Tabatha Takes Over: All 5 Seasons Explained

Tabatha Takes Over ran for five seasons on Bravo, and it holds one of the better survival records we track, which surprises people who remember how blunt Tabatha Coffey could be. Across those five seasons, from 2008 to 2013, Coffey took over 50 businesses, mostly hair salons but also a dog groomer, a nightclub, and a beauty college. We track all 50 at Tabatha Takes Over, and 38 of them are still operating in some form today. Here is what each season covered.

Season 1 (2008): eight salons, a strong start

The show launched as Tabatha's Salon Takeover with an eight-episode first season in 2008, and it is the best-surviving season of the run: seven of its eight salons are still open. It opened at Ten Salon in Long Beach and included Martino Cartier Salon in Sewell, New Jersey, whose owner went on to become a well-known celebrity stylist and philanthropist. The first season set the template: Coffey walks in, runs the salon undercover for a week, and rebuilds it around competence and accountability rather than a flashy makeover. The survival record suggests the approach stuck.

The rest of the first season reads like a list of survivors. De Cielo Salon in Burbank is still open. Salon Tika in Rockville Centre is still open. The Loft on Broadway Salon in Long Beach and Hairlab in Woodland Hills both made it. Seven of eight enduring more than 15 years after their episode is the strongest single-season record on the show, and it is no accident that it is the purest salon season, before Coffey started branching into harder categories.

Seasons 2 and 3 (2009 to 2011): expanding beyond salons

Season 2, ten episodes across 2009 and 2010, moved the show to new cities and opened in Chicago at Orbit Salon. It also produced one of the show's clean renames-that-held, Bang Salon in Fort Lauderdale, which continues as FOUR Hair Salon, and a pair of Los Angeles survivors in Eclectic Salon and Refuge Salon. It was not all survival: Allure in Coconut Grove is one of the season's closures, an early sign that Coffey's fixes did not hold everywhere.

Season 3, nine episodes, was another strong survivor season and included Mia Bella in San Bruno and Salon Vendome in Houston, both still open. By this point the show had renamed itself Tabatha Takes Over to reflect that Coffey was branching out beyond hair salons into other struggling small businesses, and the wider ambition is exactly what starts to show up in the numbers by the fourth season.

Seasons 4 and 5 (2012 to 2013): the widest range, and the end

The final two seasons pushed furthest from the salon chair. Season 4, twelve episodes in 2012, took Coffey into a nightclub, Club Ripples in Long Beach, a beauty college in Flavio Beauty College in Torrance, and even a dog-grooming business, Barkingham Palace in West Hollywood, which continued as Sunset Barquis. It carries the highest closure count of the run, four of its twelve businesses now closed, including Sweetgrass in Atlanta. That is partly the wider range: a nightclub, a college, or a groomer is a harder, more capital-heavy fix than a hair salon, and the failure rate climbed as the format stretched.

Season 5, eleven episodes in 2013, closed the series out and included House of Synergy in Long Beach, a closure, and Studio 157 in Hendersonville, another. The season steadied somewhat, with seven of its eleven businesses still open, but after five seasons and a widening remit, the show ended in 2013. Coffey had taken over 50 businesses, and the ones that lasted were overwhelmingly the salons she understood best.

The renames that held

One quiet feature of Tabatha Takes Over is how few of its survivors needed a new name to make it. Unlike the bar and restaurant shows, where renaming is a whole category of survival, only five of Coffey's 50 businesses kept operating under a changed name, and several of those changed their business entirely. A Star Is Born in Mission Viejo became Crazy Hair Company. Chill in Ventura reinvented itself completely as Marie Shannon Confections, a chocolate business rather than a salon. Café Treats in Sherman Oaks continued as Café de Mexico. These are businesses that took the reset and then evolved into something new, which is a different survival story from a salon that simply kept its chairs full, and we count all of them as still operating.

What made a salon survive

Look across the survivors and the winning pattern is consistent, because Coffey's method was consistent. She did not sell salons a dramatic makeover. She diagnosed the management, confronted the owner about their own role in the failure, and rebuilt the culture of the business: scheduling, cleanliness, pricing, and the way stylists treated clients. That kind of fix is durable precisely because it is not cosmetic. When an owner genuinely absorbed the lesson, the salon kept running for years, which is why the survival rate here sits so far above the restaurant shows.

The failures tell the inverse story. The closures cluster in the later seasons and in the non-salon businesses, the nightclub, the beauty college, Brownes and Co. in Miami, and H Design in Minneapolis. Those were harder fixes with heavier overhead, and a one-week intervention had less purchase on them. The lesson of the five-season arc is that Coffey's approach was almost tailor-made for the independent hair salon, and it lost some of its power every step it took away from that chair.

What the five seasons show

So the count: five seasons, 50 businesses, aired 2008 to 2013. The through-line is that Tabatha Takes Over posts a genuinely strong survival record, 38 of 50 still operating, and the healthiest seasons are the salon-focused early ones. When the show ventured into nightclubs and colleges in its later seasons, the fixes got harder and the closure count rose, which tells you the salon format was where Coffey's approach worked best.

It helps that Coffey herself was a working salon owner before television, an Australian stylist who had run her own business and knew exactly where a salon leaks money and morale. That credibility is part of why the survivors run so deep. Season 1 alone left a trail of them, from Candolyn's in downtown Los Angeles onward, and later seasons kept adding names like Chicago Male Salon and Spa and West End Salon and Spa in Provincetown to the open column. A salon rescued by someone who had actually run one tended to stay rescued.

If you want the single takeaway from all five seasons, it is that the durability of a Tabatha rescue tracked the simplicity of the business. Give Coffey a struggling hair salon with a fixable owner and the odds of survival were excellent. Ask her to turn around a nightclub or a beauty college in the same week, and the record gets shakier. The format found its ceiling not in the fixer but in how complicated the business underneath her was.

For the current, dated status of any single salon or business from any season, start at the Tabatha Takes Over hub, where all 50 carry their own status. Every one is a snapshot we re-verify, because businesses change hands and names shift.