By Emma Chance | TV | September 17, 2024 |
By Emma Chance | TV | September 17, 2024 |
The best reality shows, in my humble opinion as a reality television expert, are those that don’t take themselves seriously. The joke’s on them, and they’re in on it. Even when the lives of their subjects get dark, they hang onto their ridiculous edge. Or, if they can’t—like when the political leanings of the cast of The Real Housewives of New York City got to be too out of touch with reality, they pivot.
Selling Sunset, for this reason, is not a good reality show. The vibe is high drama and low stakes, which, when done right, can make for great television, but that requires a certain level of self-awareness from everyone involved, which the cast and crew of SS utterly lack. In the first couple of seasons, that was inoffensive and mildly entertaining, especially when posed over the backdrop of multi-million dollar mansions that will inevitably be swept away by some climate crisis or another someday (if you’re wondering, “But what about the real estate?” you’ve come to the wrong place). But recent seasons, including the new season 8, have fallen victim to that insidious reality TV trap: all of the real drama is happening off-screen, and no one wants to talk about it on camera. Those who do, do so clunkily, so the strings of their puppet mastery are entirely visible.
The fourth wall is a recent issue of the genre now that the stars of these shows are given celebrity status and now that “reality television star” is an actual career option. Instead of exposing their authentic lives for a viewing audience with the cameras acting as flies on the proverbial walls, which the earliest reality shows claimed to do, cast members work tirelessly to hide their real lives from production, instead crafting their own narratives and storylines. This can still make for interesting television—just look at Tamra Judge’s recent tenure on The Real Housewives of Orange County, in which she periodically brings in new people to point and laugh at instead of showing her own life, as an example.
But Tamra’s no amateur. She’s been around the reality block and come out of it divorced, estranged from her eldest daughter, and essentially friendless. She also knows that all’s fair in love and television, so she makes no apologies for her oftentimes overly candid treatment of her castmate’s secrets. For better or worse, she drives the conflict of the show. For this, viewers love to hate her.
It’s that degree of wicked devotion to the brand that I’m missing from the women of Selling Sunset. Breakout star Chrishell Stause put in the work when she went through her very public divorce and then started a relationship that earned her homophobic backlash, but since then, every conflict starts on Instagram, and the way it’s presented on camera is cryptic at best. This season, Chelsea Lazkani is the one getting a divorce, but the story isn’t about that, it’s about how the information of her husband’s alleged affair was shared with her and by whom, and if that person can be trusted, and if they just did it for the show, and whose side the rest of the women are on. Who cares about whose friends with whom, I wanna know how they’re gonna divide their assets! What will become of the Birkin bags?!
The only person who has attempted to take a page out of Tamra Judge’s book is Nicole Young, but her attempts have completely flopped. We know very little about Young’s own life because her whole thing is volunteering personal information about her coworkers. This season she alleged that castmate Emma Hernan, owner of an empanada dynasty, was having an affair with a married man. Except she didn’t really, she just acted like she knew some deep dark secret at a dinner Hernan wasn’t present for, and the rest of the women were like, “Shut up, Nicole.” And then she didn’t shut up.
“Oh, this evil human,” Hernan told E! News after the season aired. “I was completely blindsided by all of this. I had no idea that this was going on the entire season. I did not find this out till right before, when we got the screeners. It’s disgusting…There’s zero truth to this.”
Turns out no one really knew this conversation was going on, outside of the, like, two women Young talked about it with, which only further speaks to the floppery that is Young’s attempt at storylining. Stause also found out about it when the season aired, at which point she threatened to quit.
“I will NEVER work on a show with her on it again. I would rather be sued,” Stause wrote on Instagram.
Chrishell is fuming! #SellingSunset pic.twitter.com/MM34ZKMFpL
— Queens of Bravo (@queensofbravo) August 31, 2024
It’s for this reason—based on an entirely unsubstantiated and seemingly made-up allegation by a minor cast member that didn’t even amount to any sort of confrontation on camera—that there will not be a season 8 reunion, because they all would have been forced to sit in a room together and talk about it. So…the whole point of reality TV.
If your reality show is composed of people who refuse to film together because of the false narratives they make up about each other while hiding the details of their real lives behind haute-couture outfits so ridiculous they can’t even sit down, what do you have, really? Not a reality show, that’s for damn sure.