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Vanderpump Rules HBIC Lisa Vanderpump is reportedly being pushed out of the hit Bravo show she helped create.
According to a new report, Lisa Vanderpump, who has served as an executive producer on Vanderpump Rules since the show’s inception in 2013, is being slowly phased out of the show.
“I heard … Bravo has been trying to push Lisa Vanderpump out of the show,” Thea de Sousa, author of The Unofficial Vanderpump Rules Ultimate Trivia Book, told The U.S. Sun. “First of all her paycheck, [the] number that she adds to the show, second of all, her relevancy, with the cast having moved on from her restaurants.”
When Vanderpump Rules first began, the show centered around young twenty and thirty somethings working at Lisa Vanderpump‘s SUR restaurant in West Hollywood. Throughout the early seasons Lisa played mentor and boss to the members of the Vanderpump Rules cast. Over the years, more and more members of the cast quit working for Lisa’s bars and restaurants. Currently no one in the cast works at SUR or for any other of Lisa’s restaurants, which makes her role on the show obsolete.
“For the past season, they’ve been trying to minimize her contact with the show. That’s Bravo’s doing. That’s nothing to do with the cast. So people are perceiving that to be Lisa distancing herself, and it’s not. It’s the other way around,” Thea shared. “It’s the show trying to distance itself from Lisa. She’s at like a guest star level now on Vanderpump. It’s a lot less money.”
According to Thea, one of the main issues production is having with bringing the show back for season 12 is the cost. The show has become two expensive for Bravo with many cast members making around $600,000 a season.
“You can imagine how completely just underwater Bravo is in terms of paying this cast, and that’s been the issue since spring,” Thea explained. “That’s been the reason why they didn’t film over the summer. They couldn’t handle the same contracts. So they had to start negotiating [with] people and trying to move people down from maybe main cast member to ‘friend of,’ which they had tried to do a couple [of] seasons before.”
However, a spokesperson for Bravo denies the claims it plans to demote any long time stars, saying, “There is absolutely no truth to this reporting,”
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