Southern Charm has always been a show about the awful things men do and the women who let them get away with it. As if the current cast couldn’t give us enough of a tutorial on rape culture and toxic masculinity, we needed more. Just like my bedroom on my husband’s birthday, we’re adding three (3) new dudes to the mix to spice it up. The good news is I love two of them and one of them I immediately despise.
Before we get to the boys, we have to deal with a little bit of girl talk. Madison decides she will throw out the perfectly good, unused vibrator that Taylor gave her and Brett as a wedding gift. Okay, I totally get it if she doesn’t want that in her marital bed, but at least pass it along. Give it to a sister in need. Donate it to Goodwill. You know what they say: an orgasm is a terrible thing to waste.
We also sit through Taylor giving a presentation about canned cocktails to Leva and her staff of handsome and possibly gay bartenders. (TJ, you could be one of three dudes, and my husband’s birthday is around the corner.) Her delivery is so stilted that she seems like a ChatGPT robot left out in the sun for too long. Taylor is upset that she quit her job to travel the world with Shep. Oh, do not give me that for even a second. We all told you this was a bad idea. I personally said on this very same internet you look at today that this plan would end in tears, and was I right? Yes. I am always right. Sorry, but that is science.
Speaking of ladies, we got a little check-in with Patricia and Whitney. I’m not sure if Patricia has had any recent face work, but her skin is looking flawless. I know if we asked Ms. Pat she would tell us the name of her surgeon. While she and Whitney are sitting in her living room, Whitney bitches that it is too much of a museum and there is nowhere comfortable to sit and nowhere for him to put down a drink. Whitney, come on. You have never let a drink sit in your hand long enough before finishing that you ever needed to put it down.
The first dude we meet in JT, not to be confused with TJ, who works at Leva’s bar. I think they’re like the two sides of Lindsay Lohan in some fucked-up, Southern Parent Trap. Anyway, JT is a transplant who moved to town during COVID-19 and has become friends with the boys. Much like PK, a Red Bull and vodka suppository, his initials are for his first and last name, Jarrett Thomas. Everything about him screams like he has Trump DNA in him somewhere. He’s essentially Donald Trump Jr Jr. (This doubles as a short joke.) They meet to play golf, a game so horrible that every time a dude swings a club, you can hear it traveling through the air, making a very distinct noise. Who knew that “douche” was also an onomatopoeia.
JT is the kind of guy with a “Napoleon complex” who holds out a bottle of whiskey to his golf buddies and says things like, “Do you want a cup, or do you want to be a man?” Oh, Jesus. I give this guy more eye rolls than this ratty course they play on has brown blades of grass. JT starts telling the guys how he planned a trip to London and Paris to see the World Cup for a bunch of friends, and Taylor showed up and hooked up with one of his bros.
This leads to a conversation where we find out that Austen and Taylor are still very close even though Shep broke up with her. This leads to another conversation where JT is like, “Shep, why did you even let Taylor go? She’s perfect.” Oh, JT. Has he watched the show? It wasn’t Taylor that Shep quit on, it’s any emotional entanglement whatsoever. He just can’t handle having to answer to anyone other than himself. It’s called toxic narcissism. It’s something JT should know all about from his spiritual father, the 45th President of the Electoral College.
JT also brings up that Taylor spent the night at Austen’s house recently after a big night out. He says having a friend’s ex stay over is “murky.” I will agree with that. I’m with Craig regarding talking to friends’ exes: if you do it, it erodes the trust with your friend. I don’t think Austen and Taylor should be hanging out at all, but Shep says it’s not up to him to say who Austen or Taylor should spend time with. That’s because he is a graduate of the Tom Schwartz School of Eternal Manchildren and can’t handle it when anyone is even remotely upset with him. He doesn’t want to be a “bad guy,” so he just waits until he explodes in an emotional rage to let his real feelings be known.
Austen claims he didn’t know that Taylor was there, that she got wasted and passed out in the guest room. This is actually a perfectly reasonable explanation. Well, kind of. It’s perfectly reasonable that she got wasted and crashed. It’s kind of weird if she did it and in the morning was like “SURPRISE!” wearing only her panties and one of Austen’s beer brand T-shirts. Either way that sends Shep into a full-on tizzy because, despite what he wants us to believe, he’s not over Taylor. He still loves her; he just loves hooking up with identical twins on an Australian beach a little bit more.
Now that we have stupid JT, who was just cast as Elmer Fudd in the live-action Looney Tunes movie, we can move on to Rod, whom we first meet on a date with Olivia. I’m sorry but Rod is hot. He is tall, bearded, and has a great head of hair with just a soupçon of grey at the temples. If this man has a good job (Bravo TV dot com says he’s a computer programmer), then he really is the full package.
We don’t learn a lot about him on the date other than that he’s the only “brown person” in the park and that he is not the best kisser that we’ve ever seen on Bravo. Apparently, he and Olivia met at a bar (was the bar called “The Producers”?) and immediately hit it off, so they scheduled this date. He knows she’s gluten-free so he went to two different bakeries to get her good gluten-free bread and then brought it to his favorite sandwich shop so that they could make a GF version of one of their best sammies, which they usually don’t do. Seriously, if she’s not going to marry this dude, then I am. Sure, this is a first-date haze, but if you have a guy who will do all this for you then you put a ring on that faster than JT will put lifts in his deck shoes.
Speaking of JT, the last of the guys we meet is on Austen, Shep, Craig, and JT’s big golf bro-down. They’re joined by Rodrigo, a.k.a. Roddy. When he walked in I thought Finally, the handsome Mustached-American representation that we needed on Bravo. Then we find out that he has a boyfriend named Tyler and my heart, brains, and other parts of my anatomy that are a bit lower explode. A hot gay with a mustache and a (please, please, please, please, please) open marriage? Guys, grab TJ (not JT!) and get on a plane to London. I have my husband’s birthday party to plan and you’re all jumping out of the cake wearing rugby uniforms.
We don’t learn a ton from Rodrigo in this episode except that he loves to chug beer and his ex-boyfriend is now married to a woman. We did get a very revealing clip though. Austen, Shep, and Craig go for a dude huddle at the bar leaving Rodrigo and JT alone at the table. Mini A Lago asks Roddy how he knows the guys. He says his bestie went to high school with Austen in Charlotte and that’s how they met. “I knew Austen when he was a normal person before he turned into a douche. Well, he was always a douche,” he says. Okay, this seems to translate as, “Yeah, I knew Austen before he got famous, and he kind of always sucked, but now that he’s famous he sucks harder than me and Tyler at the one gay bar in downtown Charleston.”
The episode ends with the guys on the rooftop of a bar watching the sunset. JT tells them all about his English ex-wife, whom he married for a green card, who left him for a hot, 6-foot-5 ski instructor who gives her multiple orgasms and has a trust fund. I added some details in there to make JT feel bad. But he shouldn’t. He’s here on the show. He’s with the boys and will unleash himself on the girls. While they all stand in a hacky sack circle on top of the bar with the kerosene heaters buzzing around them, JT leans over the railing and looks out at the lights of the city, the bend in the river, the clouds congealing into cotton balls as the sunset dapples the night sky. He thinks of the possibility, the future, everything this town has to offer, but all we see is the darkness encroaching, like the slight autumnal chill in the air is actually visible.
