‘The Valley’ Is the First Great TV Show About the ‘Divorced Guy’
In a Valley fight, neither party is ever totally right or totally wrong. Their sniping criticism is undermined by their hypocrisy. We can hear the smug superiority couched in “I just want what’s best for you.” We know that if Jax is speaking an uncomfortable truth, it will likely be in the service of causing maximum pain. (A few episodes after the hibachi party, while Brittany is battling a brutal hangover, Jax can be heard berating her: “Stop fucking drinking. You want to have more kids? Act like a mom.”)
Jax and Brittany’s separation was revealed at the end of season one, around which time Jax posted a photo of himself cuddling with his publicist in Montreal. The second season follows their divorce. A lot of people in the extended Vanderpump universe are getting divorced, and The Valley is emerging as culture’s first great document of the “divorced guy” that has become a cultural punching bag for the past few years.
“Divorced guy” is shorthand for a specific sort of loser that makes tepid attempts to regain their youth after wasting a woman’s time. The divorced guy is embarrassingly hetero. The divorced guy is going through a humiliating phase of hookups and leather jackets. The divorced guy, rather than mirroring the divorced woman’s spirit of liberation and empowerment, is embittered by the world’s power dynamics shifting under his feet. He rides a horse called grievance through a strange land full of women who don’t like him, stopping only for family court hearings.
Elon Musk is one kind of divorced guy. Kanye West is another. The Vanderpump Rules–Valley universe offers its own special flavors of divorced guys.
There’s Tom Schwartz, who, like Jax, came to Los Angeles to model and wound up being the most hopeless bartender on a show about bad bartenders. Schwartz has an aw-shucks schtick that belied a vicious antagonism towards his ex-wife, who seemed to dislike her husband just as much. Post-divorce, Schwartz’s deflective naiveté continues to lead him down unprofitable paths, like inviting his situationship to live with him (she has since left), opening his own bar (it has since closed), and, now, showing up to help Jax open his own bar.
There’s also The Valley’s Jesse Lally, a Bravo newcomer who is the answer to the question, “What if Jordan Peterson were a moderately successful real estate broker?” Lally’s way of being divorced is to spread rumors that his ex-wife was sleeping with men for money. This, to my eyes, is an unhinged version of the playground-bully-with-a-crush routine that perhaps suggests a desperation to remain connected to his ex, even through torment.
The way we act after separation often reveals the feelings obscured by the relationship itself. Jax, however, is a unique case. His divorce has not unearthed anything about him that wasn’t already on display over his years on television. That said, Jax’s divorce does seem to have made Jax’s problems more real to Jax. On Vanderpump, it often seemed like he was inoculated against personal growth, but, recently, he has pursued inpatient mental health care and spent time in rehab for alcohol and cocaine abuse.
Contrast what’s happening on The Valley, if you will, with the clutch of divorce lit published in the last couple of years. If you’re in the market for unflinching depictions of heterosexual relationships in dissolution, you may have already found them in Sarah Manguso’s Liars, Miranda July’s All Fours, Leslie Jamison’s Splinters, and Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful. But you would not find, in these excellent books, the divorced guy. Divorce lit starts at the end of the relationship, and the men exist as memories or, sometimes, a jumping-off point for reflections on the unreliability of the divorce narrator.
