At the beginning of this season of Summer House, things were not looking good for the show’s OG star, Kyle Cooke. Loverboy, his alcohol business born of the show, was struggling — he was telling everyone who would listen that he had personally guaranteed a $4.2 million small-business-administration loan that he was struggling to pay back. He had also separated from Amanda Batula, his wife of four years, and the show’s forthcoming episodes would show him yelling and cursing at her in various states of inebriation. The fans were more than ready to back Batula in the great Kymanda divorce, and she had commerce on her side, too, booking single-lady-themed influencer campaigns with Baskin-Robbins, Buffalo Wild Wings, and Invisalign.
Then March 31 happened. On a day that will live in infamy for Bravo fans — at least until the next major scandal happens on The Valley or whatever — Batula and West Wilson announced in an Instagram statement that they were, in fact, dating. It was a stunning betrayal of Batula’s supposed best friend and Wilson’s ex-girlfriend, Ciara Miller. Suddenly, Cooke wasn’t looking like the main villain in the Summer House story anymore.
Since then, Cooke has pretty much played things perfectly. The longtime Bravolebrity — he launched Summer House ten seasons ago — has been unfailingly gracious in the face of Batula’s new relationship with Wilson. And he has apologized continuously for his objectively bad behavior over the summer.
Last week, as fans watched an episode in which he tells Batula “Fuck you” for looking at him wrong and attempts to physically fight his best friend, Carl Radke, Cooke wrote on Instagram, “Tonight’s Summer House episode was the hardest I’ve ever had to watch and relive. My lowest of lows. A true crash out. I take full responsibility and accountability for my words and actions, but for now I just want to pretend I’m back on this beach with my friends before sh*t hit the fan and everything fell apart.”
This was not the first time in Cooke’s reality-TV career that he’d had to make amends. Earlier this season, he called Batula a “fucking dumbass bitch” because she was not sufficiently supportive of his newfound career as a DJ. In the long history of the couple’s relationship that has played out on the show, he has cheated on her, belittled her aspirations to design swimsuits, stayed out all night at fans’ apartments, and inspired tears of despair in Batula’s friends and family, who have begged her, at various points, to get some self-respect and leave him already.
But ever since Batula and Wilson confessed their relationship, fans are more than ready to forgive him. Loverboy sales have been up, and Cooke regularly posts on Instagram about merch restocks, including sweatshirts emblazoned with the words “Carl’s a Mess,” a quote he gave to a man-on-the-street interviewer that quickly went viral. He probably could be making even more money to pay back his loan by selling products that reference the scandal more directly, but he told Jason Tartick on the Trading Secrets podcast this week that he won’t do it.
“Ultimately, I want to handle this in the classiest way possible,” he said. “I know that sounds cheesy, but I was already in this mind-set long before any of this happened with my split from Amanda, that I needed to kind of take the high road.”
“There’s a lot that goes on in a marriage, you know, in the other ten months that we don’t film,” he added. “There was really no point and no gain in dragging our marriage through that to kind of expose more and tell my side.”
Cooke could have ended this season as a pariah — on last night’s season finale, we watched as Batula left the titular summer house for a hotel, fully over Cooke’s antics. Instead, he’s on something of a victory lap, promoting the show and his new reality-TV vehicle, In the City, on The Kelly Clarkson Show, Live With Kelly and Mark, and Watch What Happens Live.
On the premiere of In the City last night — Bravo’s new series about a few Summer House stars and their friends pursuing slightly more grown-up relationships in Manhattan — Cooke came across as sympathetic. Funny, even! Take the opening scene of the show, in which Cooke and Batula reunite to discuss the end of their marriage and the backlash she’s facing online for her relationship with Wilson.
Batula attempts to remind Cooke — and perhaps the viewers — that he cheated on her during their relationship and “made out with someone while we were married.”
“There’s a video of it,” she insists. Cooke’s deadpan response — “Okay” — was a laugh-out-loud moment in an otherwise depressing premiere focused on the myriad ways in which hetero marriages fail. This 43-year-old DJ is going to live to see another day in the Bravo universe after all.