“That girl from Laguna Beach who’s married to Jay Cutler.”
“Lauren Conrad?”
“No, the other one. Kristin. The fun one. She opened a store.”
This is not the introduction Kristin Cavallari wants me to give you about her reality TV show. While I am loathe to disappoint my queen, if you’re going to waste your lunch break diving into this pile of hot nonsense with me, you deserve the truth, and that is it.
Over the past 13 years, Kristin has worked hard to put distance between her reality TV past and her reality TV present, and you’d do well to respect that fact — especially if you want to work at her jewelry store in the Gulch to launch your Instagram career. Rule No. 1 of working for a Laguna Beach star: Don’t talk about Laguna Beach. Fortunately, I am 36 and have never had the abs nor the inclination to become a midriff-baring social media influencer, so these rules do not apply to me. Let’s exercise that freedom, shall we? Here are seven things you need to know about Very Cavallari — including whether you should be watching it.
1. The show is not asking much of me, and I appreciate that.
The stakes on Very Cavallari are blissfully low. Will Shannon get fired? Will Kelly go out with that guy who looks like Mumford & Sons made a baby with a metrosexual cowboy? Aside from one pregnancy, nothing here is too dramatic — and even that pregnancy was handled with a borderline psychotic lack of drama. There’s something comforting about that, especially if you’re binging this as you should: on a Sunday while you cook chili and hold yourself.
To illustrate, here are a few recent plot points from Very Cavallari:
- Kristin test drives an alpaca she borrows from Luke Bryan’s wife.
- Jay Cutler hates their goat, Pepper, because Pepper is a bully. Jay Cutler secretly packs Pepper up in Luke Bryan’s wife’s U-Haul. An APB is still out on Pepper at this time.
- The shipping department at Kristin’s jewelry store sends out 10 empty packages per week, and no one knows why.
You read that right: Packages are being mailed with nothing in them, and that is happening 10 times per week. As a person whose first job was shipping crap at a
we-sell-your-stuff-on-eBay store, I have absolutely, 100 percent, NO FUCKING IDEA how this happens. If you are a sober, adult human being who can walk upright, you can ship jewelry. Actually, you don’t even need to be sober! Unless you are being forced to pack boxes in the middle of, say, a clown rodeo, there is no reason this should ever happen. It is this kind of nonsense I expect from Very Cavallari, and Very Cavallari delivers.
2. The star of this show is not Kristin Cavallari. It is Jay Cutler.
On a practical level, Kristin gets more screen time than Jay, the show is named for her, and she “manages” the team of actor/singer/models who are never going to care enough about retail to satisfy her. But the real star of the show is Jay Cutler. I believe Kristin knows this, which is why she perennially tops my list of Girls I’d Like to Get Drinks With. As a 35-year-old retiree, Jay Cutler has never been more in his element. Whether he’s watching live footage of deer he’ll never hunt, wandering into rooms to offer oddly insightful advice, or telling Kristin to fire all of her employees, he toes the line between being charming and physically turning inside out from giving so few shits. In short, he is a treasure.
For the uninitiated, Jay Cutler had a wildly promising football career at Vandy back in the day and then a largely lackluster one in the NFL. He played most of his 12 seasons with the Chicago Bears, during which time you may have seen the “Smokin’ Jay Cutler” meme. It was the first time in history pure apathy was caught on film.
It was around that time that Jay Cutler became irresistible to me. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but this man lights up a dark part of my brain — one that has lain dormant since I was 13 and I thought a guy saying “‘Sup” to me while pulling a cigarette out of his JNCOs meant he loved me. But these are dark times, and I take my joy where I can get it. After the 2017 season, Jay Cutler retired from football because blah blah blah SPORTS. I tuned out halfway through his Wikipedia page, but I did learn a few things. First, it was Jay Cutler who led Vandy to break the Vols’ 23-year winning streak in football in 2005. It was the first time they’d beaten the Vols since 1982, and the first time they’d done it in Knoxville since 1975. And I was there. It was a bad day to be a Tennessee Vol. If Cutler can make me like him after that, he can make anyone like him. The second thing I learned is that Cutler got a degree in Human and Organizational Development, which is supposed to prepare one for “a successful career focused on finding solutions to human problems.” If you’ve ever seen Cutler Roomba his way through a social situation, you will find that comical. But dude gives solid advice, so well done, Vandy.
