On the third period of the unscripted TV drama "Selling Dusk," presently spilling on Netflix, Christine, an operator at the Oppenheim Gathering, a top of the line West Hollywood-based land firm, is arranging her wedding to Christian, a well off tech business visionary
Sleek and Amazonian, with a foot-long platinum ponytail and a taste for severe corsetry, Christine is what has come to be known as a “boss bitch”: a successful agent with a killer instinct. She has always seen herself as something of a “gothic Barbie,” she tells the camera, and her nuptials should match this attitude. “It makes sense, the two of us doing over-the-top everything,” the chatty Karamo Brown, of “Queer Eye,” tells Christine, when he cameos in one episode and the two discuss their upcoming weddings. “Right? So extra,” she agrees, as she walks her fellow Netflix asset through a four-bedroom, three-bath Richard Neutrahouse that Brown is purportedly considering buying. (The property’s price, 2,999,000 dollars, and the commission that Christine stands to make, 89,970 dollars, flash on the screen.) Christine’s wedding cake, it emerges, will be black with a white filling dappled with strawberries, to mimic blood—“Till-death-do-us-part vibes,” she tells a wedding planner, as her slightly dazed-looking fiancé looks on. Her two couture wedding gowns, too, will be black—“Maleficent vibes,” she informs a bridal-shop attendant. All of this comes together at a ceremony meant to resemble a “gothic winter wonderland,” filmed for the eighth and final episode of the season. As Christine walks down the aisle, friends and family are showered with a flurry of snow. “Oh, it’s actually cold,” one guest yelps, flinching as the flakes continue to come down. “This is a little aggressive,” another agrees.
In the world of “Selling Sunset,” Christine is a limit case, and her over-the-top power-ditz act appears, at times, nearly parodic. (On an early episode this season, she throws a “burgers and Botox”-themed open house, at which, in a grotesque tableau, some guests receive injections to smooth out their furrowed brows as others scarf down patties mere paces away.) Apart from these shenanigans, the show is a tamer thing: one part real-estate porn and one part office drama, portraying the mild conflicts and even milder friendships among the female employees of the Oppenheim Group, an agency run by the natty, impossible-to-tell-apart twins Jason and Brett Oppenheim. It borrows freely from many previous shows, including Robin Leach’s voyeuristic nineteen-eighties gambol “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” Bravo’s “Real Housewives” franchise, and real-estate shows like “Property Brothers,” “Flipping Out,” and “Million Dollar Listing.” The plot is slow going, and often seems scripted. Christine shit-talks an agent named Mary behind her back, and Mary, predictably, finds out. Chrishell, a Southern beauty whose focus is on properties in the San Fernando Valley, is blindsided when her TV-actor husband files for divorce. The women become upset that Mary is given the office’s prize listings, purportedly because she used to date Jason. These minor dramas are interspersed with corporate-brochure-like real-estate scenes in a series of Los Angeles luxury properties, which always have a pool and sometimes a screening room, a home gym, or a tennis court. Alongside frankly gorgeous aerial shots of the city, in the manner of the mid-two-thousands MTV reality show “The Hills” (with which “Selling Sunset” shares a creator), these home tours are a visual Xanax, sending the viewer into a state of soothing dissociation.
And yet, beneath this seeming tranquillity strums another kind of energy. In the popular imagination, Los Angeles is the city of dreams, but its utopian promise—of eternal sunshine and blissful deliverance from life’s indignities—is often pulsing with the nightmare opposite. In Joan Didion’s “The White Album,” from 1979, her famous recollection of the Manson murders includes a bit of real-estate data: “On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive.” She notes that “no one was surprised,” which speaks not just to the particular period of late-sixties upheaval she writes of, but, more generally, to a current of violence in L.A., which persists to this day and arises in large part from an ever-widening gap between haves and have-nots. In Nathanael West’s novel “The Day of the Locust,” the protagonist, a Hollywood set designer and artist, is working on “The Burning of Los Angeles,” a painting in which he imagines the city going up in flames. The conflagration is “a great bonfire of architectural styles, ranging from Egyptian to Cape Cod colonial,” fuelled by the rage of “all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence,” and who “come to California to die.”
Ok