Bravo's Quarantined Summer House Is Everything We Want It to Be

When reality shows started to go back into production last summer, we were assured that it would only be under the strictist of COVID safety protocols. Although new seasons of some of these shows have stretched the credibility of whatever measures they claimed to be adhering to (Real Housewives franchise, we're looking at you), others have gone to considerable lengths to tape their seasons in an actual bubble. Bravo's Summer House is one such show, and while attempts to isolate the cast from the rest of the world meant shaking up the fundamental nature of the show, the good news is the personality conflicts, the hookups, and, yes, the bare butts (we see Kyle's ass within the first 30 seconds of the Season 5 premiere) remain.

"Dude this is so pandemic," Kyle says in the supertease to the season that kicks off the premiere episode, which is the kind of enthusiastic insight we expect from Mr. "Summer Should Be Fun," and it heralds what will be a very different season of Summer House. In a typical season, the idea is that the 6-8 person cast share a house in the Hamptons all summer, spending their workaday weeks in New York City and then weekending at the titular summer abode. They drink and squabble and party and hook up at home, of course, but they're also going out every night and hosting big parties full of God knows who during the days. None of that is going to be possible in the quarantined bubble of this season. As the opening title cards (ominously?) tell us, ten friends will spend six full weeks at the Summer House. No driving back and forth to the city. No Friday night clubbing. No Saturday pool parties. Just (one hopes) a bunch of drama between the cast members.

The show refers to the cast as a "quaranteam" this season, which is cute, but I can't imagine they'll seem very much like a team for long. The housemates include all seven members of last year's regular cast — engaged couple Kyle and Amanda, tall/charming disaster Carl, Type A hurricane Lindsay, deeply chill Paige, deeply un-chill Hannah, and last season's brand new chaos hunk, Luke — plus two people who in a normal season would have been considered "guests" (one-time regular Danielle, plus Lindsay's boyfriend Stephen), and new cast member Ciara. Lindsay's decision to rope her boyfriend into the bubble feels very Lindsay, while Paige's decision to go it alone without boyfriend Perry (who drops her off at the house in what she quite accurately compares to a dad dropping his daughter off at college) feels very Paige.

We get caught up with the gang as they all disembark for the Hamptons. As is the case on pretty much all of Bravo's shows that were taped in the second half of 2020, "quarantine" is referred to in the past tense, ie something that happened in the spring. Carl apparently had COVID, although he didn't realize it until he tested positive for antibodies. Luke went back to Minnesota to ride things out. Both Paige and Hannah went to live with their respective parents. And Kyle and Amanda lived in uncomfortably close quarters. Everybody seems wildly desperate to stretch their limbs and experience human contact again, which contributes to an odd sense that this season of Summer House is beamed in from some yearned-for future summer where we'll all be free again.

The biggest change, beyond the fact that they're all in the house for six solid weeks, is that production has moved them to a bigger house, a wildly fancy mansion that Lindsay says she's only ever been to at fancy Hampton's parties where you're not allowed inside. "One of us could be a cocaine dealer and this is our house," is how Paige accurately puts it. But don't worry about dealing with too much change — there's still that same pile-up of Amazon boxes out by the front door when they all arrive.

Living at the house full time also means everybody will be working from home, which leads to a fascinating/maddening/hilarious montage of these Bravo-lebrities at their day jobs: Kyle and Amanda are still running their Loverboy canned spritzer business. Carl is still hard at work doing sales… stuff. Ditty Lindsay being a publicist. Hannah and Paige are working as a podcaster and a fashion influencer, respectively, which includes Paige getting a delivery of a warehouse's worth of clothing on racks. As Kyle says, this work-from-home thing is going to take a lot of willpower, and… well, let's just say it's a good thing that their actual real jobs are being Bravo-lebrities.

By the end of the first night, we already get the season's first big conflict. Hannah, who's on her third season and has really grown into her role as the nexus of drama in the house, is mad at Lindsay for excluding her from her New Year's Eve party, and for trying to fix up Luke (Hannah's will they/won't they/oh God shut up love interest from last season) with Danielle at said party. Lindsay is, of course, mad at Hannah for saying something mean about her on a podcast, the go-to source for grievance on these shows. By day two, Hannah and Lindsay have patched things up, just in time for Luke to show up… with the girl he's been living with, Ciara.

Ciara, the new girl this season, is captioned in her first appearance as a "nurse/model," which: excellent. She tells the group about working in critical care during the first months of the pandemic, which leads Paige to refer to her as "if Naomi Campbell and Mother Teresa had a baby." This seems like an accurate-enough description, especially if Mother Teresa said things like "I'm not a girls girl," which is what Ciara says in an early soudbite, thus guaranteeing plenty of squabbles and boyfriend snatching in the weeks to come. Oh, and it should come as no surprise that Carl is hot for her. Obviously he is.

Carl, meanwhile, has decided to turn a new leaf, marking the fourth consecutive season he has intended to turn a new leaf (remember the year he vowed he was over being a fuckboy?). This year, he's seemingly quit drinking, which is to say he talks about his problematic drinking, suggesting that he doesn't want to get obliterated anymore, but he never outright says he's quit drinking. So when, by the end of the episode, he's saying "I'll take some sips," it feels like an indicator of things to come.

On Summer House, the circumstances may change, with a quarantine bubble and a massive new house and Carl pledging to be good, but it's still the same Summer House. The hope is that the locked-down protocols will allow viewers to watch the new season without the creepy-crawly sensation that comes with watching the Housewives flit from house to house without their masks on. In an ideal world, this summer should be fun.

Summer House airs on Bravo February 4th at 9:00 PM ET.

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Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.