And that’s everything I know about Jay Cutler. I like it that way, so please don’t send me stories about what a shithead he is. I don’t want Jay Cutler to be president or even to coach my kid’s football team. He could be a stand-up dude or he could be a pile of old diapers stacked up to look like Teen Wolf. I’m fine either way as long as he stays where he belongs: inside my TV.
3. I went to Uncommon James so you don’t have to.
While “Uncommon James” as a brand name is obvious young-person trash-babble, the name delights me for one reason: Jay Cutler came up with it. A former football player who spends his days chasing chickens thought of a name so millennial that the response is Pavlovian for any woman who owns a piece of clothing saying she is a unicorn. This is what that degree was for.
And some of the jewelry is totally cute! It’s not going to set anyone’s world on fire, but it’s clean and modern, and I got a cute pair of floral hoops that I’m not one bit sorry about. I am especially pleased to have visited the store because it gifted me with this: the most inexplicable culinary trend I’ve ever encountered: holey bowls.
I’ve spent more time thinking about these bowls than any sane person who can also ship a package should. Are they colanders? No, because then you couldn’t keep the sauce in the bowl after you drain your pasta. Are they fruit bowls with holes for circulating air? They could be, but that only makes sense for whole fruit, and these are salad-bowl-sized, so you’d have to be plating whole fruit individually days in advance for these to make sense. These bowls left me baffled and delighted, which is also the official tagline of Uncommon James.
Equally confusing was a “Tennessee Pine” candle. I’m no arborist, but I’ve lived here for 35 years, and I did not know our pines had a unique smell. I also didn’t know that their smell — if this candle is to be believed — is less pine tree and more vanilla and confusion. You live, you learn.
4. The Cutlers may be good parents (with one huge caveat).
One thing you won’t see on Very Cavallari: their kids. Kristin talks often about the decision not to put their kids on TV before they’re old enough make that choice, and holy hell is that refreshing. I’d bet my left eyeball that the second a Kardashian finds out it’s pregnant, it locks down that child’s future Instagram handle. So KCav is taking a thoughtful approach, which is surely informed by the fact that her own parents consented for her to appear on reality TV when she was a junior in high school. These kids might just turn out alright! If they don’t get the measles.
Yes, dear reader, the bad news is my girl is an anti-vaxxer. I know — I haven’t been this disappointed since I found out Beck is a Scientologist. While Kristin says “scary statistics” led her to this choice, I think we all know who’s to blame: Jenny Fucking McCarthy. I don’t know whether McCarthy hit rock bottom when she became an anti-vaxxer, when she starred in BASEketball, or when she married the thirstiest Wahlberg, but I do know this: Of all the shit to still be around 20 years after Singled Out, the world needed her least.
5. The show is Vanderpump-ian, and I hope it leans into that.
As eponymous reality TV leads go, Kristin is setting herself up in the grand tradition of Lisa Vanderpump, and she’s doing a fairly good job. She (mostly) stays out of the fray, and she carries herself with a hell of a lot more gravitas than Lindsay Lohan with about one-fifth of the fame. That’s an impressive feat to pull off on the E! Network, a trash chute overflowing with used condoms and fame-hungry hair models. I must admit, however, that I’m worried about the drama. In the first episode of season 2, Kristin fired her problematic, insubordinate social media manager, Shannon, and that is not good business. I mean, yes, it is good business — if you’re actually just running a business. But Shannon, like every brassy, entitled “Instagram expert” before her, was a solid low-stakes “villain.” If Kristin wants the Boss Bitch mantle, she needs a messy drama queen to bump up against. Shannon is that. I call into evidence her Twitter.
If you think that is a woman wearing fishnet stockings under jorts, you’re damn right it is. She’s also tweeting about overdosing on cauliflower and “women empowerment” and all the other things that make her an ideal foil for KCav. I still believe Kristin is savvy enough to fill this drama void because she must know the reason Uncommon James has “taken off” in the last year — she had four employees a year ago to her current 50-plus — is because of this show. I work in the Gulch, and I had never so much as walked by Uncommon James until a friend told me about Very Cavallari. So please, my queen, protect the drama.
