Steven McBee Jr. isn’t ready to quit just yet.
Following an explosive third season and months of drama that continued well after cameras stopped rolling, Steven McBee Jr. is speaking out for the first time in an exclusive interview with the Roxanne and Shantel podcast.
During the conversation, Steven opened up about everything from his highly publicized breakup with Allie Eklund to the fallout from Stagecoach, his family’s financial struggles, his father Steve McBee Sr.’s upcoming release from prison and what the future could hold for the hit Bravo series.
And despite everything that came with Season 3, Steven admitted he would welcome another opportunity to share his life with viewers.
When asked whether he would be happy ending the McBee family’s story with Season 3 or if he would want to continue filming, Steven acknowledged that emotions have been running high for the entire family.
“Well, I think for my family and I, I’m really bad about speaking in superlatives. So always and never, right? And I need to get away from that,” Steven explained. “My family inherently does the same, so we’re ‘never doing that again.’ Like, yeah, you know, it’s in the height of the emotional state I’m in, the height of some of the online backlash.”
Steven went on to make it clear that his experience with Bravo and the production team itself has been a positive one.
“Here’s what I will say. The network has been extremely good to me. The production company has been extremely good to me. I have a lot of people that care about not only me, but my family, from the network down to production. We’re treated well.”
Steven also took responsibility for some of the intense backlash he faced following Season 3, particularly when it came to his relationship with Allie Eklund.
“A lot of this online backlash is my own doing, not only from the mistake I made, obviously, in the way that I handled the post-Stagecoach reaction, but also just like bringing a girl on to the show that I hardly knew and then, you know, trying to marry her and bring her into the businesses a month after knowing her,” Steven admitted. “Like, a lot of this comes back to one person and the person staring directly in the mirror at me.”
Still, Steven says he would love the opportunity to return for another season and show viewers another side of himself.
“To answer your question, I would love to have the opportunity, a mulligan, I guess you could say,” Steven revealed. “I do want the chance to show people that I’m not this horrible person.”
Steven also acknowledged that he has things he continues to work on personally.
“I have anger issues. I’d be the first to admit that. And I’m working. It was not something that I was unaware of at the time of the Stagecoach incident. I’d been in therapy. I still am in therapy. I still am working on myself. So I understand that I have some flaws that I absolutely need to work on, but I am not what so many headlines, what my ex has attempted to make me out to be over the last three months.”
As for what Steven would want viewers to see in a potential Season 4, he says there is much more to the McBee family than the chaos viewers witnessed throughout Season 3.
“I would love to have the opportunity to showcase, you know, my family and I. Yes, there’s a lot of drama in our lives, but 95% of the time we are as thick as can be.”
And there is already one major life event that could potentially play out in front of cameras: Steve McBee Sr.’s return home from prison.
Steven said the family “cannot wait” to have his father back and believes his time away may ultimately have changed him for the better.
“We cannot wait to have him back here. I think prison and that time to do nothing but just read and reflect is going to be the best thing that’s ever happened to him,” Steven said. “I hope that the way that he talks now, the way that he acts now, and the things that he says, I hope they stick whenever he gets out of prison. And if so, I think there’s a lot of good things to come.”
Steven continued, “I think that, you know, he’s going to be a force to be reckoned with in a good way. So again, I’m hoping for the best for that, and I hope it sticks. But as of what he’s saying right now, I think it’s going to be a really, really good thing for our family.”
When asked whether the family would be open to Bravo cameras capturing Steve Sr.’s return, similar to how viewers watched the family drop him off before he reported to prison, Steven didn’t rule it out.
“I mean, I don’t want to speak for everyone in my family. I think that we would entertain the idea,” he revealed.
Steven also admitted that the enormous response to Season 3 has been an adjustment for the entire family.
“It is hard. I mean, yes, Jesse is struggling, but we’re all struggling. My mom is struggling. I’m struggling. This is not easy. We’re not used to this life,” Steven explained. “And again, it goes back to how big Season 3 has been.”
He added that while previous seasons brought some criticism, the attention surrounding Season 3 has been on “an entirely new level.”
For now, nothing about Season 4 has been confirmed, but Steven’s position is clear: despite the difficult year, he isn’t ready to walk away.