Netflix's Selling Sunset feels as though it was concocted in a test tube as a chimera of the Real Housewives and the Property Brothers. It revolves around the Oppenheim Group, a high-end Los Angeles real estate brokerage run by a pair of identical brothers and their team of plastic surgery-enhanced agents who will take any opportunity to shit-talk each other. This is exactly why Selling Sunset is great: It's trash TV with shiny production and absurd houses, and when its second season hits Netflix today, it'll inject your quarantine with the dose of catty drama and gossip that you so desperately crave.
The conceit of the first season, which aired on Netflix last year, was the construction of a 20,000-square-foot Sunset Strip mansion. Forget HGTV; Selling Sunset is the kind of show where houses have double the number of bathrooms as bedrooms, 15-foot outdoor televisions that rise from the ground, huge infinity pools overlooking LA, and clients who see five-car garages as simply inadequate. With the house initially listed for $43.9 million dollars, the show's central tension lay in who would receive the $1.2 million commission from its sale.
These unbelievable LA mansions are a backdrop to messy arguments—this is not the wholesomeness of the Gaines family. In Selling Sunset's second season, the houses are bigger and more expensive, and the cattiness is just as constant. Propelling the show are frequent fights within the Oppenheim team, both in and out of the office, and the making and breaking of "friendships." Like Real Housewives and Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Selling Sunset has many pseudo-villains. Nobody seems to have grown out of the high school mean girl bullshit of talking smack behind the back of a "friend," and then having someone else leak that information.
That's usually catalyzed by drama queen Christine Quinn, who is as entertaining as she is easy to hate. Bending to her whim, the cast of characters includes a TV soap star-turned-agent, a Playboy Playmate who's now involved with Flip or Flop's Tarek El Moussa, and the older agent who once dated an Oppenheim brother but now dates a much younger French man. These personal qualities are all potential plot points to a cast of people catty and hungry for attention.
Though Selling Sunset pushes the bounds of "reality" right to the edge of the giant infinity pool, that doesn't make its petty fights and trash talk any less enjoyable. As Shayla Love recently wrote for this website, we need gossip now more than ever. Watching and discussing the drama of others both stimulates us and bonds us, though we might not want to engage in it ourselves.
As we're stuck in close quarters with roommates and partners with whom we must stay on good terms, Selling Sunset lets us relish in the unbridled messiness of other people blowing up their own personal relationships and picking fights just because they can. Your life might be boring during quarantine, but their lives sure as hell aren't.
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