At first, I thought I had run out of hatred. An unsettling sensation. Fortunately, order was soon restored. It turns out that the opening episode of Owning Manhattan – the latest product in Netflix’s attempt to saturate the market for real-estate shows – is an uncharacteristically gentle lead-in to what becomes a characteristic maelstrom of backbiting, warring egos, frightening fashion choices, daily Oscar-ceremony levels of grooming and gobsmacking commissions up for grabs.
After the most recent iteration – the essentially dismal Buying London, set in essentially dismal London and unable to field the level of monstrosity required in property and human terms that the Americans manage so effortlessly – this is at least a return to suitably excessive form. Fans of Selling Sunset who are not yet sated should find something to help them here.
Owning Manhattan is fronted by Ryan Serhant, a real-estate broker who appeared in nine seasons of Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing New York (and had his wedding covered in the four-part miniseries Million Dollar Listing New York: Ryan’s Wedding and starred in the spin-off show Sell It Like Serhant) before starting his own company in 2021. It’s called SERHANT. You probably guessed. It does $1bn a year in sales. Ryan oozes charm, which is precisely as horrible as it sounds. I would say he oozes confidence, too, but that would suggest there is some part of him not made of the stuff, which is not true.
Nor is it true of any of the agents we meet. One doesn’t blink, one is mostly lips and one has breasts that are so forced into her clothes that blue veins are visible on her cleavage; it makes me long to pop her in a sweatshirt and show her that a new life is possible. One has a dog in a bag – possibly as a USP, possibly as a snack – and one has eyebrows that make me want to hide under the covers until they go away.
I can’t pretend to have a grip on them all yet. I know there is Chloe, who came to New York from Los Angeles to try to become a Broadway star, but pivoted to real estate when it turned out “I actually wanted the whole damn skyline”. There is a blond southern belle called Savannah (confusingly, from North Carolina) who is a newbie, learning the ropes on rentals and struggling to pay her own rent on the meagre commissions. There is Jess M, who hands Savannah a lifeline, but may yet exact a fee in blood.
Above all, there is Tricia, a longstanding SERHANT employee who used to run her own nail salon in Brooklyn and parlayed the 23,000 contacts she gathered on that database into a career in real estate. You might hear Shoreditch called the Brooklyn of London, she says, because “you’re always going to be emulating our shit. That’s just how it is.”
She works with her husband. “I wouldn’t recommend it, but I do it and I do it well.” It was he who proposed the arrangement. She recalls the moment fondly. “Well, I’d like to join me, too! Shit.” Ryan calls her “the unofficial mayor of Brooklyn”, but she may be the US president by the time you read this.
What else is there to say? With the exception of the occasional brownstone, the properties continue to confirm the maxim that money cannot buy you taste. They also deepen the mystery surrounding American hygiene. Just about every property has more bathrooms than bedrooms. The poorest clients get by with, say, a 3.5:3 ratio, but the $250m penthouse overlooking Central Park – which will become the focal point of much vicious infighting – shows us that the ideal is 11:7. One each and four spare. What is going on?
I would like to say that, with Owning Manhattan, the realtor-reality-show genre is surely exhausted. But it’s not, of course. The appetite for high drama with low stakes (which is what these Monopoly-money commission figures are for viewers) never wanes. But if we could have a bit of a rest from it, that would be lovely. Those who want to could wriggle into a sweatshirt and restore the circulation to their mammaries. It’s genuinely worrying me. Please.
• Owning Manhattan is on Netflix now
