Shep Rose Finally Admits He Has a Drinking Problem…Kinda

By Emma Chance | TV | January 12, 2024 |

By Emma Chance | TV | January 12, 2024 |

Last night was part 1 of the Southern Charm season 9 reunion, and while most of the season was taken up by the Austen Kroll/Taylor Ann Green/Olivia Flowers triangle, the biggest topic on the reunion couch was Shep Rose and his ever-problematic drinking habit.

Rose, 44, the ex-boyfriend of Green, is a perfect representation of the Peter Pan syndrome the men of Southern Charm are all, at some level, afflicted by. So fabled are Rose’s commitment issues that he had a spin-off dating show, Relationshep, in 2017. (His Instagram handle is still @relationshep, even though he didn’t end up with any of the women who vied for his heart.)

Rose and all of the SC dudes have always been heavy drinkers. This is maybe the only show on Bravo where the men are the more interesting, albeit grossly problematic, characters (except for maybe Real Housewives of New Jersey). The whole thing is basically them getting drunk and yelling at each other about their friendship and then cheating on their girlfriends and then yelling at each other about that. So, Shep Rose drinking so much that he blacks out for 72 hours and his friends have to babysit him, which is what he did at BravoCon this past fall, is nothing new. What is new is that this time, he has regrets.

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“I’m at a crossroads. I was out of control, drunk in Las Vegas. I scared the shit out of me,” Rose said. “I was blacked out. I can’t even tell you what happened.”

Host Andy Cohen chimed in to say that he saw Kroll, 36, trying to take care of Rose during the long weekend. Kroll, looking grave, replied, “That’s not the first time.”

Rose thanked his friends for their support and further expressed his remorse. He explained that he’d tried to invite Kroll and Craig Conover, 34, out to lunch to have this conversation with them before the reunion, but they refused the invitation.

“This road that you’re on ends with a cliff. I can’t be in that car anymore. That’s why I didn’t go to that meeting,” Conover said. “After BravoCon, it’s dark, but I was like, ‘He’s going to ruin his life and I have to be okay with that because we’ve been here before.”

When Cohen asked Rose what he was planning to do on this “crossroads,” he answered that he was no longer drinking liquor or taking shots and now only drinks beer, which was met with eye-rolls and pitying sighs from the rest of the cast.

But Conover understood. “I haven’t drank liquor in two years, but I had to make a massive change this summer. I’m an addict to that stuff,” he admitted. Rose replied by telling his friend, “I’m going to follow your lead.”

Cohen posited that maybe filming Southern Charm isn’t healthy for Rose. But if he didn’t have the show, what would he have? That was part of the problem in the first place. He admitted:

“I didn’t have anything. I thought, ‘Who am I? How am I of value to anybody?”

All of his friends have relationships and/or careers, and he’s just a rich, drunk, almost old man. Without the show, he wouldn’t even be a kind of famous rich, drunk, almost old man. Then again, maybe that would be the best thing for him.

He insisted he “can do it,” adding “Stay tuned.”