Viewers of The Valley campaigned for Jax Taylor to be removed from the show’s call sheet last year after displaying disturbing behavior on and off screen. But now, with the arrival of the series’ junior season, some watchers are singing a different tune.
At the center of season two’s storyline was a domestic incident that occurred between Jax and his wife, Brittany Cartwright. In the series premiere, the former couple recounted a moment where Jax got angry and flipped a coffee table, which bruised Brittany’s knee. At the first Valley reunion, Brittany alleged Jax broke her Stanley cup, phone, laptop and threw her into a bush, though he denied her claims.
Then came the announcement many Bravo viewers were waiting for: Jax was to step away from The Valley, to focus on his sobriety, mental health and coparenting with Brittany.
Jax’s behavior on season two did not make the decision shocking to those watching the show, and it was rather reminiscent of his firing from Vanderpump Rules back in 2020. Last year, Valley viewers flooded Reddit and TikTok arguing for his removal from the show for season three. Now this year, as the latest installment hit Bravo a little over a month ago on April 1, The Valley has faced a wave of criticism for its content, and in some instances, the lack of Jax in the cast.
Brittany’s impending divorce is addressed on The Valley, but it is not the show’s center point. Instead, the former Vanderpump star is in her first relationship post-Jax, which has, in real-time, already dissipated.
Zack Wickham and his boyfriend Benji Quach have moved in together. Michelle Saniei and Jesse Lally are still working on getting divorced, and the latter’s partner, Lacy Nicole, has finally agreed to film. Jasmine Goode and Melissa Carelli are planning their wedding. And Lala Kent and Tom Schwartz are there, too.
What is at the core of season three is the struggles Kristen Doute and Luke Broderick are facing after welcoming their first child. Luke’s comments about his fiancée not wanting to be intimate after recently giving birth and navigating postpartum have particularly resulted in backlash. Nia Sanchez also just had her fourth child, and the fallout from her husband, Daniel Booko’s, intense season two conflict with Janet Caperna, is the underlying tension of The Valley‘s plot.
With Jax gone, Janet assumes the villain role imposed upon her by most of her castmates. Lala often acts as a bridge between Janet and the rest of their co-stars, though Nia, Danny and Kristen are stubborn in not pursuing any form of relationship with Janet after she said Danny “sexually assaulted” Jasmine Goode’s partner, Melissa Marie, at an event that was not filmed.
Their feud leaves The Valley in an awkward position, reawakening a trope (or a storyline, one could call it) that has become all too common on modern reality television shows; that of castmembers refusing to film with other castmembers.
In return, viewers have deemed season three “boring.” That, coupled with two women who are being candid in their struggles with postpartum having to navigate criticism from their partners, has left a very sour taste in the mouths of the audience.
Some have pointed back to the lack of Jax, a known pot-stirrer across his eight seasons on Vanderpump Rules and two-year run on its spinoff, for why season three of The Valley could be missing an added flair.
“I really tried this season but it’s boring. I literally fell asleep last time while watching,” one Redditor wrote online. “Nothing is happening. It’s just a bunch of 40 yo people with boring lives and kids. Like who wants to watch this? And sorry not sorry but it got even worse since Jax left.”
Leslie Ye, a reality TV TikTok creator, argued in a recent video that The Valley doesn’t necessarily need Jax Taylor on its cast, but they need a Jax Taylor figure on the series to keep it afloat.
“You have to have someone who’s willing to go there with each and every person on the cast. And unfortunately, no one really seems to be willing to,” she said. “Whether it’s that they care too much about their relationships with the other people on the cast, or they’re too scared of the fans, or they just don’t want the noise, nobody really seems like they’re clocking into work this season.”
Ye continued, “Somebody needs to step up. Somebody needs to say, like, I don’t care that there’s all this shit in my backyard; I’m gonna point out everybody else’s crap, because that’s the job that I signed up to do. And unless somebody does that soon, this show is either gonna get canceled, or they’re gonna have to bring Jax back because it’s not giving Bravo. It’s not even giving TLC, because they’re just giving nothing. They’re doing absolutely nothing with the screentime.”
Another Reddit user echoed Ye’s argument, writing in a thread that Jax “was the straw that stirred the drink,” and that the season three cast lacks “a strong personality or two as the spoke of a wheel, and it doesn’t have that.” (In scripted TV terms, think Sex and the City without Carrie Bradshaw or The Sopranos without Tony Soprano.)
It’s polarizing how quickly the fanbase has shifted their viewpoint on Jax’s merit to The Valley, arguably so because last year’s fan backlash played a significant role in his exit. In a pre-reunion interview with The Hollywood Reporter last spring, executive producer Alex Baskin said that the audience’s concerns about Jax continuing on the show were taken into account by his team and Jax himself when deciding if he’d move forward for season three.
“I think in some cases the response from the audience is a good thing, and I think it forces someone to assess where they are and what they might need to do. The audience was very clear, understandably, how they felt about the situation,” Baskin said. “And certainly that’s something that we take into account, and he took it into account. It’s hard to say whether or not he would have made that decision on his own but for the influence of the audience.”
Part of The Valley burnout may stem from the stacked lineup of shows Bravo has running in its current programming. Breakout hits like The Real Housewives of Rhode Island, steady gems including Southern Hospitality and, of course, the scandal of Summer House now dominate the network’s orbiting fan forums and social media pages.
“[The Valley] doesn’t know what it wants to be, or WHY anyone should be invested,” one user wrote on Reddit. “It doesn’t have the chaos of Vanderpump, the relationships of Southern Hospitality, the elitism of Real Housewives. So what is it? Is it 40-somethings with kids? Okay, and then what?”
They continued, “Obviously they had a show with Jax and Brittany and a few of their ‘friends,’ and Jax with the bar etc. I’m not saying that was amazing, but okay it had a direction. Now it’s just flailing with toxic people who don’t have real reasons to interact.”
The best unstructured reality shows are founded upon the basis of human relationships, and how the everyday aspects of a castmember’s life intersect and result in conflict. The Valley is made up of a pool of people who are half-friends, half-coworkers, which is already a leg up from some of Bravo’s other shows that are clearly cast on no basis of prior connections.
And one lackluster season doesn’t indicate that the series should be thrown out, or that a controversial castmember is what it takes to save a show. Though it should serve as a warning for what could result if the Valley-goers don’t tap into the raw potential that its debut 2024 season leaned into on the coattails of its predecessor, Vanderpump Rules.