How A Retreat With A Spiritual Healer Made The Flipping Outsters Total Professionals, JK, LOL

As another season of Flipping Out comes to an end, Jeff decides that his staff's lack of professionalism necessitates their all going on a mandatory retreat with a spiritual healer to work out their issues. Naturally, everyone's commitment to the process means they make tremendous strides and solve their problems permanently. Just kidding! Other than a moderate amount of lip service being paid to the idea of what a functional workplace might look like, nothing really changes. And: it's been seven years. Surely the show's producers don't believe that we believe it ever will, do they?

The premise of Flipping Out is inherent in its title: real estate developer Jeff Lewis flips houses while also having rage dumps all over his staff, all the time. Over the years, we've seen him do some really beautiful remodels (I wouldn't still be watching if we hadn't), and fire some real fuckups -- including, in one case, a guy whose on-the-job behaviour was so objectionable that it led, in part, to the end of his marriage to his co-worker, who continues to be employed by the company. That Jeff's lack of professionalism may be the root of many of the company's issues has always been a running theme, and one we've seen him deal with in various kinds of therapy, both legit (...with a therapist) and sketchy (psychics). In some ways, Jeff has mellowed: we don't see him having rage meltdowns as much as we used to, for example. But that just may be the result of his staff/cast having firmed up such that the only people who still work for him are the ones who aren't bothered by his mean sense of humour, which is why these ongoing attempts to gin up conflict seem, with increasing obviousness, to be completely manufactured for the cameras.

For example: Andrew. Right from the start, Andrew has been straight out of Dodge City, as I outlined more than a year ago. I won't go so far as to call him a grifter, but either there's something actually off about his life story, or he (or whoever) has come up with a persona for him with potential conflict baked in. Whatever his backstory, he's a problem now, and has been a problem all along -- so much that he quit and was re-hired for extremely dubious reasons. And this season he has barely acted any better, in both senses of the phrase, constantly making sexual remarks about his co-workers -- which, okay, so does his boss, so Andrew might as well -- but also about contractors and clients, which, no. There is no reason he would still be working for this company if there weren't cameras on him, and producers behind them needing something to story-edit -- and I feel like Gage's ongoing disgust with him is due to the fact that, as "Business Affairs," Gage is trying to grow the company and Andrew cannot possibly serve that mission, because, based on what we've seen, he's not just inappropriate but useless.

Therein lies the difference between Andrew and Jeff, though: Jeff is inappropriate and good at his job, and working on his projects must be fulfilling or else people would quit. I mean, people have quit, this season -- remember the intern? You might not, because she quit after one day after being subject to all the unprofessional sex talk flying around her. But everyone else who's still there has obviously done a cost-benefit analysis on it and made the right call for themselves. Sure, Vanina has to put up with a lot of loose talk about her new boobs, but that's the price of letting Jeff pay for her surgery, you know?

Jeff has an obvious track record of success to run on that supersedes the off-colour jokes he makes with or in front of the more straitlaced executives of companies like Dunn-Edwards or the various trade show directors for whom Jeff's designed model spaces -- but that's assuming those executives aren't primed to roll with it for the sake of the show and that Jeff isn't very different off-camera, which I can imagine he would be. And though the show tries hard to make us horrified on behalf of the people who "have to" work for someone as weird and aggressive as Jeff, at this point it's obviously a self-selecting group who have decided that he doesn't mean it and/or that even if he does, they don't care. Assuming that what we see is even real, Jeff is never going to change his behaviour until someone sues him. And since Bravo would probably settle it for him, probably not even then. So...maybe next season we can skip the fake retreat. I want to see Jeff remodeling a beautiful kitchen, not doing goddamn trust falls.