.jpg)
This is an edition of the newsletter Pulling Weeds With Chris Black, in which the columnist weighs in on hot topics in culture. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Thursday.
I have been watching Southern Charm, Bravo’s reality show about a close-knit group of Charleston, South Carolina residents, since it started in 2014. The show features the usual reality-TV conventions: copious drinking, dating, and fighting, with just a dash of Southern cotillion-trained blue-blood porch-sitting Protestant aristocracy. Charleston serves as a beautiful backdrop, but is also a character on the show—Georgian townhouses, single houses with piazzas built to catch a breeze, and pastel facades that look suspiciously like they were designed for Instagram a few centuries early. It’s orderly, gracious, and a little smug.
Not to bring up the dreaded “manosphere,” but Southern Charm does a good job of showing men talking about their feelings. The core three—Shep Rose, Austen Kroll, and Craig Conover—have no issue hashing out their issues of a few shots of Casamigos at a beach bar. Conover is a great-looking lawyer from Delaware who has navigated his reality-celebrity status correctly. He launched Sewing Down South, a lifestyle brand that started with (I shit you not) decorative pillows and has expanded into an "eight-figure" business selling apparel, home decor, and other products. He keeps an immaculate garden, practices beekeeping, and is an investor in a few restaurants and bars. His recent breakup with fellow reality star and podcaster Paige DeSorbo has been well chronicled online and Conover is once again searching for love on Season 11, which is airing on Bravo as we speak.
We chatted on Zoom about ambition, what his law school dean told him about doing reality TV, his DMs, and getting away from downtown.
Craig Conover: I love the production side. I love making television and sharing my life with people. I just don't want this to be my only thing. After 12 years, there are more stories to be told.
Yeah. No. I appreciate it. And that's what is fun, because I have a good relationship with Southern Charm's production company, Haymaker, but I run a lot of this shit when I'm filming. I've done it for a long time. Obviously, not in an official capacity, but they're always like, "You should come produce." For a lot of my law background, on the litigation side of things, you're just telling a story to the jury, and you're laying this story out fundamentally. So, I'm excited. We've got three concepts on the unscripted side right now. It will either work or it won’t, but you can't wait for permission in life. No one’s going to come to me one day and be like, "You know what, Craig? We think it's your turn to make television."
I was in a movie two years ago, but the script was written 20 years ago. They won the best script at the Austin Film Festival 20 years ago, and then 18 years later, the movie was made. I don't want to have to wait that long to do these.
I see it in the industry I'm in—if you don't have purpose or value, and all you do is wait for these three months to film, you’re a hamster on a wheel.
I always tell people, "This weird guy named Whitney just showed up in Charleston one day.” We definitely didn't think it was real. We thought he was just trying to meet girls. And he's still doing it for those reasons, but I remember talking to my dean, because I was in my second year of law school. And Dean Laughton was like, "Look, Craig. What will you regret more? Not doing it and wondering what if, or doing it and dealing with the consequences later?" And five years later, I was in front of the Supreme Court of South Carolina explaining what a reality show was and what my relationship was to a known felon.
Paige and I both had followings before our relationship, but people really bonded with us as we dated. These are universal experiences that people at home are going through. They’re watching people try to figure out their lives. But the parasocial relationship is crazy. I did it in Toronto the other day, I saw Angela from 90 Day Fiance; she was dealing with the Delta person, and I was almost like, "What's up, Angela?" Then I was like, "Wait. I don't actually know her." But it's fun to go around the country and do these meet-and-greets where people are like, "I feel like I know you." I say, "Well, now you do." It's a weird thing to be in people's living rooms. I started filming when I was 24. I'm 37 now. You just try to grow.
Charleston is one of the main characters on our show. As much as I hated the Board of Architectural Review for making everything impossible, to their credit, Charleston still looks the same as it did decades ago. I love Nashville, but Nashville is a new city, even though it's not.
But that's because [Charleston is] still protected. There are fewer and fewer places where it feels like stepping back in time. Also, people are pretty nice there. It's funny, my friends just moved down from New York, and I took them and did the whole circuit. They were like, "Are these people full of shit or are they actually excited that we moved here?" No, they're legitimately pumped that this is your first time at Halls Chophouse. They're not fucking with you. But Charleston, I don't know if the show would work anywhere else. That's our ringer.
They just got a star. Shep and our producers, their top is Chubby Fish. If you came to visit and did a one-day in Charleston, we would go to 167 for lunch. On the golf cart. It would just be the loop. We'd go to Red's for daytime drinks out on Shem Creek, and I'd tell you all the history out there of Forrest Gump and Outer Banks. See the dolphins play. Then I would take you to Halls for dinner. That's my loop.
They didn't teach us about the South. I'm from Delaware, above the Mason-Dixon, and I had never heard of Charleston. I ended up down there, but I had never owned a collared shirt before that. I was a baseball kid and a surfer kid. I loved the preppiness, the pastels; it was awesome. Look, some episodes and scenes have been removed from our show because 12 years ago, when we started filming, we were societally in a different place. The things that were on TV back then, people wouldn't even be able to receive now. So we highlighted stuff that no one had seen before.
Yeah. He sold the concept to NBC, and they loved it, but they didn't like the people in the sizzle reel. He was looking for these character profiles, and I matched one of them. His assistant was like, "I have two perfect guys for you." It was me and Cory. They knew I wouldn't do anything without him, so they cast us together, but it was a lie. They were actually only casting me. When they gave me the contract, Cory moved to Europe. I went to class one day, and he was just gone. We didn't talk for three years, because he was like, "I don't want to be mad at you for doing this, but…" Anyway, they offered me the job. It was the first big decision in my life. To this day, I'm still a yes guy. There are 150 other people on Bravo, and not too many of them have the pathway that I've taken, and that’s because I say yes to everything.
That's the only way it works. You see shows skirt away from that because it’s easier not to be transparent or sugarcoat things. But these shows only work because of the openness. Like, I had one bad day out of 12 weeks of filming this year. But that's life, right?
No, it won't be until the end. And I remember I called Andy and told him because I was stressed. He was like, "Who cares?"
"This works because you're imperfect."
Yeah, I'm in Mount Pleasant. I lived downtown for 10 years. I had to be taken out of a social environment to learn how to be by myself. If you live downtown, you can golf cart or walk anywhere. Something is happening every night. So, I moved 20 minutes away to Mount Pleasant, and that was my way to grow up. And that's my happy place. I can wake up, and my friends are already at the pool. And I'm like, "Oh, what's up, guys?" Shep went even further; he went all the way to the beach to get away from downtown. That's why this season I find myself dating downtown, and at one point I'm like, "What am I doing? I've done this before. Why am I out on King Street?"
You look to make yourself feel good. It's words of affirmation. It's funny because Austen reminded me of something I used to say. I haven't taken Adderall in, like, five years, but he said when he started the show, I used to tell producers, "Just tell me I'm pretty and give me an Adderall and I'll do whatever you want."
Now they think I'm in a relationship because people forget that we film these shows a year before. I've always met someone at work, though. Paige, I met while filming a show. I've been telling myself, like, "What would it even be like to meet up with someone that you hadn't met in person yet?" I know people do that all the time. I just haven't done that.
Oh, the behind-the-scenes show that I'm going to force them to make for the next BravoCon will be the hottest show. The behind-the-scenes that people still haven't heard about is just nuts.