ET video chatted with Loverboy founders Kyle Cooke and Amanda Batula about the end of 'Summer House's fourth season and what's next.
Summer should be fun. A near-worldwide shutdown due to a pandemic? Not fun… but it is necessary, even if it messes with Summer House's next season.
"We're very hopeful," Summer House star Kyle Cooke tells ET of being able to shoot a fifth season of the Bravo sleeper hit. While the network has yet to announce whether the series has been renewed, ratings for its currently airing fourth season have been hitting series highs as of late.
"We never find out what's happening until it happens," Kyle’s fiancée, Amanda Batula, notes of getting to shoot a season. "I mean, we're coming up with our own plans on how we can make season five work. … It's like, let’s do this Big Brother-style. Let’s just throw us all in the house."
Camera crews typically start documenting the Summer House cast's lives in June, but that timeline might not be possible in 2020, as shelter-in-place orders keep getting extended as the nation fights to "flatten the curve."
“I mean, if there is one show on Bravo that can actually pull off a quarantine-based show, it's probably Quarantine House,” Kyle adds, only half-joking. “We could film season five in, like, three weeks.”
Should season five happen, the couple says they’d like to see the cast stay the same as season four, which is a first for Kyle.
"It's the first time I feel like I can speak on behalf of, maybe even some of the producers -- although they'd never let me -- where if nothing changed, I'd be perfectly cool with it, you know what I mean?" he says, but also notes that there's always "a little bit of turnover and change" due to "life events" and "friendships evolving."
"[It's] even as simple as Lindsay [Hubbard] and her boyfriend, Stephen," Amanda adds. "Who knows what happens with that, but he could be in the mix in the summer, or in the house this summer. Or maybe Carl [Radke] picks up a new girlfriend in quarantine. Like, we have no idea what's ahead for us."
"I would love for maybe not the people to change as much as, like, the actual house," she says. "That would be great."
"We've explored every nook and cranny, if you know what I mean," Kyle quips.
ET video chatted with Kyle and Amanda, who are currently isolating together at their apartment in New York City and attempting to plan their wedding. They have a date set for this fall, with save-the-dates already out to their guests.
"It's really weird to, like, get excited about planning a wedding that you don't even know if it's going to happen," Amanda says. "You want to move forward, you want to book all these people. But, like, who knows?"
"I do think there's gonna be some return to, like, 'the new normal,'" Kyle interjects. "Not normal, but whatever the new normal is. But in a post- or, like, a pre-vaccine world, do weddings happen?"
"Yeah, is there, like, a limit on how many people you can have?" Amanda asks. "At what point do they let 250 of your closest friends and family get together in a confined space? … But we are staying optimistic. I mean, I think there are worse things that can happen."
"Whether the wedding ceremony happens or not, we'll probably just end up getting married no matter what, and celebrating it later on," she adds, which is apparently news to Kyle.
“That's what people are doing these days,” Amanda notes. “They're like, let’s just go, fill out the paperwork and, you know, celebrate later.”
Wedding planning was also on a little bit of a delay as the couple devoted their time to their business, Loverboy, a range of alcoholic, canned teas that is expanding into wine-based spritzers. The new Loverboy Spritz is the first of their products available for purchase online, though its price point caused a little commotion online when they first announced it, especially amid a worldwide pandemic.
"This is actually nine months in the making," Kyle notes. "So it was a complete coincidence, quite frankly."
"We always planned on launching it in April, before COVID-19," Amanda reiterates. "It was like a blessing and a curse. The timing was good with, you know, everyone staying home, wanting to drink, but the pricing comes off as a little bit insensitive. But, we are a small business, too, and we are just trying to, you know, get by."
Currently, you can buy a pack of 12 cans for $69, which breaks down to a little less than $6 per can.
"People are just used to comparing everything to White Claw these days," Kyle says of the initial sticker shock, which led to headlines that made it look like just one can cost $69.
"This is a cocktail in a can," he explains. "I pay $18 for a spritz at a restaurant. So, just under six bucks a can, ready to go? Why not?"
"We're gonna come up with a charity drive to just, you know, acknowledge, yes, this is a premium product, and we want to find ways to give back,” he adds. “I would've loved to time that with our launch last week, but keep your eyes peeled. We wanna do something special."
In the meantime, fans can watch Kyle and Amanda in the final few episodes of Summer House's fourth season. Amanda teases that viewers will see her hit her "breaking point" in an upcoming episode.
"I was in a different headspace," she says, thinking back to last summer. "I knew I was just, like, very on edge and frustrated with everyone all summer, and my life in general. And it definitely comes off that way. There's no ‘good edit’ for Amanda, no."
"We kinda started out in this place where it almost looked like we were incapable of having fun," Kyle notes. "But I'm glad that other relationships took the weight off our shoulders for once."
One of those couples would be Hannah Berner and Luke Gulbranson, who spent all summer flirting, not labeling what they were and, to Amanda's surprise, engaging in a lot more heavy petting than Hannah admitted to.
"I know that they would, like, make out and kiss or whatever, but I didn't realize, like, how much she was going to his bedroom and making out," she confesses. "Or, like, they would kiss in random places. I was not fully aware of how much it was happening."
"And Hannah was playing it, like, super cool," she adds. "[It’s been] cute to watch."
There was also the surprise coupling of Lindsay and Carl, which ended nearly as quickly as it began. Kyle and Amanda say they were thankful that the pair moved on from each other as fast as they did, because if they had been together or fought all summer long, the summer would have been miserable. In the final episodes of season four, Carl will actually move onto another housemate, Jules Daoud, who Kyle and Amanda admit is getting a little bit of an unfair edit. She wasn’t constantly walking into rooms asking, "What’s going on?" At least, they didn’t notice if she was doing that.
"I mean, I feel like I was that way, too," Amanda says. "I would walk into Hannah and Paige [DeSorbo's] room all the time and be, like, what are you guys doing? What are you talking about? Like, what is happening? But, obviously they are not showing me saying that. So, it was, uh… yeah. Poor Jules."
Summer House airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Bravo, while Loverboy Spritz is available for purchase now on the brand’s official website.
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