The first time Carl Radke appeared on television screens was during an episode of “Vanderpump Rules” that was actually a backdoor pilot for a new Bravo show, “Summer House.”
In the episode, Radke is 29, working in New York City and drinking copiously on the weekends in a Hamptons share house with his friends Kyle Cooke, Lindsay Hubbard and a few others.
The spinoff became a Bravo phenomenon all its own, one that has now spanned eight seasons, with Radke one of the few constants as the cast around him changed. Viewers have seen his tumultuous 30s play out onscreen: He has been in messy relationships, confronted his drinking and gotten sober, mourned the death of his brother and, in the Season 8 finale, called off his engagement.
Over coffee in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where at 6 feet 5 inches tall Radke was certainly the tallest person in the room, he imagined his life if it hadn’t been spent in front of cameras for the past several years. “I feel like I would probably be married and have a family, but living a very, like, a lower key life,” he said, before going through some of the moments that have defined his time on “Summer House” so far.
The early seasons: drinking, drinking, more drinking
Though many Bravo reality shows involved quite a bit of drinking (look no further than early seasons of “Vanderpump Rules”), Radke, Cooke and Hubbard were known to make others look like lightweights.
“There are weekends during Seasons 1 and 2 where they completely don’t show because we were so drunk,” Radke said. One specific weekend sticks out, he added, when the friends headed to an oyster farm but viewers never saw it.
“We were so drunk at the oyster farm, there was no story. Nothing was being really moved along. And just us shucking oysters and drunkenly saying stupid things.”
Bravo is currently managing a string of lawsuits, some of which include claims that producers encouraged an environment of heavy drinking. One “Real Housewives of New Jersey” cast member said that producers would provide alcohol, which sometimes led to extreme drunkenness. Another housewife, this one from the cast of “Real Housewives of New York City,” claimed that despite her being sober, producers continued to encourage her to drink.
Radke tells of a different experience.
“With the volume of drinking, only we decided to do that,” he said. It became such a part of their identity that Cooke started Loverboy, a business selling spiked iced tea, with Radke as a vice president of sales. “We loved to party. I’m telling you, they took drinks out of our hands.”
The middle seasons: reckoning with sobriety
Radke’s problems with alcohol became apparent as the show progressed. In a Season 4 episode, Cooke tells Hubbard that Radke showed up to a work event drunk, leaving Cooke to simultaneously play the roles of babysitter and worker.
Radke said seeing himself on the show actually helped him realize how serious his problem was, especially with how it dominated so much of his time.
“Every other Bravo show, you film a dinner or at a party and then you go home, in separate places. We go home, back to the same spot, where there’s more microphones and more cameras,” Radke said.
He made the decision to get sober before the fifth season, which was filmed during the first year of the Covid pandemic. Rather than traveling back and forth between the city and the Hamptons, the cast hunkered down in a Hamptons mansion for six weeks — working from home and trying to enjoy the social time.
Everything seemed like it was on the right track for Radke, until the unthinkable happened.
That August, with cameras filming, Radke got a call that his brother had died. His housemates rallied around him and he took a brief break from filming, but when he got back to the summer house, he started drinking again.
The anxiety and panic didn’t entirely hit Radke until six months later when he tried to come to terms with the fact that news of his brother’s death, and the way he coped, would be broadcast on national television.
“I went back to New York City, to my old SoHo apartment, and that’s when I just, like, started spiraling,” he said. “Drinking and using by myself. And just the fear of like, ‘This is going to play on TV.’”
Though the anxiety of the show’s dealing with his brother’s death led him down a dark path, Radke also credits the show with his survival.
“I’d like to think the show saved my life — seriously, I don’t know if I would have ever seen myself behave. I always thought that it was like, fun, people liked being around me, but over time, that wasn’t the case,” Radke said of his drinking.
The current season: engagement fallout
As Radke settled into sobriety, his main plot point on the show centered around his relationship with a fellow housemate, Lindsay Hubbard.
Radke and Hubbard had flirted with the idea of dating in earlier seasons, but it wasn’t until the seventh season that they made it official. By the end of that summer, after less than a year of dating, they were engaged. Their wedding was set for November 2023, and though audiences knew before the start of Season 8 in February that Radke had called it off, the events leading up to the breakup have played out onscreen over the past few months. Radke has come off as both a sympathetic figure and a villain as the relationship dissolved.
“I’m not proud of how I was handling the situation and how I was treating her. I mean, I was clearly frustrated and, you know, so I wish I had really been more direct,” Radke said. “You can clearly see I’m struggling to communicate my feelings and that’s not on her, that’s on me — I’m seeing myself blame and play victim, and I don’t want to be either.”
Looking to the future: a clean slate
As Radke reflects on his past eight years on television — almost the entirety of his 30s — he’s identified some things he’d like to do differently.
First, he is fully single for the first time in years. He noted that in the world of recovery, it is recommended that you be single for a full year at the start of your sobriety — but in every season of the show Radke has been in some sort of relationship. Now, he wants to take that advice.
Another point of tension this season came between Radke and Hubbard, about Radke’s work ethic (or lack thereof). He plans to use his sobriety as a new way to focus his career, working with Cooke on a nonalcoholic line of sparkling tea and developing a bar that serves nonalcoholic cocktails for people who want to be able to go out without drinking.
Though the “Summer House” finale just aired, filming for Season 9 begins shortly back in the Hamptons. Radke’s goals are simple.
“I’m looking forward to this summer because of my friends and getting back to having fun. Got one more summer before I’m 40,” he said with a laugh.
