Who's Afraid of Janet Caperna?
The creation of a reality TV villain.
There’s been a strange un-reality to things lately. Not merely unreality, but some sort of active unspooling. Un-reality.
I’ve put off writing this because I’ve already talked a lot about reality TV in other posts, and there are more important things happening in the world than whatever is airing on Bravo. In the time since I last wrote I went on my honeymoon and did my best to forget the broader corners of the world, choosing instead to eat delicious food, drink beautiful drinks, see art, hear music, dance. We had an unforgettable time, and none of it quite seemed like reality. There was no work, there was no family, no cat, and only one friend that we met up with for diner food and martinis.
On our first real night in New Orleans (which also happened to be my wife’s birthday) we drank too much Sazerac, wandered Bourbon Street, I ate the best fried oysters of my entire existence, and retired back to our hotel relatively early. Nestled in bed, we realized that it was Tuesday night - The Valley airs on Tuesday’s.
The Valley is an ill-fated spin-off of the Vanderpump Rules universe centering on the trials and tribulations of a selection of ne’er do wells that got fired in 2020 for being bad people, but it premiered last summer to instantaneous delight. Its first episode was the most watched season premiere for a series on Bravo in almost ten years, and it was almost destined to be a hit. The central characters (i.e. those fired from their previous show for being bad people) are Jax Taylor and his soon-to-be ex-wife Brittany Cartwright, and Kristen Doute, and they wasted zero time in reminding us what exactly it was that made them both Horrendous people but dynamite television. The first season was a joyous romp through some of the worst dysfunction I’ve ever seen, featuring two intensely toxic marriages ending in divorce, substance abuse, and whatever the hell is happening with Zack Wickham’s hair.
The show was a bona fide hit, and its success buoyed it through the ensuing year so that by the time season two premiered people were frothing at the mouth for content. By that time it was public that Jax had entered into rehab, that Kristen and her longtime boyfriend Luke Broderick were not only engaged but pregnant with their first child, and that Jesse had doubled down on the accusation that his soon-to-be ex, Michelle, had cheated on him. People were excited. I was excited.
And yet, seeing the show’s opening credits begin to play in our hotel room in New Orleans I felt a strange dread. It had become increasingly clear to me that I was watching a completely different show than what seemed to be the majority of the audience, and it had begun to make me feel like I was living in a separate reality. Usually I have a very sturdy sense of time and place, but the reaction that other people had been having to The Valley made me feel disoriented in a way that hearkens back to that really upsetting commercial they used to air about living with schizophrenia in a train station (I looked for a link to insert here but inexplicably nobody else seems to remember this commercial and the implications of that are not lost on me). It had started in the first season, but had already started to get worse now that the second had begun to air.
Like most things, I guess we can blame this on Janet.
The most hated woman on Bravo right now is a woman named Janet Caperna. Janet was never officially on Vanderpump Rules, save for a few glimpses in the background of scenes, but she has since become one of the most recognizable and reviled characters currently featured on the reality TV stage. Even trying to go back through my memory of why and when people began to hate Janet I almost draw a blank since it seemed to be something everlasting, something without beginning or end. This was initially confusing to me because Janet came off in the first season as a pretty dull person, who had a few middling dramas but who I mainly remembered as being The Pregnant One. At a certain point I became aware that people hated her, but the realization was like floodwater - I turned my head and I was already up to my waist, leaving me only able to think of how to get out and not the direction it came from.
In her inaugural season her primary nemesis was Kristen Doute, so she already started off on the wrong foot in terms of the audience. Kristen made up a rumor about Janet calling a fellow castmate a racist, it was proven to be untrue, and as a result Janet iced out Kristen from her events and trips for the rest of the season. This was ambitious for a rookie, and it resulted in ire from the audience who were watching The Valley almost exclusively to see Kristen, so now having the back half of the show feature her little to not at all stuck Janet at the top of the heap as far as villains went. Add in her conflict with fan-favorite Zack Wickham and we spent almost the entire year talking about how Janet was a liar who constantly made herself the victim, and in truth I didn’t understand the vitriol then and I fail to understand it now. Janet seemed kind of boring, and she still is, and that’s fine by me. I think the onus for this should instead fall on the people producing the show who should have better explored storylines with other cast members, as Janet generally just seems over-exposed. The audience spends a lot of time bitching about how they’re sick of stupid, manipulative Janet, but it isn’t as though Janet gets a choice in how much they choose to feature her. There are primary storylines with her this year, but it wouldn’t be the first time that editors worked around a conflict to better showcase other characters.
