Jeff Lewis opened up about the cancelation of Flipping Out and teased its potential return to Bravo while appearing on a podcast on Tuesday.
As he also discussed how Bravo has changed in the way it pays its talent, hinted that Shah of Sunset may soon resurface, and targeted “dirty producers” and their unfair edits, Jeff, 54, explained why his show got the boot and looked back on his decision to become a reality star.
“I don’t want to pretend like, ‘Oh, I decided to spend more time with my family.’ No, they didn’t renew my contract,” Jeff began on the January 28 episode of My Friend, My Soulmate, My Podcast. “It wasn’t that there was low ratings or people lost interest. It was the Bravo executives that thought the show couldn’t go on without [Jenni Pulos].”
According to Jeff, he disagreed with Bravo’s assessment of the series and felt he went above and beyond for the show.
“I don’t know if they really understood exactly what I did to make that show work. I always made sure I was really busy, I had a lot of clients. I had a lot of projects. I was staffed up. All of this was at my expense and Jenni was a great employee and she was my co-star,” he explained. She helped build the show, what it became, but what happened was, inevitably, we grew apart and our goals, they no longer aligned and it just made sense for us to separate.”
Looking back, Jeff noted that because that was the reality of his and Jenni’s situation, that’s what Bravo should’ve followed.
“I thought that would’ve been very interesting,” he admitted.
That said, Jeff knows “things happen for a reason” and believes that after going through a number of hard moments, including the death of his grandmother and his breakup with Gage Edward, he may have done something he “couldn’t come back from.”
“I don’t know if that would’ve been the best look for me, had we continued … I was spiraling,” he shared.
Although Jeff was upset when Flipping Out was canceled, he stayed busy and went on to star in his own Amazon series, Hollywood Houseflip, which was “very successful” without Jenni, 52. During this time, he was told by a Bravo executive that “the door [was] always open” for a comeback.
Once Hollywood Houseflip ended after two seasons, Jeff ran into the same executive and told her he was ready for his Bravo return. Since then, he has been working with development on what he says will “basically be a Flipping Out sequel.”
“We’ve been putting the cast, what would be the cast, which are the people in my life, on tape. So that tape is now being sent to Bravo and then they’ll elect whether they want to move forward or not,” he revealed.
As he prepared for his potential return, Jeff acknowledged there is a “very different climate” at Bravo these days when it comes to how much people are paid.
“We’re not seeing the money that [we] once saw. However, I found them to be very reasonable in the sense of, ‘Look, if you’re not going to be paying me, then you can’t put me in handcuffs, in a cage, like you did before. You have to give me carveouts to go out and make money, to supplement what you’re no longer paying me,’” he reasoned.
He then confirmed that he’s been hearing about a Shahs reboot.
“From what I hear, Shahs is having that same conversation,” he revealed.
While Jeff is ready to reprise his position on Bravo, he did have some negative things to say about the network’s producers.
“I went through that a few times where I had issues with producers,” he shared, signaling a moment in which a scene was edited to make it look as if he threw a ball at a toddler.
“It looks like I was trying to kill this three-year-old,” he recalled. “When I watched it … I said, ‘That’s not what happened. You can’t use that. I look like a child abuser.’ It was a big deal because the production company’s like, ‘No, we can’t. It’s already edited. It’s locked.’ I said, ‘This is not true. You have to change this.’ And I called the executive at Bravo, and they changed it.”
At another moment, producers gave one of his bitter ex-employees a platform to bash his then-boyfriend.
“He was angry. And he got in a confessional chair and said really terrible things about Gage,” Jeff revealed. “It was just someone trying to create a sensational moment and it was really awful things about Gauge’s appearance. And I said, ‘This doesn’t even make sense to the story. Why would you air that?’ So they said, ‘Sorry, it’s locked. We can’t change it.’ And I was supposed to leave the next day to go to New York to promote it and it got to the point where I said, ‘I will not be getting on that plane tomorrow … and I will not be doing one interview unless this is removed.’”
Looking back on his decision to be a part of Flipping Out, Jeff said he didn’t seek out a position in reality television.
“I was literally discovered. And I did this for money,” he stated. “I did this for a platform, to promote my business. [I] did this to build [my] businesses. [I] did this to create multiple streams of income.”
