How Jax Taylor’s Cocaine Addiction Affected Season 2

In the show’s April 15 premiere, Jax strives to justify his actions in a confessional interview. “I lost all control. I saw red. I had an out-of-body experience,” he says, speaking to the camera. “But show me a guy that wouldn’t handle the situation the way I handled it.”

By his own telling — on “The Valley,” and on podcasts since filming Season 2 ended in mid-September — Taylor had been spinning out since Cartwright left him: partying, drinking, doing cocaine and having sex with whatever women were in his DMs. Taylor’s volatility is partly what made him so skilled as a shit-stirrer and chaos agent on “Vanderpump Rules,” the progenitor of “The Valley,” during which his relationship with Cartwright began. But measured against the “Vanderpump Rules” storyline known as the Scandoval — the entrancing intra-cast cheating scandal turned international news story from spring 2023 — Taylor’s violent flare-up, and the fallout from it, has been its tonal opposite: deeply upsetting.

At the end of the second episode, Taylor checks into a nearby mental health facility, urged to go there by Cartwright, his sister, his team, the show’s producers and Bravo. He stays there for 30 days, during which he still manages to text Cartwright threats like “trust me i gave my friends your address. they are gonna stop by.” While he’s away, Cartwright consults a divorce lawyer about her estranged husband’s behavior; at one point, the lawyer, eyes wide, says, “This is not normal.” When Taylor returns home in the June 17 episode, instead of trying to see Cruz, he gets Botox and a haircut. In the final scene, he learns Cartwright has filed for divorce and sole legal custody.

Though reality programming has been consistently dismissed as fluff even as it’s become a dominant force in television, there are countless examples of how unscripted series have reflected real life in groundbreaking ways, dating back to when Pedro Zamora, then dying of AIDS, starred on “The Real World: San Francisco” in 1994. On Bravo alone, amid lavish parties and glamorous trips, cast members have faced divorce, bankruptcy, illness, legal problems, imprisonment, abuse and death by suicide.  

What sets “The Valley” apart is how much Season 2 has turned its cameras on the darker realities of most of its ensemble, beyond even the “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”-tinged turmoil of Taylor and Cartwright’s disintegrating marriage. The results have been as fascinating and layered as they are unprecedented. Divorcing real estate agents Jesse Lally and Michelle Saniei appear to loathe one another; she’s accused him of blowing through their money, while he’s called her a “lying, cheating whore.” Voice actor Daniel Booko and former Miss USA Nia Sanchez Booko — who were living in an overstuffed condo with their three small children — have presented a united front as Daniel’s drinking has become a major storyline, centered on the time he got blackout drunk and inappropriately touched castmate Jasmine Goode and her now-fiancée Melissa Marie. Married couple Janet and Jason Caperna have stoked drama among the ensemble, especially around Booko’s drinking. (An exception is the sweet love story of Luke Broderick and “Vanderpump Rules” alum Kristen Doute, who get engaged during the season; Doute gave birth to their daughter on June 11.)

After the Scandoval caused “Vanderpump Rules” to become a ratings sensation (and eventual Emmy nominee), executive producer Alex Baskin resurrected a pitch he’d made to Bravo, pre-pandemic, for a show that cast members from the original could graduate into as they married, had kids, bought homes and no longer worked at Lisa Vanderpump’s West Hollywood restaurants. That plan had to go dormant after Taylor, Cartwright and Doute were let go from “Vanderpump Rules” in 2020 for different reasons. But when the Scandoval brought all three back into the public eye as pundits (yes, there were pundits!), most viewers welcomed them with open arms. “There was an opportunity at that point, because there was overwhelming interest in the franchise itself,” Baskin says. Erica Forstadt, NBCUniversal’s SVP of unscripted current production, agrees. “It was a slam dunk, honestly,” she says. “I think the audience wanted to see what was going on with those three at that time.”

Production began immediately, and “The Valley” — populated with people from Taylor and Cartwright’s friend group — premiered in March 2024, with Season 11 of “Vanderpump Rules” as its lead-in. It became Bravo’s most-watched freshman series in a decade, and ratings remain strong in the show’s second season, according to Nielsen and NBCUniversal, with the premiere episode drawing 3.1 million cross-platform viewers (and counting) on Bravo and Peacock. Despite how fragmented TV audiences have become, “The Valley” averages as many viewers as Season 2 of “Vanderpump Rules” did in 2013-14.

Data aside, what’s perhaps most significant is an ineffable measurement: “The Valley” has sparked a tonnage of conversation in the Bravosphere, the term of art for the world of fan podcasts, social media accounts and subreddits that scrutinize every move the network’s cast members make — and every twist in the shows themselves. In this closed-circuit universe, “The Valley” is the zeitgeist topic, and viewers are riveted. (And yes, Bravo is mounting an Emmys campaign for “The Valley.”)

Not all chatter about the cast has been positive though; broadsides directed at Cartwright — some in the Bravo cognoscenti say she should have known who Taylor was when she married him — especially bother Baskin. During a long interview at his office in, yes, the Valley, Baskin, whose company 32 Flavors produces the show, says the season’s igniting domestic incident was impossible to look away from once Cartwright told them that Taylor had done “something unacceptable.”

