It’s time for the sun to set on “Selling Sunset”
“Selling Sunset” is back for its sixth season on Netflix.
July 1, 2023
The sixth season of “Selling Sunset” has arrived, packed with even more drama, designer outfits, and multi-million dollar mansions. This season, similar to its previous seasons, started off focusing on real estate agents living in Los Angeles who were working for the Oppenheim group, but quickly took a turn for the worse as frivolous drama upstaged the heart of the show.
Needless to say, this show is not really about real estate. It’s about a group of women who have nothing better to do than fight with each other in public while sloshing around their 20-dollar espresso martinis and spicy mango margaritas. These women are a walking hypocrisy, declaring themselves to be focused solely on their business but constantly holding grudges for superfluous reasons. You’d think that a show about an almost all-female group of women working in a previously male-dominated field would feel empowering, but it absolutely does not.
Instead, it’s a constant reminder that no matter how hard women try to break stereotypes, the media is addicted to one version of a woman: a beautiful blonde who wants children and is easily made happy through a new pair of Dior sunglasses.
New stars Bre Tiesi and Nicole Young were catalysts for the fights between veteran female agents, mainly Chrishell Stause and Chelsea Lazkani. Tiesi, the mother to one of Nick Cannon’s 12 children from various women, took up large amounts of screen time due to her intriguing open relationship with Cannon. Despite Lazkani having a negative outlook on the nature of Cannon’s relationships, Tiesi defends her family strongly, noting that Lazkani has no right to speak about her family. This storyline continues for many episodes, eventually leading absolutely nowhere despite many arguments between Lazkani and Tiesi.
The main disagreement of the show is handled less maturely, to say the least (spoiler alert ahead!). So here’s what happened: Stause was put on a house listing with Young and apparently didn’t pull her weight in selling the home. So, Young believes that Stause doesn’t deserve to be filed as a co-agent, which – let’s be real – is irrelevant because no one is even looking at those files. The arguments begin to heat up and the women throw out damaging insults. The highlights include Young claiming that Stause only got the listing because their boss had a crush on her (coincidentally they both dated him at some point) and Stause calling Young a hard drug user. Arguably the only thing more annoying than Stause and Young fighting over something that happened three years ago is fellow agent Heather El Moussa mentioning she’s pregnant every five minutes.
By this point of the show, real estate is long forgotten as the girls are lounging in Palm Springs on a work retreat, getting IVs to help prevent their hangovers and filling them with vitamins and donning designer handbags and outfits. It’s hard to remember that this series is supposed to be about independent business women in the real estate field, well, until Young threatens to sue Stause for ruining her reputation by calling her a “meth addict.” This throws the entire group into a state of shock as they all know that the cameras are rolling and that there’s no way they’re not going to run that footage. It was then that I began to question what happened to Stause over the past two years that turned her from the kind and often naive woman who just wanted to sell homes and be a mother to the type of woman who accuses others of being “cracked” on national television. It seems as if when Christine Quinn, the show’s previous villain, decided to leave the show after Season 5, Stause felt a need to step in as the new resident evil.
If you have any intentions of watching good television or learning about real estate, I’d skip out on this one. Not only is it hard to understand what the women are saying once they’re one drink in and getting a little flustered, but it’s also disgusting watching these women exist in a seemingly fake world.
This characteristic isn’t unique to “Selling Sunset;” almost every reality series centers itself around creating female conflict that aims to create entertainment out of female suffering. Every time I turn on shows like “Below Deck,” “Too Hot to Handle,” and “The Bachelor,” I spend half of the time hating the producers for creating this anti-feminist addictive garbage and the other half of the time hating myself desperately wanting to press the next episode button.
That’s the allure of these shows after all – creating a space that is so unbelievably disconnected from the reality that most people live in that viewers feel comfortable judging others.
–July 1, 2023–
