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After months of scandal and speculation, and several weeks of extended reunion unpacking, the sordid mess of Summer House<\/a> season ten has been excavated. There will be more details to examine and inconsistencies to probe in next week\u2019s surprise episode<\/a>, but the gist is clear: Amanda Batula slept with her friend Ciara Miller\u2019s on-again, off-again boyfriend West Wilson while not yet divorced from Kyle Cooke. The reunion made<\/a> repeated<\/a> attempts<\/a> to diagnose and assess the damage. Why did neither of them think of the consequences? Andy Cohen keeps trying to ask. They\u2019ve ruined the sanctity of the friend group, West\u2019s friend Jesse Solomon sobs. On the other side of the couch, Kyle sits staring at them both, alternating between anger and grief, and although Andy didn\u2019t spend much time trying to peel back the layers of Kyle\u2019s despair, his aimlessness is as much at the heart of this season as anything Amanda and West did.<\/p>\n Betrayals and scandals like this are endemic to reality TV; the Bravoverse in particular is still living in the long shadow of 2023\u2019s Scandoval<\/a>, the tectonic collapse inside Vanderpump Rules that was also fueled by inter-group infidelity. What makes the Summer House affair different is the context surrounding this betrayal. Unlike Housewives or The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, Summer House has more of a premise than just \u201chere are a bunch of friends who get into fights.\u201d The show follows a group of people who spend every summer weekend together in one giant house in the Hamptons, drinking and making out and raging. But ten years in, with the key players in this drama in their 30s and 40s, Summer House isn\u2019t just about partying like you\u2019re young anymore. This season may have been overshadowed by Amanda and West\u2019s infidelity, but more than that, it is tinted by the original cast\u2019s creeping consciousness that they\u2019re not 22 anymore. Summer House has stopped being about fun summers and started being a sad, serious show about midlife crises and existential dread.<\/p>\n When Summer House began, original cast members Kyle, Lindsay Hubbard<\/a>, Carl Radke<\/a>, and Amanda were all young, horny, and unattached. As the seasons went on, production pumped the house full of young new singles to ensure the OGs could never slide into a staid routine of early bedtimes and board games. Ciara joined the show in season five, early enough to get embedded into the social dynamics of the original cast and watch Kyle and Amanda get married in season six. By the time West and Jesse joined in season eight, their fresh blood got caught up in the churn of old patterns. They\u2019re in the house to fuel the fire, but Kyle has become the real keeper of the Summer House flame. His career is about partying; his three major professional decisions are being on a reality show about house parties, starting a beverage company that specializes in day drinking, and, most recently, becoming a DJ. Amanda has spent their nine-year relationship arguing with Kyle about how much he parties, resenting him for coming home late, and hoping he\u2019ll eventually grow up. Their fights from the early seasons could play out as a fight from season eight or nine, with almost no change in dialogue \u2014 Amanda yelling at Kyle about coming home at 4 a.m. blackout drunk while Kyle throws things and sobs that no one understands him.<\/p>\n By season ten, Kyle and Amanda can no longer ignore how much time has passed. Even though their arguments are exactly the same, even though they\u2019ve been stuck inside Summer House\u2019s mirage of endless beach days and pool parties for a full decade, time has kept moving. Amanda has no idea what to do with herself now that she\u2019s supposed to be happily married. She\u2019s not in the flush of new love anymore, she\u2019s not being pursued, she\u2019s never liked spending time with her husband that much, and she\u2019s been depressed since her wedding. Kyle, meanwhile, cannot stop mentioning that he\u2019s in his 40s now, but neither can he reconcile the internal dissonance of staring down the barrel of 45 while also funneling all his energy into a beverage brand called Loverboy and <\/strong>dressing himself in merch that says \u201cSummer should be fun\u201d and \u201cThank you for drinking with us!\u201d He wants to have kids and feel that his life is progressing toward something, but his perception of his own social value is wrapped up in being the life of the party. His social and economic futures are tied to the relentless expectation of hauling one\u2019s whole life out to the Hamptons every weekend, performing increasingly rote acts of bacchanalia, then arriving back home every Sunday night wrung out, hungover, and sad.<\/p>\n It\u2019s like an Edith Wharton novel, where people caught inside an oppressive set of social expectations make desperate decisions and then spend decades living with the miserable consequences. The Summer House cast is under a constant roiling strain of being perceived as likable by an unseen, ever-palpable Bravoverse viewership, especially West, who seems so terrified of looking bad on TV that he has fully disassociated from all of his actions. For Kyle and Amanda, there\u2019s the looming sense that all these years need to have meant something. Kyle spends most of the season anxious about his career, and most of the reunion anxious about Amanda suggesting that the last decade has been a waste. If there\u2019s no meaning, if this has all just been a decade of fighting in public for the purposes of societal amusement, then how do either Kyle or Amanda keep going? How long can you keep doing this?<\/p>\n Like any good novel, Summer House also provides Kyle and Amanda with a vision of what their lives could have been instead. Carl and Lindsay, ex-couple and once the show\u2019s greatest wellspring of drama, have instead become separate beacons of self-aware maturity. After losing his brother, Carl confronted his substance-abuse issues and has spent the past two seasons embracing the fact that he\u2019s over 40. He\u2019s investing in an alcohol-free bar that reflects his values, and although he parties with the best of them, he does it sober and generally behaves like he\u2019s grateful for his life. Lindsay, meanwhile, became a parent, and while she\u2019s still one of the best reality-drama purveyors in the business, she now instigates conflict with the deft hand of a careful puppetmaster \u2014 she can always keep stirring the pot, but motherhood lets her escape Summer House\u2019s quagmire of arrested development.<\/p>\n Carl\u2019s and Lindsay\u2019s comparative maturity makes Kyle\u2019s situation all the more depressing. He\u2019s a heavily drinking, mid-40s Peter Pan, and the key to Summer House\u2019s appeal in this midlife era is that at least some of the time, Kyle knows this about himself. \u201cI\u2019m 42,\u201d he keeps telling Carl in season ten. How old would he be when his hypothetical kid graduates from high school? How long does he have to stay shackled to this drinks company he clearly resents? Amanda knows it too. She\u2019s nine years younger than Kyle, but when compared with Ciara\u2019s confidence and beauty, Amanda sees the horizons of her own cool, young desirability closing in on her. So Amanda cast her lot in with Ciara\u2019s ex West, and has tried to reframe herself as a wild, misbehaving girlfriend rather than a nagging wife.<\/p>\n A decade into its run, Summer House\u2019s freewheeling mirage of perpetual youth has become the source of its most compelling tension. The producers keep trying to introduce hot, young cast members with names like Bailee and Bailey and Lexi and Levi, and every time, the drama they create feels insignificant next to the yawning maw of Kyle\u2019s search for inner fulfillment, or Carl\u2019s attempts to find love again after tragedy, or Amanda\u2019s attempts to find an identity outside of wife and girlfriend. Ciara and her new friend Mia Calabrese come with their own self-confident, can\u2019t-be-bothered maturity, but the Bailees and Levis can\u2019t hack it. They\u2019ve been cast onto a show that still claims to be about how summer should be fun, but that\u2019s not what this is anymore. Summer House is a document of people trapped by patterns of behavior they do not know how to escape, confronting the reality of their own inevitable aging and the gap between how the world sees them and how they see themselves. It\u2019s a seething pit of midlife crises, littered with regrets and empty cans of Loverboy.<\/p>\n