The plot of this season of Southern Charm was moving at a languid pace, and Shep Rose’s girlfriend Sienna Evans has ignited the plot and is moving it forward. The reality star has always been a player, going from woman to woman and his nomadic tendencies have him flitting from one city to the next island to an entirely different country when he’s not stationed in Charleston filming for Southern Charm.
A romantic might call him a wayfarer, a realist would reckon that he’s got major commitment issues, and Shep himself would say he’s both. Shep is slowly reckoning with himself and endeavoring to be more self-aware, with a major catalyst being Andy Cohen confronting him about his behavior after he got blackout drunk during BravoCon. A redemption arc doesn’t make anyone immune to karma, and in Shep’s case, karma comes in the form of a pageant queen who is almost twenty years younger than him.
Shep Rose Was Overdue for Some Humility on ‘Southern Charm’
It seems like Shep has finally developed the capacity to think beyond himself as he fell for Sienna, claiming he’s in love with her and wants to set down roots with a family in her native Bahamas. But is he really in love with her after meeting her maybe six times? Or is he just high off experiencing a fleeting connection for the first time since becoming more in touch with reality? Of course, the first girl he calls “The One” is a significantly younger beauty queen who is unattainable in that she lives in a different country and openly snubs him. He fantasizes about living on an island and raising kids together with her when he knows that it will never shake out. If Charleston is too claustrophobic for his bachelor lifestyle to stay there for longer than a couple of months, he can’t even fathom how suffocating it is being tethered to a small island with a bunch of kids and a wife would be.
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“I honestly was pinching myself.”
Shep went from boarding school to an SEC school to Vanderbilt to coasting through life in Charleston, so he has constantly been in scenarios that are quite literally made for him to flourish as a WASPy, objectively attractive man with an affluent last name and reality TV clout. He has been rewarded for his stunted behavior and he’s finally being confronted with a reality that isn’t tailor-made for him. Sienna is a BIPOC woman whose career is on the rise and whose DMs are bursting at the seams with men who are more successful, so he’s out of his cushy element on every level. Sienna has been visibly dismissive to Shep on the show, and she’s a pageant winner, so one would think she would at least feign enthusiasm when the cameras are rolling. He’s bending over backward to appease her, frantically surveying his friends about what he should do about sending her a simple text to check in. She is still doing nothing to conceal that she does not like him, but is giving him small doses of feigned interest because she seems to relish that he’s desperate. Shep has been the first to admit that Sienna is giving him a taste of his own medicine, and it has been gratifying for women everywhere who have dated a guy like Shep.
Reactions to Sienna Were Telling
The cast has a lot of opinions about Sienna, even though she’s had minimal interactions with any of them. Patricia Altschul is telling on herself by claiming Sienna is “a stalker” for cozying up to Shep after matching with her 60-year-old son Whitney Sudler-Smith on Raya. Madison Lecroy is airing herself out by echoing the same sentiments just because Sienna’s grandmother runs a Southern Charm fanpage. Patricia’s been married multiple times to extremely wealthy men and Madison got on the show by dating Austen Kroll and has a history of texting married athletes, so they have a history of positioning themselves to climb the social ladder and their internalized misogyny is causing them to editorialize Sienna’s behavior, making it something much darker than it actually is even though they’ve done similar things. Meanwhile, Craig Conover is exposing his lack of self-awareness by saying he can read Sienna’s dark “energy” and “aura” as soon as she walks into a room, but he consistently misunderstood when his now ex-girlfriend Paige DeSorbo repeatedly told him she would never move to Charleston and didn’t want to settle down at this point.
Then there’s Taylor Green, Shep’s ex-girlfriend, who is delighting in schadenfreude and it’s the most likable she’s ever been. Shep cheating on her repeatedly, condescending her, and being a middle-aged man prowling King Street for much younger women wasn’t enough to give her The Ick and realize there was nothing she could have done to change him. Taylor has been a polarizing figure, with a lot of her bad behavior stemming from self-sabotage after Shep mistreated her starting at an age where she didn’t even have a fully developed frontal lobe. Taylor witnessing Shep being humbled has made her a more empathetic figure, and hopefully she is taking personal inventory on her patterns with men like Shep, specifically her new boyfriend Gaston Rojas. She is witnessing firsthand how difficult it is to have a personal reckoning at a much older age, so fingers crossed she’s doing it now at younger age when it’s easier to change.
Southern Charm
- Release Date
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March 3, 2014
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