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Stassi Schroeder just had the craziest week of her life. 

Her new reality show, House of Stassi, dropped on Hulu last Thursday, a day after debuting its first two episodes on Freeform July 29. It quickly shot to the No. 1 spot on the streamer’s TV chart, alongside a No. 2 debut across TV and film; House of Stassi has remained in the top six spots on Hulu’s daily TV ranking over its first week of release. 

“That is a core memory I will never forget,” Schroeder tells The Hollywood Reporter of learning her show’s debut stats. “I freaked out with my team and [husband] Beau [Clark] and everyone. We sat there crying… I’m just so thankful.” 

Breaking out of her role as a reality TV “It” girl after eight starring seasons on Bravo‘s Vanderpump Rules, Schroeder now slips into a executive producer role for House of Stassi. The show, like fellow unscripted Hulu hit The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, does not shy away from acknowledging the optics that they’re filming for a reality show. 

Breaking the fourth wall was important to Schroeder because “we set out to make the realest possible show we could.” She adds, “If we didn’t acknowledge that we are filming a show, there’s automatically a layer of fakeness.

“Back when I was on Bravo, we weren’t allowed to do that, so we had it in our heads to just pretend that’s not what was happening,” Schroeder explains. “And to me, that doesn’t make the realest show that you can.”

The former Vanderpump star says no one from her former Bravo family has congratulated her on House of Stassi’s success, except for Tom Schwartz. “I don’t expect it from anyone. I think that we’re like opposing teams. That’s what it kind of feels like, and that doesn’t bother me at all.”

House of Stassi’s road to Freeform and Hulu was long. Her pitch for the series centered around her and her castmates bearing all for the cameras, heightened by her added expertise of the genre. “I kept saying, ‘You don’t understand; I know reality TV, and I will bleed out for this. And you’re gonna see dynamics that we normally don’t get to see represented on TV,’” Schroeder says.

To prove her point, she cites her marriage to Beau Clark, and “the fact that our gender roles are kind of reversed.” Schroeder is the booked and busy breadwinner, and, in season one, Clark opens up about feeling stuck at home running their household. She also notes the relationship between her dear friend Taylor Strecker and her wife Taylor “Teddy” Donohue, who was pregnant during filming with their first child.

The show was announced in August 2024, alongside news that Schroeder would reunite onscreen with her Vanderpump Rules boss Lisa Vanderpump for season two of Vanderpump Villa. She had already pitched her series to Hulu before boarding Villa, she says, when the idea of the crossover was raised. But in order for Schroeder to sign onto Vanderpump Villa, she had conditions. 

“When I said I would do Villa, I was like, ‘Listen, if I’m gonna do Villa, you have to greenlight my show.’ [They said,] ‘We can’t do that just yet.’ I was like, ‘Fine, then you’re gonna have a press release about it,’” she explains. “Everyone thought I was insane, and I’m like, ‘Trust, if we just release a press release, it will get so much buzz that it’ll force this along a little bit more.’ And it worked.”

Hulu was where Schroeder wanted House of Stassi to land. “We put so much hope into it landing at Hulu, even though I still had to pitch everywhere else. I’ve learned a lot during this process; that’s just etiquette in terms of pitching shows,” she says.

Schroeder’s pitch always included her being an EP, which she says “was the hardest part” of the process, that of “actually finding a production company that wanted to work with us that was willing to let me be a producer. Most everyone but one said no.” 

But someone said yes, and secured that deal: The show is produced by Scout Productions and Belcheri Productions, with Schroeder’s former Vanderump Rules EPs Erin Foye and Jenna Rosenfeld carrying that title over to House of Stassi, alongside Schroeder herself. 

Vanity credits aren’t uncommon for budding talent (the cast of Mormon Wives were upped to EPs for their fourth season). But Schroeder more than holds the IMDb credit when it comes to her producing House of Stassi; she has her hand in all aspects of the show. However, she says she “took my producer hat off as much as possible during filming” to ensure a fair process for her cast. 

“I don’t think I even knew back when we started [House of Stassi] how much I would be involved in the process,” she says. “I made sure to tell the rest of the cast on day one, ‘Just because I’ve been your leader and I’m having those talks [in my role as an EP], right now, as of today, I’m your cast member, co-star, friend. I won’t know about your storylines. I won’t know what you’re filming, because that’s not fair.’”

House of Stassi has prompted much online chatter, and Schroeder has seen it all. 

“The rush of having everyone be like, ‘We’re obsessed.’ ‘This is something so new and different,’ and ‘This is a new category of reality TV;’ the fact that everyone is watching and then talking about it, I feel so satisfied and blessed,” she says. “But it’s also been a rough week, because I forgot what it was like to be out there and have so many opinions. It’s crazy to have a week that is the best week of your life also be a hard one.” 

Schroeder says that now, with House of Stassi released to the world, “I forgot how polarizing I was.” She explains, “People really either want to be against me or be for me, and I’m a bigger fan of the gray area.” 

Then come the think pieces and critiques of the dynamics in Schroeder and Clark’s marriage, specifically following House of Stassi’s finale dinner party that went awry. Their close friends tried to raise concerns about their marriage, they deemed it an “intervention” of sorts, but it ended in a disastrous fight between the married couple. 

Schroeder admits it’s not surprising that the conflict prompted discussion, “because we were both so vulnerable and didn’t hold back and showed real married couple things and issues.” She says she and Clark have “had a million conversations since then, and that’s something that we continue to work on.” However, she’s not pleased with how her friends approached the conversation. 

“I still think that all my friends handled that incorrectly,” she says. “That’s not something you bring up to a person at a big Christmas holiday dinner party, that’s something that you guys come to me directly and say. And I will have it out with them, [with a potential] season two.

‘My sadness really outweighed my producer head in that moment,” she admits. “That was a really hard night for me. And while I knew that, everyone’s just doing what I said and making good TV, it hurt more than I could appreciate it.” 

She still wants to have more conversations about the so-called intervention. “I can see everyone’s point of view a teensy bit. The execution was absolute shit, and that is something that I need to talk to them about,” she says.

Outside of her discussion about her marriage, former Vanderpump Rules star Katie Maloney revealed she experienced the early stages of an emotional affair in her marriage to co-star Tom Schwartz. Schroeder’s sister Georgi Aubin and Clark’s friend Rob Evors denied sleeping together in the season, but were caught on a hot mic talking about hooking up for months. “I don’t believe either of them right now,” Schroeder says of them denying a romance. 

“They keep saying, ‘No, we were just we were messing with you guys,'” Schroeder says of Aubin and Evors, “And I’m like… that’s footage we found on your microphone. What do you mean you were just messing with us?”

The reality star-EP says that’s what she hopes an all-but-announced second season of House of Stassi will dive into, the lives of her inner circle. And she’d love for the audience to see more of her life as a mom. 

“I’m bummed that a lot of the scenes with me, Beau and our kids really didn’t make it in,” she says. “I see the criticism online of being like, ‘Stassi’s a bad mom’ or whatever. I’m like, ‘You didn’t even see me parent. You didn’t even see a scene with me being a mom. So how could you even say that?’”

A House of Stassi season two renewal won’t prohibit her from returning to Villa, if she has it her way — “I really love doing Vanderpump Villa. …  I love the staff, I love Lisa; that is a dream job,” she says.

“My hopes for the future is that we can continue to do this, evolve, show more stories that people want, have conversations and debates about [the show]. Like, that’s the dream,” she says. “The things that I’ve learned is I guess I’m not always right, and I need thicker skin sometimes.”

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Season one of House of Stassi is now streaming on Hulu.