“It was really scary,” he says. He calls the Cartwright of today “a different person” from who she was on “Vanderpump Rules,” and wishes the audience would recognize “her growth and her assertiveness.” He adds: “This is all Brittany’s real life.”

The show’s tone has been a delicate balancing act this season, Baskin says, and he’s in constant conversation with Bravo about achieving the right equilibrium. Taylor and Cartwright were the central couple of “The Valley,” and are well-known to Bravo viewers: The ugly ending of their marriage presents a new challenge for the series and the network. To Forstadt, the “Valley” team comes at the story “from a documentary place,” she says. “In my mind, it’s real. This is what is happening.” Later, she adds: “Had we not covered it, then we wouldn’t have been telling a truthful story. And I think that’s even more problematic.”

“Remind me again what you want to watch?” Baskin asks rhetorically at one point. “We’re all trying to figure out how to tell the story responsibly and fairly, in a way that is entertaining and real. But that doesn’t put a gloss on what is really happening. This subject matter is dark!”

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When Cartwright and Taylor met in Las Vegas in 2015, she was 26 and living in Kentucky, and he was 36 and already famous from “Vanderpump Rules.” The self-proclaimed “No. 1 guy in this group,” he provided the show, through sheer force of will, with its centripetalforce in a cast full of charismatic antiheroes. After sweeping her off her feet, Taylor convinced Cartwright to move from Kentucky to Los Angeles. She appeared to sand down Taylor’s roughest edges and calm him (to the extent that’s possible), but as “Vanderpump Rules” went on, Taylor’s charms curdled, and he became a toxic presence. He wasn’t asked back, taking Cartwright down with him, after Season 8 — the same season that featured their 2019 wedding at a Kentucky castle.

Even if their interests have seemingly diverged, Cartwright and Taylor continue to share the same manager and publicist. After Variety spoke with Baskin, their publicist canceled an already scheduled interview with Cartwright; Taylor declined to be interviewed.

There’s a lot of material out there already though — everyone has a podcast. In fact, in March, Taylor went on Baskin’s “Bravo’s Hot Mic” podcast and confessed that for more than 20 years, he’d struggled with cocaine and had recently quit it, as well as drinking. He’d sought help once more over the Thanksgiving holiday, he said, after another outburst caused Cartwright again to enlist their team and production to get Taylor back into treatment. There, he said on the podcast, he faced his drug addiction and wanted to announce it publicly. But Baskin wants to be clear that going into treatment is not something that Taylor’s employers “can legally mandate — we can’t. That’s a step that someone has to take on their own.”

Viewers weren’t at all surprised by Taylor’s cocaine confession — the reaction online was basically, sweetie, we knew, next to photos of a bugged-out-looking Jax from across the years. But what happened with Cartwright has managed to shock the audience — and the cast. “You have to be very careful, Brittany,” Saniei tells Cartwright in the Season 2 premiere. “If he’s escalating, it takes one second for something to happen. And once something happens, there’s no going back.”

Sanchez Booko had a similar reaction when Cartwright told her about the fight with Taylor. “I was like, ‘It’s not safe. You definitely can’t be around him,’” she tells Variety in an interview at the Roosevelt Hotel. “It made me really worried for my friend.”

Cartwright and Taylor had security cameras in their home at the time — unrelated to filming — and Cartwright also showed Sanchez Booko video of Taylor’s explosion. “When I saw the video, my first question to Brittany out loud was ‘What was he on?’” Sanchez Booko says. “And she said, ‘No, he was sober, just so mad.’ He looked scary from a woman’s point of view.”

Although reality stars have gone to rehab before during filming, Taylor’s drug use hadn’t yet been openly acknowledged. And though drunkenness is a staple of reality TV, hard drugs have always been highly taboo — if cast members are using, they hide it from production. But as he packs to go to the facility in the season’s second episode, with his anxiety clearly spiking, Taylor and Cartwright argue once more for the road — and during this fight, she at last exposes him. “Jax, you have a coke problem!” she yells up their stairs. “Everybody knows it! Own up to it. Be real with the doctors.”

Jax, you have a coke problem. Was Baskin surprised that Cartwright finally snapped?

“She was going to say everything that she had experienced — that’s her story,” Baskin says. “She felt like the problem was he had been enabled for too long. And she’s like, ‘Fuck that. I’m not doing that. I’m going to say it out loud.’ She was done. She was going to say everything.”

Speaking one’s mind can cut both ways, however. In an interview in his Los Angeles home above the Sunset Strip (which is not in the Valley, as he likes to point out), Lally expresses remorse about the vicious things he’s said on camera about Saniei. “I mean, obviously I regret calling Michelle a hooker,” he says. “I’m trying to raise a little girl. Like, do you know what a guy like me from Boston would do if somebody called my daughter a whore? Whatever is to blame for that, it’s just irresponsible and shameful.” At another point, he says, “We’re doing this to make a great show, but we’re also still real families with real careers and children.”

