Southern Charm Season-Premiere Recap: The Cup Runneth Over

Welcome back for another season of Southern Charm, the only show on television where they use the word “plantation” and don’t think a thing of it. However, much like the image of plantations, the relationships on the show need a lot of repair. Wait, I take that back. We don’t need to repair the image of plantations. Fuck those places. Even if Blake Lively wants to have her wedding in one.

The biggest relationship that is fractured is the one between the three main bros of this here reality television program. Ever since Shep got so wasted at BravoCon that he needed to have a talking-to from NBCUniversal’s corporate overlords, things between him and Craig and Austen have been more sour than the face Patricia makes if someone uses the wrong fork. The episode revolves around everyone getting together for the Carolina Cup, some kind of horse racing event that takes place only a 10-minute drive from Shep’s family plant … nope, it’s a family farm. That’s what we’re calling it now. Oh, good.

Craig and Austen drive out a night early to hang out with Shep at the farm and ignore the fact that he has a white refrigerator. Shep claims that he has changed a lot in his life since he got in trouble for being a boozer. He says he’s eating better, drinking less, and going to the gym four to five times a week. I will give it to Shep; he is looking pretty fit, the best he has in years, even when he stripped off to get in the shower. What else has he done to help with his alcohol problem? Well, he went and did ayahuasca for four days in Costa Rica, and he says that was like a decade of therapy, so, apparently, he’s all fixed now.

This is a little bit like Shannon Storms Beador going to meditate her alcohol problems away when she got arrested for a DUI that put the life of her beloved dog, Archie Beador, in danger. No wonder Craig and Austen are skeptical. He seems to have fixed his penchant for benders by … going on a bender with a different drug in another country? Now, I have never done the drug, and I have friends who say amazing things about it, but when your drinking is such an issue that HR gets involved, you need to add something to your “plant medicine” journey. A bit of therapy, a 12-step meeting or two, subscribing to some sobriety influencers on TikTok. Something.

It makes sense that Craig and Austen both want a bit of clarity from Shep. They say they can’t tell if he really wants to change or if this is something he has to say he wants to do just so it looks good. Again, if he were doing other things rather than hallucinating in a tent and throwing up for eight hours, that might help them believe that Shep is really on the road to recovery. Craig even says that he’s heard about Shep having wild nights even since all of this change has occurred, and Shep acknowledges those too. So, where exactly is he?

I do think that Shep makes a decent point when he says that Craig and Austen shunned him when he needed him the most. He’s also right that if they did want to take a step back from him and their friendship because of the drinking, they should have let him know the reason rather than just ghosting him. If they said, “We’re tired of you being so wasted that we have to take care of you all the time, and we need a break,” that might have got him examining how alcohol affects his relationships. Instead, they just ghost him so they look like assholes, and he just goes to find new drinking buddies.

I am so much more on Craig and Austen’s side in this. It’s exhausting to have a friend who is that much of a mess all the time. Yes, both of them have been just as messy, but it seems like Craig isn’t as interested in never-ending games of Flip Cup anymore and Austen, for as drunk as he gets, has never, you know, mocked an unhoused woman and gotten caught on camera. What I do think is dumb is that Craig says that he needs to distance himself from Shep because it’s bad for his business. You mean … the pillows? How is this affecting the pillows? I have a feeling most of the people buying them watch this show and they know that Shep is a drinker, that Craig doesn’t love it, and that Shep and Craig are very different people. If Craig was just like, “I’m tired of having to apologize for you to every bouncer in town,” I think that is totally legit, but, “You’re putting the pillows in jeopardy”? Be slightly serious.

What other relationships are out of order? JT, a garden gnome who hates hats, says things are awkward with Taylor because he came on to her and she shot him down. Also, she has a new boyfriend named Gaston, and that name does not seem like a prank at all, and I don’t understand how. Instead, he’s gotten very close to Venita, whom he bonded with last year on the cast trip.

JT, who was in a near-fatal ATV accident at a Costa Rican resort (ayahuasca does not seem to have been involved), has decided he needs to repair his relationship with Austen. When they stop on the way to the Carolina Cup for a pee break, JT arrives back in the Sprinter with like a dozen canes to give out to everyone so he won’t be the only one walking with one. JT is cornier than the world’s busiest arepa stand. This is so dumb. He walks up to Austen, tells him that he wants to move on with him, and gives him a cane. Everyone else dies of second-hand embarrassment, and the field at the Carolina Cup looks like the Rapture just occurred.

Where JT has a problem with Austen is when everyone is talking about his new girlfriend Audrey, who has definitely made a Bama Rush video, and Venita and Leva say that they both know several women who “dated Austen” while he was together with Audrey. JT says, “If Austen wants to fuck around, just be up front about it.” Why should he, and why does JT care? Austen is not dating JT’s sister, cousin, or friend. He’s not dating JT himself. Then Austen treating people like shit is none of his business. Let him do it! Let the women (and the people on the other side of these screens) judge him for it. JT should just be quiet and think about being a little bit less of a dweeb, and maybe he’d feel a lot better about himself.

While most of the episode was about these fractured relationships, we needed to meet a few new people. There is Molly O’Connell, a Charleston native and former contestant on America’s Next Top Model. (She came in second on “cycle” 16 and I definitely watched it and don’t remember her at all.) She was Craig’s old sexting buddy, which they both think is funny, and so does Paige, Craig’s girlfriend, because Paige knows Craig knows that the moment he even looks at another woman, the moment he even considers thinking a stray sexual thought about her, that Paige will dump his ass and he will lose the best thing that has ever happened to him. Paige doesn’t need to put Craig in his place; Craig knows his place, and that place is not to do a single thing that would mess up his relationship.

It was a little strange that Molly was also talking about getting with Whitney, who arrived at the Cup with his mother, Patricia, and a date named Taylor, because the last thing we need is more women in floral maxi dresses with the exact same name. At least she did us the courtesy of being a brunette. So Molly is just looking to cement her place on the show by hooking up with any of the straight dudes who aren’t JT. Got it.

JT might seem inoffensive and way too tryhard, but he got quite offensive and tried way too hard when Miss Pat came over to the tent. He gave her a cane just like he had given to everyone else (and they quickly ditched them under the table with the strawberry trees that looked like Melania Trump’s haunted Christmas). He didn’t realize that you don’t give a cane to a woman of a certain age, no matter if everyone else got one or not. How did he not realize that would hit differently. So Patricia does the lady-like thing; she gets up and takes her $50,000 picnic Birkin somewhere else and totally ignores this man. While I think it’s going to be fascinating to see the shifting dynamics between Austen, Shep, and Craig now that they’ve all made life changes, if you ask me what I’m really looking forward to, it’s dunking on JT like he’s the world’s tiniest gingerbread man in a cup of steaming hot tea.