her symbolic position as house conscience. She is swift to cry delicately, slow to sleep with men, angry at herself when she does either. Back in Season Eight, West joined the cast, promptly securing her affections. And yet once filming wrapped, he began to punish her, as men often do, for being his dream girl. Ciara has the sort of good looks that cause the universe to stencil in “model” in advance as a résumé item. West, however, is considered attractive thanks to the female imagination, the generosity that is so rarely returned to straight girls: he’s hot, if you tilt your head, if you think about it. After Season Eight, he is hot to the world, precisely because Ciara has so decided. To punish her for this, West introduces her to his family, seduces her, admitting only later that he “isn’t ready.” By Season Ten, this state of obscure unpreparedness seems to have continued unabated. Yet West goes to great efforts to revive what was between them, with Amanda’s help, like digging up a body and freshening it with poison. They kiss, in time for the season’s finale. By winter, he leaves her again, for her friend. “We could find her a new husband in a year,” Ciara had said of Amanda, back in the summer, not in the least suspecting she was introducing a rival.
Summer House airs weekly; news of Amanda and West’s romance broke around halfway through, toward the end of March. Which meant that most viewers watched part, if not all, of Season Ten with a view to what was coming, as a paranoid surveillance operation. Anticipating audience outrage, producers cut the show deftly, dwelling particularly on manipulative Amanda-West, West-Kyle and Amanda-Ciara scenes: like the parents of spoiled children, producers always give their audience what it asks for, and here it was Amanda’s head on a pike. In this way the disturbing violence of West’s elderly step-grandmother’s tangential, unrelated murder did not feel necessarily so tangential or unrelated, when first reported. It was connected by the same dotted lines of darkness and foul mood traceable everywhere these days: eerie coincidence, errant interference, hands pulling strings in the Hamptons sky. Cast member Ben brings around a new girlfriend, Sabrina Belle, outfitted in every episode with a band of white lace around her neck, reminding me of that sleepover horror story where only a bride’s green ribbon keeps her head from rolling off. “Why at this small, intimate party do you decide to have this girl sitting in your lap?” Amanda demands of West, after a careless hookup distresses Ciara—and Amanda too, apparently. Foreknowledge introduces to the viewers a pit in the stomach, the white knuckles of a Greek tragedy. Because we come from the future, where Ciara and Kyle have already been stabbed in the back, only we can see them being lured into a corner.
I could write about Summer House for a thousand years. Its producers must feel something similar; after all, it has enjoyed ten seasons and several spin-offs. Roads I almost traveled include: To whom does a person belong? When it comes to betrayal, is the call always coming from inside the house? Can a person control who they love, and what makes a man “ready” for one woman and not another? For long-term viewers of Summer House, weathering the Kyle-Amanda split is rather like weathering the split of your parents—you hate and love them both. Writing this, I keep rewinding with my remote back to a particular moment.
“I just wish that you would love me,” Kyle tells Amanda, on his birthday. He lies in bed. As per the theme of his party, his hair is powdered white, his face painted with wrinkles, so that he resembles an old man. “Maybe if you were a little nicer to me you’d make it easier,” she says back. He is drunk enough to need help removing his shoes, and Amanda still loves him enough to provide it: she gently unfastens each of his Velcro straps, frees the tongue of his sneakers. She has been taking care of him for a long time. In part three of the reunion, Kyle asks West through tears: What is your plan for Amanda? It was still a good love story. No one on the outside will ever really know who did the bloodsucking here.
Further reading on celebrity and pop culture
Philippa Snow on rewatching Gossip Girl, pre-reboot (issue 22)
Alexandra Tanner on The Rehearsal and the rise of auto-performance (2025)
Emma Lieber on realist novels, reality TV, and Hillary Clinton (issue 13)
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