Entertainment

Stassi Pulls Back The Curtain On ‘Queen Bees’

by Kristie Rohwedder

Eight years ago, the first (and only) season of Queen Bees, a reality show about “mean girls” learning how to be not-mean, premiered on the channel formerly known as The N, and the series still seems too good (and too bonkers) to be true. I fell in love with this program for a bunch of reasons. (Yoanna House from America’s Next Top Model was the host of the show, there was a giant progress report card that brought the drama episode after episode, there was a bizarre speed dating scene that made me feel like I was wearing night vision goggles, and so on.) However, there is one element that shines brighter than the rest: A few years after she and her family were on The Amazing Race, Stassi Schroeder was on Queen Bees . Alas, it sounds like Stassers does not share my enthusiasm for The N's short-lived personality makeover series. In a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight, the ranch dressing-obsessed Vanderpump Rules star had a few things to say about, as she calls it, “that embarrassing other show.”

"I lied about who I was,” Schroeder told Entertainment Tonight. “I had to tell stories about how I was mean to people, and I made them all up! Most of the girls in there were not, like, actual mean girls.”

Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

Whoa, whoa, whoa. The mean bees on Queen Bees were not mean bees after all? Consider me duped. This is basically “The Hills was fake” all over again, i.e., I am reeling right now.

Schroeder continued:

But they filmed us 24/7 and we lived in a house for a month and had therapy every day, so we convinced ourselves that we were bad people that needed therapy. That I was actually mean. Once it all ended I was like, I just had to do full-on method acting to make this work. And then to bounce back afterward.

Dang. For a silly TV show about star sticker charts and billboard design challenges and whatever, the competitors’ experiences sound wildly emotionally draining. If the Queen Bees cast got together and wrote a book about what it was like to be on the series, I would read the bee-jeezus out of it. Just putting it out there.

“I had nightmares for — oh my god, so long after that show,” Schroder added. “That cameras were always filming me and making me be something I'm not. When you're filmed 24/7, it's scary. I couldn't do that again."

Dang. Schroeder said Queen Bees was “the biggest mindf*ck” she has ever been through. And that’s coming from someone who has been at the eye of multiple Pump Rules drama storms.

Who knew a show on a kids' channel could be more of a mindf*ck than, say, Schroeder's battle with Kristen Doute and Jax Taylor throughout Season 2? Or Schroeder and Taylor's relationship throughout Season 1? Or Schroeder's decision to leave after Season 3, only to return in the middle of Season 4? Stassi Schroeder, that's who.

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