Summary: The premiere of 'Valley' on Bravo is not sparkling escapism

Brawlers, March 19, 2024, all Valley residents should read "Fair Game" by Allie Jones, a freelancer covering celebrity, culture and influencer news.

Photo: Casey Durkin/Bravo

Tonight, one of reality TV's most famous villains, Jax Taylor, returned to the small screen in Bravo's spin-off, Valley Village. The show follows the lives of Taylor and his wife, Brittany Cartwright, in a black and white modern farmhouse in Valley Village. Spoiler: things aren't going well for them! (They recently announced their breakup.) But Taylor - a man known for cheating on every girlfriend, fighting in front of everyone at the mall, stealing sunglasses in Hawaii, and multiple baffling gunshots - looks like a prince compared to the rest of the unhappy husbands Bravo found for the show.

It turns out that Valley is the epitome of research that shows that marital satisfaction drops significantly in the first two years after having a child. Along with Taylor and Cartwright, all the other Millennial couples on the show are all in the same stage of initial parenthood - they're either trying to get pregnant, already pregnant or already raising babies and toddlers - and they all seem miserable. This isn't simple reality avoidance; this is real life, and it's headache-inducing!

Take Jesse and Michelle Lelli, for example. They're friends of Taylor and Cartwright, working in real estate (good) but living not in the Valley but in Hollywood, behind Chateau Marmont (oddly enough). They have a three-year-old daughter, Isabella (the seventh most popular name for girls in 2020), and the mere fact of her existence caused their marriage to collapse. "We haven't discussed basic parenting," Michelle nonchalantly admits to the other moms at Taylor and Cartwright's backyard party.

In another scene, she reveals that Jesse never once woke up at night with his daughter when she was a baby, and that she slept in a separate room with her for a year so as not to disturb his sleep. This led to a certain resentment, if I may say so. "She started to evolve as a mother and I didn't evolve as a father, and that's where we are now," Jessie says in an on-camera interview. (According to Us Weekly, Jessie and Michelle have also separated.)

None of the rest of the cast seem too happy. Former "Pump Rules" chaos agent Kristen Duth also plays on the show, and even though she's already "40 years old," as she keeps saying on camera, she still gets into categorically bad relationships with men. This time she's dating a guy named Luke who actually lives in Colorado and isn't really interested in her, but they're still trying to get pregnant with no plan for what will happen if they succeed.

The couple on the show that seems to be handling life better than anyone else is Nia and Danny Buco - a former Miss USA and Disney Channel actor, respectively. They already have a two-year-old and two 6-week-old twins. Perhaps they're too overwhelmed to argue with each other on camera.

Photo: Felix Kunze/Giesel Hernandez/Bravo

"Valley" has been presented as Taylor's return to television, but his antics that made him so interesting in "Pump Rules" are absent from the show's premiere (except for one incident where he, for some reason, pulls down Danny's pants at the aforementioned fair, leading to Nia crying). Instead, "Valley" is scene after scene of heterosexual misery, and no amount of couples therapy can help them escape.

All Valley residents should read "Fair Game."