Some of them came back to Calabasas and left it better than they found it. Some of them are still working on it.
Reality TV rarely rewards genuine growth. The genre runs on conflict, not resolution — and the people who change the most tend to make the least entertaining television. What makes “Calabasas Confidential” different is that the growth and the drama are the same story. The cast members who grew the most are the ones whose arcs were the most compelling to watch. That is not a coincidence. That is good casting.
Here is where everyone landed after a summer that, as Dylan put it, really sparked some shit.
1. Jemma Durrant
No one on this cast walked further than Jemma.
She started the season angry, reactive, and living inside a version of herself that was still 17 years old in the hallway of Calabasas High School. Every time Dylan’s name came up, every time Suede drifted toward him, every time Emma walked into a room — the past came with it. She dyed her hair four colors in three months once trying to feel pretty again after what he did. That is where she started.
She ended the season standing on a balcony telling Dylan directly that she’d been holding onto a version of him that didn’t exist anymore. She accepted his apology. She took accountability for the way she’d handled things — the clapping, the screaming, the nights she gave him the reaction he was waiting for. She introduced herself to him like they were meeting for the first time. She let go.
That is not small. That is the entire point of the show.
2. Dylan Wolf
Dylan came in with a villain edit and spent the first half of the season earning it. He showed up to Jemma’s party with Emma. He flirted with Suede at Kiki-Chella. He redirected blame onto Nicole after the Yamashiro date. He told Preston that Jemma could kick sand up the coast. The people who warned Suede about him weren’t wrong — they were just describing the old version.
The new version sat with his sister and told her he didn’t want to be here anymore at one point. The new version drove to the beach house and said out loud, to the person he hurt most, that she was a victim of his own mental warfare and that he was sorry. The new version has been living with guilt and said so.
The apology to Jemma is the season’s defining moment of accountability, and he earned it by being honest about what it cost him to get sober and what it costs him to live with who he was. That’s not a villain. That’s someone who did the work and showed up.
3. Emma Medrano
Emma arrived as the potential mean girl — the one everyone had a story about, the one Jemma built a whole season of resentment around, the one the group had already decided on before she opened her mouth.
She ended the season as one of the most self-aware people in the cast. The scene with her mom at Sunrose reframes her entire arc in one conversation: her parents separated, she fell apart, she lost all her friends at the lowest point of her life, she got so depressed she had hives on her body, and she rebuilt herself through therapy into someone careful and guarded and occasionally too blunt for rooms that weren’t ready for it. She knows trust doesn’t come easy to her. She knows loneliness. She knows what it feels like to look around a room full of people and realize nobody has her back.
That kind of self-knowledge takes more work than most of the cast put in all summer. The fact that she ended the season alone on a beach towel while Ben and Emilie kissed twenty feet away — knowing something about him that Emilie didn’t — and chose not to blow it up says something about who she is now versus who she was in high school. The therapy worked. Calabasas just wasn’t ready for the result.
4. Hercy Miller
Hercy started the season as a basketball player. He ended it as someone who had to figure out who he was without the thing he’d built his entire identity around.
The NCAA called. He didn’t get his year back. Basketball, in the form he’d always chased it, is over. And sitting at the dinner table at that beach house, surrounded by people who love him, he said it wasn’t the end of Hercy. Just a different path.
That is not a small thing to arrive at in real time, on camera, at 24. Most people take years to make peace with the version of their dream that didn’t work out. Hercy had one summer and a Rose and Thorn game to get there. His dad told him early in the season that a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. By the finale, Hercy had picked a direction — he just didn’t know yet what it was going to be called.
Thankfully, after filming, Hercy did get his second chance. How he handled it in the moment, though, shows major growth and adaptability.
5. Nicoole Sahebi
Nicole started the season trying to fit back into a place that made her feel small the first time around, inserting herself into every conflict with the best intentions and absorbing none of the consequences. Emma clocked it. Suede felt it. Even Nicole admitted it — she was the one holding matches and calling it love.
She ended the season crying at a bar after Emma told her she talks about other people because if she talked about herself nobody would listen — and then driving down the coast in a convertible saying “f—k you, Emma Medrano, not you gaslighting me into thinking I’m a bad friend.” That shift matters. She stopped taking responsibility for everyone else’s messes and started asking whether the people she was protecting actually deserved it. That’s growth. It just arrived dressed as a breakdown.