The issue is that Janet showed up to work on this show, and the audience resents her for it because they already didn’t like her on the basis of last season. The second season was probably going to be about a lot of things, but all of that got dwarfed when Jax and Brittany separated and he entered treatment, so storylines had to be hastily reconfigured and side characters promoted to primary characters. Generally I think it’s sloppy to blame editing, but it comes to mind as a possible result for why people are so blindly enraged by Janet on The Valley, when overall she doesn’t seem to be giving very much by normal reality TV standards. She and her husband, Jason, have been harassed consistently from the beginning of the season for being mean to Kristen, for confronting Danny and Nia about Danny’s drinking, and just generally seeming like “bad friends”. As though anybody on Bravo is a good friend. It’s one of those labels that gets waved around when you just need an excuse to dislike someone - like saying a woman isn’t a “girl’s girl” (see my post about Paige DeSorbo for more on That).
The line that I take the most offense to in regards to Janet is that she’s just “a fan” who ended up on the show the same way her friend Brittany Cartwright did: she saw Vanderpump Rules, thought ‘that could be me’, and moved to Hollywood to parasitically befriend the cast. There are a few things that make this theory pretty ridiculous that don’t fall under the banner of “that isn’t how people behave outside of erotic thrillers”, and one of them is that there is a cast member on The Valley who pretty closely fits that description and it isn’t Janet, it’s Zack Wickham. Zack was Brittany’s high school friend from Kentucky, and when she moved to WeHo to be with Jax he followed close behind. People don’t seem to think there was anything malicious or clout-chasing in this, and indeed I think we only ever saw Zack once in a three minute scene on Vanderpump Rules despite he and Brittany being best friends for years, so why do we assign this to Janet? Janet was close with Scheana Shay while the show was still airing, and similarly to Zack I think we only ever saw her in background group shots. If she moved to Hollywood to get on this show she did a fairly shit job of it, as - in reality - it seemed pretty easy to get on Vanderpump Rules and she never did, either because she couldn’t or because she didn’t want to.
Additionally, I feel we need to have a real conversation as a community regarding how the term “fan” gets used on Bravo. These days it is being used to denote someone who, in the parlance of The Bachelor, is not there for the right reasons. And this might have held some weight back in the halcyon days of dating games and OG Housewives, but what exactly are the right reasons in 2025? Back when The Bachelor was first airing you would likely try to avoid people who were too excited to be on a television show, and you would do this because they would care more about themselves than about creating connections with other characters. They were wild cards, they would maybe give good Moments but they didn’t give Good TV. The unfortunate thing is that in 2025 nobody is on TV “for the right reasons”, not even your favs. We’ve evolved into a status obsessed culture, and despite the evolution of social media systems like TikTok that can create celebrities out of normal people, television is still the people’s medium. It can still make and break celebrities just as easily - if not more so - than any other medium, and especially so on reality shows where you don’t even really need to have talent to gain fans and create a following.
Labeling anybody a “fan” and therefore not worthy of serious consideration is just ridiculous in a day and age where we’ve now had recognizable shows on Bravo for 22 years. Back in the glory days of the early aughts it might have been reasonable to assume a candidate for Housewifery wasn’t lying when she said she had never watched an episode of the show, because at that time there were less franchises and significantly fewer episodes, but that wouldn’t be a realistic statement anymore. There have been 11 different franchises of The Real Housewives, with hundreds of seasons and thousands of episodes. It is not realistic to assume that the people who want to be on reality TV are not also students of the medium that they want to be a part of, but for some reason this is worthy of derision. As though wanting anything is somehow embarrassing. Everybody wants to feel as righteous and all-knowing as Kendrick Lamar when he referred to Drake as “a fan”, but not every person can be Kendrick Lamar. White people hate this!
The original iteration of Vanderpump Rules ran from 2013 until 2024. It had a lot of fans. Janet was probably one of them, but this is just a fact and not an assessment on someone’s character. But don’t tell the subreddit for The Valley that.
The people who inhabit the subreddit for The Valley are some of the most unwell people I’ve ever encountered in my life. What they pick and choose to be upset about eludes sense, to the degree that I - a person who notoriously wants to argue with everyone - cannot even bear to read 90% of the posts because I so vehemently disagree with almost everything that these people say. If a post is created that does not outright condemn Janet for the crime of being on television there will certainly be comments below that somehow link the issue back to Janet, even if the topic at hand is a storyline that has nothing to do with her. I’m shocked there aren’t people in there at this very moment claiming Janet murdered JonBenet Ramsey.
