After 11 seasons, it was announced that Bravo had made the decision to reboot Vanderpump Rules with an entirely new cast. This news came after a ton of speculation about whether or not the show would even be renewed, since so many members of the cast had moved on to other career paths, no longer spoke to each other, and the show was fairly disconnected from where it started.
On his Andy Cohen Live Sirius XM show, Andy Cohen shared his thoughts on the fact that Vanderpump Rules was being rebooted -- and how long he's felt like the show needed a major change.
According to Andy Cohen, rebooting the series with a brand new cast is the "absolute right thing" for Bravo to do for the show. While the show started with a cast full of SUR employees working at Lisa Vanderpump's restaurant, over the past several seasons, many of the cast members have left their job there in order to move on to other things, so the show has lost a lot of the original purpose.
"I am so impressed with how production kept the show going over the last, I'm gonna say four years, when slowly but surely none of them were working at SUR," Andy Cohen shared on his radio show about the fact that the show has evolved so far from where it started.
While it originated with SURvers and bartenders working for Lisa Vanderpump, it shifted in the last few seasons to a group of Bravolebrities that are now hosting their own podcasts and starring on Broadway.
Andy Cohen said that "the entire point" of the show had been to follow the behind-the-scenes drama of the employees at SUR, so even though fans are still heavily invested in the lives of the cast, it's not what Vanderpump Rules was at its start.
He said, "It wound up that James Kennedy was the only one with any kind of footprint at SUR, because he was DJ-ing there occasionally and now he's gone on and he's got a residency in Vegas and he's having great success and they're all having good success outside of SUR."
Will the original Vanderpump Rules cast get a goodbye episode?
Even though some fans felt like Vanderpump Rules being rebooted felt somewhat abrupt, Andy Cohen said that he disagrees and feels like the last season ended on a good point.
While some cast members, like Scheana Shay, think the show needed a "goodbye season," it doesn't look like they'll be coming back together to film again and say goodbye to the show.
On his radio show, Andy Cohen said that he feels like the end of the last season felt like a series finale, meaning that the show is in a good place to start over with a fresh cast. He said, "If you look at the last episode of last season, it really did, watch the last ten minutes or five minutes, it felt like an absolute series finale."