6. Half the cast is cool. Half is terrible. That’s the right mix for reality TV.
Shannon “fishnets-and-denim” Ford aside, the cast includes some people you’d actually want to hang out with. There’s Reagan, a former hairstylist whom people underestimate because of her accent — she tawlks a little kuntry — but who seems like a blast to drink margaritas and talk shit with. There’s Kristin’s best friend, Kelly, whose job involves styling people like Jason Aldean and Dierks Bentley and everyone else who ruined Broadway. Despite that, she also seems like a good hang, and she’s been working the fame angle since she was in this 2009 video making out with one of my friends (What’s up, Noland), so I hope she’s finding her bliss. Unmarried at age 32 — the show often reminds us that she’s approximately 78 in reality TV years — Kelly is also a good sport about opening up her love life and talking honestly about worrying it’s “never going to happen.” Sadly, that’s still a real fear women in the South have, even if they are successful and smart and hot, and she seems like all of those things.
On the flip side we’ve got Brittainy, coming in strong with a brand new way to spell that name wrong. Brittainy is a slippery one. She’s clearly beautiful and her body be bangin’, but on television, she is charisma black hole. Until I wrote this, I never thought much about her with two huge exceptions: her Tumblr and her boyfriend, both of which are treasure troves of bullshit.
Her social media bios are just nonsensical word combinations. She bills herself as an “independent socialite,” who is “addict [sic] to the human experience & organized chaos.” She is also a “crime-fighting ninja assassin with double-jointed thumbs” who loves “delicious ambiguity.” Reading through this stuff reminded me of that scene in Forgetting Sarah Marshall where Kristen Bell’s character goes apeshit on Aldous Snow about his tattoos, saying: “They are completely conflicting ideologies, and that does not make you a citizen of the world — It makes you full of shit!” Brittainy’s Tumblr is my Aldous Snow’s tattoos.
Now look — I am not without sympathy. I’m thankful every day that Facebook didn’t roll out photo albums until I was out of college. We’ve all been 19. But Brittainy is 30. The statute of limitation on self-important poetic musings runs out at 23.
And speaking of people whose time is up, let’s close with Brittainy’s boyfriend, Jon Stone. This man is credited on a few songs that I believe sum him up as a person better than I ever could.
The first is Rascal Flatts’ “Me and My Gang.” This song is a level of helium-sucking, country-boy-band tragic that gives me goosebumps in a bad way. Imagine Sesame Street puppets trying to write a Kid Rock song — that’s the cringe-inducing garbage we’re working with here. No, I will not link to it because I do not want it getting the views, so Google at your own risk. Or just wait for a pedal tavern to pass by. (Sidebar: Someone please invent an algorithm by which you can hate-watch things without improving their Google ranking. Thanks in advance.)
Another song he co-wrote (you didn’t think he wrote any of this on his own, did you?) is the 2010 Blake Shelton tune "Kiss My Country Ass.” I couldn’t even bring myself to listen to this one, but I don’t have to because the lyrics say it all: “Tearin' down a dirt road, rebel flag flyin', coon dog in the back.” In addition to sucking out loud, it’s a clear rip-off of the original redneck-pandering jam by Toby Keith: 2002’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.” But Jon Stone will do you one better! His song ends with: “You can kiss my natural born, redneck to the bone, ever lovin' country ass,” so we’re also taking a sideswipe at immigrants. And that was the last move Jon Stone needed to win Redneck Checkers. Somebody King this motherfucker!
When he’s not “making music,” Jon spends his screen time actively ignoring Brittainy, or gaslighting her into thinking she should thank him for letting her have a job and talk to him about it. Honestly, this kind of Bro is low-key the worst thing to happen to Nashville on TV since The Bachelorette cast that racist hick Lee. Brittainy: you in danger, girl.
7. So should you be watching?
Sure! It’s no season 2 Vanderpump Rules, but Kristin is sharp, Jay is absurd, and that’s more than enough for most of us. Most importantly, it passes The Housewives Test. If I turn on The Real Housewives — even for a second, even on accident — my husband can feel it in his bones. Whether he’s across the house or across the country, he can sense I’m about to get neck-deep in shrieking, crying, crass, table-flipping horseshit, and he is not amused. Very Cavallari? Fine by him. Hell, he might even watch. And that’s the reality TV gift that keeps on giving. Well, that and Jay Cutler.