Part of this must be blatant misogyny, and I’m confident enough in that statement that I won’t couch it in a qualifier. I know it’s very popular in Taylor Swift’s America for any criticism of a woman to be blamed on the patriarchy, but just because something is wielded by bad actors doesn’t immediately negate its original intent. It is not a coincidence to me that Jax Taylor began this season detailing how he has physically and emotionally abused his wife, and by proxy his child, and yet the primary antagonist in the eyes of the viewers this season is Janet. Janet who, by all accounts, just seems like kind of a bad friend and a fairly boring reality television star. These are not exactly the worst things we’ve seen people do on camera, and they don’t even really make you a bad person, they just make you a human. But the viewers of The Valley have a reaction to Janet that borders on allergic: they swell up, they became inflamed, their needs become precise and their fury at not receiving those needs is acute.
I won’t blame all of this on people hating women, even if I do think it accounts for a lot of the ways people seem particularly bothered by Janet. After all, there are women on The Valley that the audience is disproportionately protective of. One of those women is Nia Sanchez, a former Miss USA and runner-up for Miss Universe, who skated through the first season of the show appearing fairly milquetoast aside for the time her husband got pants-ed at a pool party and it brought her to tears. Season two has brought out more of the qualities that we only just got a glimpse of in season one, including how she appears to ignore or even cover-up for her husband, Danny’s, relationship with alcohol. The Darkside Danny sublot would require a post of its own to truly break down, but I’ll summarize: Danny got too drunk and spoke in a sexually suggestive manner to his friend and castmate Jasmine, as well as grabbing her girlfriend’s ass once she was out of the room. He also got too drunk on two cast trips, but my personal feeling is the response to both has been a bit overblown. We have a clear example of his drinking being problematic in the situation with Jasmine and Melissa, we don’t need to belabor the point by whining about how Danny took a nap during dinner one time. There have now been potentially three instances in which Danny has had consequences for his drinking, but he at least does not appear to be taking any steps to address it or the way that it is potentially affecting his family dynamic. Nia seems openly anxious and even angry when he drinks, and even if this is something they’re addressing in couple’s counseling it doesn’t seem that Danny has progressed enough in his journey to give up drinking to excess on camera.
This is a difficult topic, and Nia and Danny are difficult people, quite honestly. Truly, I do like them both and think they seem like nice people. I think that Danny does become a different person when he drinks, and also that his apologies to his friends seem genuine when he makes them, and that should be even more reason for him to reevaluate his drinking. I feel very sorry for Nia, who appears to be a person who has been through a lot of struggles, including being homeless as a child, and has made it out somewhat intact, and for that I’ll always be impressed by her. Together their marriage seems very strong, and they clearly love each other a lot and work on their issues privately. Their family is incredibly cute, and for the sake of their marriage I really, really think they need to leave the show while they still can.
I like Danny and Nia. But the way the audience reacts to Danny and Nia is another one of those things that I don’t entirely understand. They react to Nia downplaying, or even lying about, the effects of Danny’s drinking by arguing that this is an issue they deserve to deal with privately, and that might be true were it not for the fact that they are On A Reality Show. To ask some people, Danny and Nia are the kind of television that they want, but in reality there is not a lot of material to work with if a subject is not willing to be at least a little open about their struggles. It took a lot of bravery for Nia to open up about her childhood struggle with homelessness, but it was also brought up in the context of the women on the show trying to have an open conversation with her about Danny’s drinking. She is entitled to the privacy of her feelings, but if you are going to choose to appear on camera with your husband you also have to recognize that there will be moments you have to answer for things.
But, no. The conversation about Danny has now been reduced to being all about how Janet is a bitch who wants to hurt this beautiful, god-fearing family by invoking the fact that he got too drunk and sexually menaced their friends. This doesn’t bear in mind that at the time Janet was initially talking about it Jasmine had been clear that it was something she was still processing herself, and that perhaps she would always be somewhat angry at Danny. Somehow Janet always emerges as the principle antagonist, even when it’s other people who operate around her. It’s almost Trumpian, the degree to which we can always reliably blame a problem on this show on Janet, and now that it’s become a habit there’s nowhere else to go.
