Have you seen Selling Sunset yet? You must. Its appearance on Netflix – a whole series of the thing ready to go – is already the high-water mark of my cultural life on this planet.
Selling Sunset is one of those property shows in which rich people buy houses at extraordinary prices and somehow the rest of us are so swept away in the characters and the plotlines that we all cheer as the market goes up and up and up and the divide between rich and poor starts to yawn like one of those undersea canyons where there’s nothing at the bottom but a species of fish that’s born without eyes or a jaw, which has never known daylight, but which has still managed to ingest a couple of discarded Vitamin Water bottles for its trouble.
Selling Sunset (Season 1) Netflix Trailer Watch on YouTube
Yes, it’s all of that. But it’s also put together by the creators of The Hills, so it’s a masterpiece of constructed reality. You know this cognitive jig by now: it’s all fake, but it feels kind of real, so maybe in amidst the fakeness there’s something secretly real, right?