Booko’s indiscretion — when he drunkenly fondled Goode and Marie during a Halloween party — happened off camera, and though Booko felt before filming that he’d already made sufficient apologies, he says he heard that Taylor was “talking to people to bring it back up for the show.” He called Taylor to confront him, Booko says, and after some hemming and hawing, “he blew up, and he was like, ‘You guys got off easy in the first season, and the second season I’m coming after you and putting a target on your back! You and Nia are fake!’”

Booko says Taylor apologized at the reunion, which was filmed in early May. But at the time, he thought: “I’m trying to have your back, and all you’re doing is stabbing mine.”

“It was a hard summer,” he adds, mentioning how betrayed he feels by the Capernas in particular, who he feels played up the drama at his expense. “Lies — just malicious, vindictive behavior from some people that I really cared about, and thought were my friends. Whether they’re doing it for the show or a storyline or attention or whatever, it’s just like: You don’t do that. This is real life.”

That said, both Bookos say they would come back for Season 3, which will likely start production after the final reunion episode of Season 2 airs in August. “I just hate feeling things left unsettled,” Booko says. As for Sanchez Booko, who gave birth to their fourth child in early June, she wants to be alongside Doute and Broderick during “this new season of life,” she says. “It makes me emotional.”

Season 3 is a puzzle, according to Baskin — especially in terms of how much to fold in ex-“Vanderpump Rules” stars Scheana Shay, Lala Kent and Tom Schwartz, all of whom have appeared this season, since they’re friends with various cast members. “We’re figuring out all of it,” Baskin says. “It’s very likely the show does look different next season, but I don’t know what different means.”

After the first season, it was easy simply to bring the whole cast back, upping Zack Wickham and Goode from “friends” status to series regulars. But there are now huge rifts in the group, and there’s also the question of what to do with Taylor, who’s done a lot of harm — but has also sought help. The events filmed for this season took place 10 months ago, after all, and in a statement from his personal rep, Taylor says: “I just celebrated my 200th day of sobriety from both alcohol and cocaine. It’s been a long road and continues to be as I work through my mental health issues.”

Although Taylor was integral to the formation of the show, “no one is guaranteed a job indefinitely,” Baskin says. “Many times before, we’ve had to make a change based on someone’s behavior. But seeking help is the opposite of that. Seeking help is obviously what we completely support.”

Baskin worked behind the scenes as an executive producer on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” and “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” among others, for years, but as a shot caller for “Vanderpump Rules,” he saw his profile rise during the Scandoval. With that recognition, some content creators in the Bravosphere have slammed him by name — and as far as Reddit goes, he says with a laugh, “You know I can’t look!”

But Baskin specifically wants to address the frequent accusation that putting Taylor on television means the show and Bravo are platforming an abuser.  

“Our job is to tell the full story,” he says. “If we didn’t tell the story in its completeness, then we would be covering up something that really happened, and denying Brittany the chance to share what she had been through. I don’t think that’s really ‘platforming an abuser’ as much as that is platforming the story — which includes Brittany’s experience as well as Jax’s.”

Upon his return in the June 17 episode, Taylor has come to certain realizations that he calls “eye opening” and “humbling,” but he’s also aggrieved and feels justified about no longer paying the mortgage on the Valley Village house. At the end of the episode, Taylor is showing his old friend Tom Schwartz, whom he’s moved next to, around his new rental when a process server knocks on Taylor’s door, handing him divorce papers. Wearing a perhaps ill-considered Violent Gentlemen Hockey Club hoodie, Taylor puzzles over the documents. As he’s prone to do, Schwartz puts a positive spin on things, saying that the fact that Cartwright wants to settle things “amicably” and “out of court” is a “love letter.” Taylor seems stunned as they discuss it, both concluding that yes, it’s all for the best, though deeply sad. Taylor’s confessional interview shows why he’s gotten this far on television, though, as he quotes the iconic “Vanderpump Rules” theme song “Raise Your Glass” to punctuate how far he’s fallen — he’s created a full-circle moment. “Getting these divorce papers — it’s devastating. We’re both so hurt,” Taylor says, looking straight into the camera. “We don’t really have anything left. It’s safe to say that these are no longer the best days of our lives.” The cameras cut back to him in the kitchen with Schwartz, looking lost.

Pressed again about what Season 3 might look like, Baskin expands further. “We don’t want to be in a situation where we are forcing together people who wouldn’t spend the time together in real life,” he says. “That can become taxing and difficult to watch.” Given the large size of the ensemble, Baskin hopes at least some of them can share the same space. “But at this point, I don’t know what form that will take going forward.”

For his part, Lally doesn’t believe “The Valley” will always be this way. “I don’t think the audience is going to want it,” he says. “I’m already hearing things like, ‘Are Jesse and Michelle ever going to stop talking about each other and talk about something else?’ This show was about young families trying to navigate their lives, being married and having young kids and stuff like that. We’ll get back there. There’s some light at the end of this dark tunnel, I think.”

However Season 3 does shake out, Baskin laughs at the memory of an early worry that “The Valley,” with its focus on fortysomethings with kids, might be boring.

“There were people involved who were like, ‘Is everyone too settled and are their lives too grounded?’” he recalls. “I’m like, ‘Um, there’s a lot there!’”