Speaking of Trump, there’s a certain right-wing quality to Danny and Nia, even if they are not themselves conservative (which I don’t believe they are). You can only have this soft-spoken, beautiful Miss Universe runner-up talking to you about doing things “prayerfully” before you start to see the eyes of Tammy Faye blinking out from her face. Even if they’re just middle-of-the-road Christians it gives me slight pause, as Christians are notoriously people who traffic in the business of secret shame. If Danny has a drinking problem it may be something he’s afraid to express not only for fear of career consequences, but also of the fear of what it will mean for his relationship to his faith. The traditional Christian man is supposed to have it all together - they are, after all, the patriarch - so those men who struggle with any manner of addiction may feel trapped, or unable to express their pain in a meaningful way. This often just makes the addiction itself even worse. Additionally, there would be serious implications for the incident he had with Melissa, wherein he grabbed her ass without consent, which could even qualify as adultery depending on the exact shade of Christian they are.
I sympathize with Danny, I believe his apologies, but he also gets off the hook too easy in favor of people blaming his drinking on Janet.
Janet has talked about Danny’s drinking reminding her of an ex-partner who struggled with addiction, and made reference to Nia attending Al-Anon meetings (a scene which has since been edited out by Bravo). This was discussed within the subreddit as Janet maliciously trotting out another woman’s experience just to cut her down, but once again this erases the larger context at hand. Danny’s drinking bothered a lot of people last season and it still seems to bother people on the cast now, so it’s not strange to me that Janet would bring it up in a conversation that at least started because of the overall feeling amongst the girls that Nia wasn’t being completely honest about it. The only people who don’t seem that bothered by Danny’s drinking is the audience. And Kristen.
Kristen…
For some reason people have always felt very protective of Kristen Doute, and I’m not here to argue that I think she’s a person who doesn’t need help, but it isn’t help from the viewers that she needs. When she was on Vanderpump Rules she was often her own worst enemy, consistently in bad relationships where she was taken advantage of (and abused, in the case of James Kennedy), and yet refused to leave, always acting out of pocket and then decrying that her nickname became “crazy Kristen”, and generally giving loyalty to the wrong causes and people. I liked Kristen a lot when Vanderpump Rules was airing, so at the root I understand why people are very warm towards her.
However, I feel that I differ from the primary audience of The Valley in the way that my relationship to Kristen has changed over the years. In 2020 she was fired from Vanderpump Rules, along with her co-star Stassi Schroeder, for actions they took against a black castmate named Faith Stowers in 2018, including at least one incident where Kristen attempted to have her arrested. This information came to the public’s awareness because they were bragging about it on a podcast. Needless to say, I was fairly disgusted by what they said and even more so by what Kristen had done, and almost overnight I felt a lot of my warmth towards her disappear. I could still watch the show, but everything Kristen did now seemed that much darker, that much more heavy with the knowledge that this was not just a persona she had for the cameras but that she earnestly did behave this way in real life, and believed it was her right to act that way. When The Valley was set to premiere I was gently curious - it had been a few years, Stassi had gone on a self-congratulatory book tour about how much she had “grown”, so what about Kristen? Had she learned anything? Had she changed?
Reader, she had not. One of her first dramas on the show revolved around her falsifying a rumor that Janet had called their castmate Michelle a racist, and in the course of this drama she referred to racism as “the R word” several times, and made reference to how damaging it was to have “the R word” thrown at you. You can’t make this shit up.
But people are very, very protective over Kristen. They believe she has changed, and you can’t argue them out of that viewpoint.
Maybe we have reason to think Janet is a bad person who lies about things, but it would be idiocy to act like we don’t have the same shit and worse on Kristen. And while people say they want a nice family-centric show about Danny and Nia, they also say that we have a right to enjoy watching bad people with the other side of their mouths when you bring up Kristen. Which is it? It can’t be both. It’s that same tonal dissonance that’s making bearing witness to this fandom so scatological: post after post about how Janet is ruining the show interspersed with posts about how Kristen “has really changed!”, rounded off by an image of Danny and Nia with what seems to be AI generated text underneath it saying the haters will never win. Girls, you’re the haters lol and you are winning!