6. Preston Pippen
Preston spent most of the season being everyone’s safe landing — the one who showed up with cookies, who mediated without taking sides, who gave Alexie the pep talk and Dylan the benefit of the doubt and Jemma the space to be emotional without judgment. That’s not nothing. But it’s also not growth — it’s just being steady.
What changed for Preston was the moment he stopped performing steadiness and said the thing out loud: he has feelings for Alexie. He’s been trying to say it all summer. By the finale, he booked the Miami trip and asked her to come. Somebody who avoids emotional risk as reliably as Preston does doesn’t do that without something shifting. It might be the quietest arc on the show. It’s still an arc.
7. Suede Brooks
Suede came in as the wisest person in the room and spent six episodes proving she wasn’t immune to the thing she warned Jemma about. She called Dylan a prick the first day she met him. She gave him the most thorough co-sign of anyone in the group six weeks later. She sat between his legs at a beach day while Jemma watched from across the sand.
But she ended the season with the clearest-eyed read on what happened: she got got by a boy. She said it out loud to the cameras. She apologized to Jemma without conditions, which is more than most people in this cast managed. And she told Dylan directly that she finally understood what he did to Jemma and that the way he treats women isn’t acceptable.
She came in as the big sister. She had to learn the lesson she was giving out. That counts.
8. Alexie Olivo
Alexie spent the season being considerate of Emilie in ways Emilie never reciprocated — and slowly coming to terms with the fact that she’d been doing it for years. The fight at Sagebrush was painful precisely because Alexie knew exactly how Emilie was going to behave and it still hurt.
By the finale, she’d done something harder: she was moving to New York anyway, she booked the Miami trip with Preston, and she found a new best friend in Raine along the way. Growth for Alexie this season wasn’t about a big confrontation. It was about finally letting the evidence speak for itself.
9. Kimora Lewis
Kimora threw a carnival to celebrate her own music, left it in tears, and spent the rest of the season processing what it means when your best friend turns out to be someone you didn’t actually know. That is a real and legitimate grief, and she carried it with more grace than the situation required.
Her growth this season is quieter than most because the show didn’t give her enough space to show what came after Kiki-Chella. What it did show is a woman who named what hurt her, who held her line, and who finished the summer with her music intact. That’s enough.
10. Sterling Retzlaff
Sterling arrived as the show’s most stable variable and stayed that way. His growth this season is less about personal transformation and more about building something real — a friend group he genuinely loves, a relationship he’s actively tending, a career he’s trying to figure out without his dad’s well-location backup plan. The conversation with Brynn in the morning is small and honest and more emotionally functional than anything else that happened at that beach house. Sterling didn’t need to grow. He needed to show up. He did.
11. Ben Favaedi
Ben arrived late, caused significant collateral damage to two friendships without meaning to, told a woman he was falling in love with her while carrying information about his ex that she still doesn’t have. He’s likable and he’s not malicious. He also has some things to reckon with that the season didn’t quite get to. Check back in Season 2.
Honorable Mentions: Jodie & Raine
Jodie and Raine each had meaningful personal moments this season — Jodie opening up about the PTSD from the Jordyn fallout, and Raine sitting with her dad and saying the fear of the unknown out loud. The two were not central enough to the season’s main arcs to rank fairly. That’s a Season 2 conversation.
The Emilie Question
Emilie is the only cast member who is genuinely hard to place on a growth spectrum — not because her arc was unclear, but because it moved in the wrong direction. She started the season as the composed, mature one who was simply too evolved for high school drama. She ended it having walked out of two apologies, called her oldest friend a gaslighter, and told the cameras “he chose” while shrugging. The self-awareness she demonstrated early — “I think a lot of problems this summer are projection” — never translated into accountability. It just became a more polished version of the same deflection.
That’s not decline exactly. It’s more like the mask coming off. The Emilie at the end of the season is probably the same Emilie who was there at the beginning. The show just had time to show us both sides.
Calabasas Confidential Season 1 is streaming now on Netflix.
Read next:
- The Jemma, Suede & Dylan Triangle on ‘Calabasas Confidential’ Explained — and Where They Are Now
- ‘Calabasas Confidential’ Cast: Where Are They Now After Season 1?
- Why Jemma Durrant’s History With Dylan Wolf Still Shapes ‘Calabasas Confidential’
- Hercy Miller’s NBA Journey: What to Know About the ‘Calabasas Confidential’ Star’s Basketball Career
- ‘Calabasas Confidential’ Season 1 Finale: It Really Sparked Some Shit
For more “Calabasas Confidential,” check out our Full “Calabasas Confidential” Guide here.
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