If you have ever watched Selling Sunset, you will know exactly what to expect with Selling the OC (Netflix). Unfortunately, I had not. I went into it blind and was soon in a state of nervous collapse from which I do not expect to recover any time soon.
To explain. Selling Sunset was – still is, in fact, as it’s now in its fifth Netflix season and has been renewed for a sixth and seventh – a reality TV show set in the glitzy LA offices of high end real estate brokerage firm the Oppenheim Group, owned and run by twins Brett and Jason who have the looks and vibes that suggest worryingly close genetic ties to Voldemort. The Gucci-clad agents survive and seem somehow even to thrive in a maelstrom of ambition, personal enmities, borderline affairs, treacheries, bitching and Botox of an intensity that would fell any English person – and possibly quite a few non-Californians.
The twins have now opened a new office an hour’s drive down the highway, in Orange County. To the untutored eye it looks like they have relocated the entire staff from Sunset, but I am assured by better-informed individuals that they are an entirely new set of hires. Nonetheless, they seem all to have been made by the same factory, of the same extruded plastic, buffed to a high shine, sprayed with the same tans, fitted with the same teeth and set out to fight over commission cheques as they compete to find and sell properties to billionaire clients and negotiate the backbiting intra-office dramas.
Alex Hall is – so far – the queen bee. She is a brunette with astonishing boobs and a manner that differentiates her from most of the others by carrying with it a tinge of almost recognisably human warmth.
Then there’s Gio. He says things like, “On a confidence scale of one to 10, I’m a fucking 15” and “I am the top dog at the Oppenheim Group and I am a fucking rock star.” Imagine the distilled essences of all the Apprentice contestants there have ever been crammed into one tiny gym-honed frame and you’re still not even close. As Alex puts it: “Gio’s such a tool.” This does not contradict my claims of human warmth above, by the way, but validates them. He has at this point just jeopardised a $3m commission on a $10m Laguna Beach house and should by rights have been thrown off one of its many balconies and into the Pacific below.
After that there is a Brit called Polly with a voice like a knife through the head, Kayla – a single mother, thrown out by her parents when she was young for getting pregnant and probably tougher than the rest even though they all seem to be made of Teflon-coated steel. There are two more Alexes: Alexandra Rose and Alexandra Jarvis. They are both vicious blondes we are clearly being encouraged to love to hate, and I cannot put a cigarette paper between them, beyond the fact that one of them is not sure if there’s a difference between America and North America. They work as a team and are doing very well professionally but – and possibly these two things are related – not making many friends in the office.
There are many more shiny people moving around the place. I cannot be expected to keep track of them all. There are too many exhausting, baffling meltdowns, accusations of badmouthing being flung around, counter-accusations, loyalties and disloyalties, alliances and double-crosses going on for any normal person to cope with. I had to lie on the sofa in a darkened room for three days for every 10 minutes watched. But watch I did, and you will too.