I generally subscribe to the belief that you shouldn’t get so emotionally invested in any form of media so that something related to it hurts you in a real way, and I know that a lot of people have never had to level with themselves about the ways they consume television and film so it can be hard for them. I was raised by the TV, and it taught me everything I know, and this has presented me with myriad problems, not the least of which being the ways in which I’ve put outsized importance on analyzing What It All Means instead of enjoying it. Become a paid subscriber today! lol
But I’m one person, and we live in a different era of media consumption, and our response to media is encouraged to be more and more reactionary to account for the speed of posting about something so other people are urged to engage. The quicker we eat one property the faster it’s replaced by something else, so in a sense we’re not trained to think of the people on our TV’s as real people anymore. Reality has been made less real by virtue of our need to react to it. We used to watch things, but now the importance is placed on what happens after we watch it, what made us angry, what details we’ve spotted in the background or in a timely tweet from a cast member.
People hating Janet with the sheer power they appear to seems unreal to me by this metric. She doesn’t bleed to them, because she isn’t capable of it. At the time of this writing Janet just released an episode of her podcast, This Side of the Hill, titled “Addressing the Hate.” In it she details only some of the truly mind-numbing volume of hate mail she’s received, including instances of death threats and threats to harm her family and friends. The Valley subreddit, being a place of sound mind and spirit, condemned the threats but felt the need to double down on the “well, what did she expect?” angle of the criticism. Janet and her family have left the country on a planned trip, making reference to the fact that they were anxious to do so because of the threats being lobbied at their family. I got in a few arguments this weekend with people who outright claim that she’s lying for sympathy, and at least to them it makes more sense that Janet would make up threats because “she’s a proven liar”, rather than accept that there are those in their midst capable of being this deeply affected by a reality television program. It’s better to believe that she’s lying about “fleeing the country” than accept that someone wants to put significant distance between themself and us.
They say if she just apologized maybe it would all stop.
Apologize for what? This woman hasn’t done anything to you.
The accountability of the audience goes completely out the window when it comes to Janet. Everything somehow becomes her fault, or Lala Kent's, or Alex Baskin's. It’s easier to blame Janet for the actions of her own haters, as many have done in recent days, by claiming if Janet was really scared or really hurt she would just leave the show. Maybe she should leave the show, but we shouldn’t act like forcing a person into a corner allows them anywhere else to go. She’s faced with a Faustian bargain: stay on the show to spite the people who have hurt and lied about her, or leave the show and bear with the smug chuckles of an audience who will act like they didn’t force her hand, that her leaving is some admission of wrongdoing. It’s easier to act as though Janet is a compulsive liar than to admit that the activity we engage in has consequences for the people that we talk about, or that we might think of our engagement with media as completely normal and benign when in reality we traffic in the same corridors as people who send death threats to people they’ve never even met. What disturbs me primarily about this whole thing is that this interlude within the fandom has not prompted any self-reflection at all as far as it relates to how and why people are getting this upset over a television show - indeed, people are happily deflecting the blame from the fandom and instead saying that it must not be true at all because Janet is a liar. We’re normal, and Janet is the one with the problem, so even if one or two people told her they hoped she died it isn’t even really that big of a deal.
What Janet has done on The Valley is child’s play when you consider what the average cast member on Vanderpump Rules did in a single season, and yet the audience has reacted with the kind of venom we didn’t even see when it was reported that James Kennedy threw his girlfriend to the ground. It isn’t real.
Perhaps it isn’t that The Valley has become un-real, it is instead that it has become all too real. We’re all like goldfish swimming around the same little bowl, and we can’t contextualize that what we see on one go-around is the same exact thing we are seeing on the second. We like to make documentaries and podcasts and books about how one woman or another was brutalized by a culture that both celebrates and condemns Women Behaving Badly, and yet when presented with another imperfect victim we never learn our lesson. It’s just too fun to stop. Or, it is for some people. The unspoken subtext of this is that when I see thread after thread and post after post blasting Janet for things that she likely isn’t doing purposefully it reminds me of the way people treated Amber Heard, and I’m honestly still traumatized by that. I probably always will be. I don’t care who agrees.
I’ve thought of a lot of different ways to write this post, and I’m never very happy with it. I think that I keep trying to find ways to convince people, to try and urge the audience into understanding that this isn’t right, that Janet is not the thing that’s wrong with The Valley. But I keep stopping short. I know nobody is going to change their mind, and that’s a disheartening feeling. I’ve felt it a lot recently, the numbing, stomach-sinking feeling you get when you’re trying to explain why you feel the way that you do about something to someone who clearly just doesn’t care to hear it. Probably a lot of people are feeling that, too. Maybe that's why they're so angry.
The problem with The Valley isn’t Janet Caperna. It’s us.
