overnights

Selling Sunset Season-Premiere Recap: Malibu Barbies

Selling Sunset

Very High Heels to Fill
Season 4 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating 3 stars

Selling Sunset

Very High Heels to Fill
Season 4 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating 3 stars
Photo: Netflix

Roll up and let me in
VIP slippin’ in
Dripping in confidence
Want it all take it all
Cut like a diamond ring
Perfect in clarity
Something, something rarity …

Excuse me. I was just singing this totally catchy, absolutely relatable, and not-at-all intrusive song that is featured in the latest episode of Selling Sunset, the reality TV equivalent of one of those free magazines in the lobby of an overpriced dermatologist’s office that you have no idea how it makes any money. Except we know just how much the Bratz dolls of the Oppenheim Group make their money: by selling interchangeable glass boxes in proximity to the smoggiest city in the world.

As all the blondes sit around riveted to their riveted metal desks made from the helicopter wreckage from the set of Blackhawk Down, they say the real estate market in Los Angeles is booming. They’re right. At the beginning of the episode, Chrishell walks into the office wearing a skirt that looks like a pleated oil spill to tell the gang that she sold a $12 million house that had 50 offers on it. That’s more offers than I get on a Friday evening on Grindr, and I only cost three compliments and a ride home afterward. The only other thing we learn in the office is that Amanza has an oily face, everyone hates Christine, and Heather thinks that she can move to the back of the office to the front while Christine is away on maternity leave. Everyone knows this is not going to go over well, and as soon as Christine comes back Heather will slink back to her corner and say, “Sorry,” with enough vocal fry that it could cook an airplane hangar’s worth of donuts.

Before you can even stop thinking about Christine, she and her hair extensions whip themselves out of a yellow Porsche dressed like an ’80s Bond villain, which I think is both a compliment and a read. Here’s the thing about Christine, I love her and her dedication to over-the-top, porn Goth iconography. I also find her as exhausting as running a marathon wearing cement Nikes. Just look at this outfit she shows up in. It’s a black jacket with shoulders pitched around the bottom of her earlobes and a bedazzled lapel, a strappy top that looks like a garter belt for her whole body, and a pair of cat-eye sunglasses with as many rhinestones as Lil Nas X has jockstraps. (The limit does not exist.)

It is fierce, but also my eyes need a package vacation. Then, once she’s in the house, we see her “purse,” which is just a tiny folding chair on a chain. Okay. That’s it. I retire. I am cashing in my 401K, moving to Belize, and starting my next chapter as a conch fritter salesman. I just can’t with this. This purse is exactly my problem with Christine, it thinks it’s cute, but it’s trying so incredibly hard I just want to give it a bottle and put it to sleep. She has, as the kids would say, incredible pick-me energy.

She’s at this house because her husband told Jason, one of the twins, that they were looking for a bigger house. “Nothing huge,” Christine says. “Like 10,000 square feet.” Even Jason chuckles because that is huge. And Christine knows that and she’s playing like it’s not because she’s a fancy rich lady who lives in a volcano and her husband is going to take over the world if only he can kill Roger Moore as James Bond. God, Christine. Shut up.

It’s like when she says she found out she was pregnant because her stomach didn’t feel good, and she thought, “God, what did I eat today at Shake Shack?” Please. Christine has not eaten at Shake Shack. First of all, she would be like, “I don’t wait in lines!” and we know any good SS has more lines than the Weeknd’s house party. Secondly, look at her. She’s nine months pregnant, and it looks like she has a baby hamster under her dress. This is not a woman who eats hamburgers, but she wants us to think she eat hamburgers so that we’ll be like, You eat cheese fries and you look like that??!!! Christine, we remain unfooled.

She gets a house tour from Jason. (I will refer to both of the twins as Jason because I cannot tell them apart and, to paraphrase what John Oliver says about the Olsen Twins, I honestly believe they are really one incredibly tiny elf moving back and forth very quickly.) Much like the Brothers Oppenheim, I also can hardly tell any of the houses on this show apart. They’re all what I like to call BoJacks: bland modernist boxes with home cinemas, wine walls, and tacky, Buddhist-inspired art perilously perched on a hill and full of nothing except striving and loneliness. Some of them might even come with their own Todd on the couch.

Over in the valley, Chrishell is not in a BoJack, but the kind of “modern farmhouse” that you find in the Valley. You know it’s in the Valley because it’s only $3.5 million. It’s her listing, but she says she loves it so much she’s going to put an offer on the house. This will be her own house, not one owned by her man, because she’s better off investing in real estate than romance. “Put your hopes in a home, not a man, because it will keep its value,” she says. Hashtag girlboss hashtag blessed hashtag who runs the world.

I was starting to wonder what Chrishell liked about this house with its (yes) wine cooler and giant French doors that open to a pool and vaulted ceilings with exposed beams and then we see pictures of her old house and they look … exactly the same. Got it. Okay. Makes sense. Chrishell is not moving on. She is not even MoveOn dot org.

The Oppenheim Group is moving on to hiring someone to replace Divina, who died from giving interminably hot takes in person. This is the thing I don’t understand about the fakery of Selling Sunset. Jason is like, “Mary, I want you to come meet this new Realtor I might hire.” And they go and meet her, and then he’s like, “Come by the office on Monday and meet everyone.” She’s clearly hired. She’s clearly cast on the show. Why are you trying to pretend like she’s not? We’re not stupid. It would take nothing away from this story to be like, “Hey, Mary, I hired this new Realtor, and I want you to come to meet her first and see her listing in Malibu.” That I believe, that is true. I mean, if you’re going to fake even the small stuff like this, what else are you going to fake? Like a relationship with one of your coworkers/castmates?

They go and meet Vanessa at a BoJack but on the beach. (A BeachJack?) Vanessa is a very pretty Mexican woman who used to be a soap actress, and since Chrishell was also a soap actress, Mary is like, “Oh, Jason, you have a type.” I mean a-doy. Is the sky blue? Is water wet? Is Justin Bieber currently regretting at least two of his tattoos?

Vanessa comes into the office to meet everyone, and Christine, who is supposedly on maternity leave, shows up and takes her desk back, and Heather is like, “Sooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrryyyyyyyyyyyy” just like I told you she would be. Vanessa tells everyone that she’s only been in real estate for about a year and she did it because her sister was a Realtor and she died unexpectedly and she thought that the proper way to mourn her was to get her real estate license. She says that now her sister’s spirit oversees her whole career. It’s sad but also creepy, but touching, but also, like, does she have to split the commission with the ghost? How does that even work?

Selling Sunset Season-Premiere Recap: Malibu Barbies