There Was Drama Surrounding Bobby Berk's Exit from 'Queer Eye'

By Dustin Rowles | TV | November 17, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | November 17, 2023 |

I don’t know what goes on behind the scenes of Netflix’s Queer Eye, but I’ve watched enough episodes to know that Bobby Berk spends much of the episode separated from the rest of the group, mostly because he’s doing the hard part. He’s not shopping for a new outfit, giving a haircut, or teaching someone to make a pasta dish; he’s redesigning an entire house, adding a new wing, and landscaping 60 acres of farmland in three days.

I know that I’m not the only person to make this observation, but anyone who has seen Queer Eye must know that Bobby Berk deserves his own show. It’s unclear if that is what’s going to happen, but it is clear that his exit from the series is not all hugs and gift baskets.

According to an US Weekly source, Berk was “asked to leave” the series “because he wasn’t vibing with the cast.” That same source noted that there were “many challenges” that led to his exit. Maybe those challenges included the fact that he had to build an entire skyscraper made of John Deere parts in the front yard of some toothless Ozark hillbilly in 28 hours.

“There were many challenges with scheduling [and] there was a loss of interest from Bobby filming the show,” the source told the magazine. “The network and the cast thought it was time to bring in fresh blood. His heart was not in it and the rest of the cast started to resent him because of that.”

A second source, however, told the publication that he was not asked to leave and that the “decision was amicable.”

The first source was probably a cast member or a producer, and the second source was probably Bobby Berk’s agent. We know how this works. We also know that the truth was probably somewhere in between, which is to say: Maybe Berk did lose interest. Maybe he wasn’t “vibing” with the cast, but perhaps that’s because he was too busy to spend all day vibing. After all, he had to defuse a bomb and reproduce an entire Los Angeles neighborhood in a small Texas town with LEGOs in 12 minutes.