Escape to Reality
Watching "Buying Beverly Hills"
This week has been insanely busy, so predictably, I’ve spent a good amount of time I don’t have to actively be doing things watching television. Because my brain cannot handle complex thoughts at the current moment, most of the television I have been watching has been of the “reality” variety. Watching it is a small step up from staring blankly into space. I get the same relief from it that I imagine my ancestors got from walking through a forest or staring at a sunset—passive reflection. But because I’m always trying to learn more about my local culture, the show I just gobbled like an un-fine wine was Buying Beverly Hills.
Buying Beverly Hills lies at the intersection of a couple of reality franchises. The first is the high-end real estate reality television show, distinct from the flyover modern farmhouses that populate HGTV. No, we’re talking shows like Selling Sunset and Million Dollar Listing, where bad people with bad style and a lot of money sell houses to worse people with worse style and even more money.
The other reality franchise is Real Housewives, specifically Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (RHOBH). Buying Beverly Hills centers on a real estate agency called—try to follow me here—The Agency. The Agency famously formed when Mauricio Umansky, husband of Kyle Richards (the only original cast member of RHOBH still standing) had a falling out with Kyle’s brother-in-law, Rick Hilton, father to Nicky and Paris. If you didn’t understand that, congratulations, you have not wasted your life and should spend no further time trying to decipher it!
In Buying Beverly Hills Mauricio (lovingly known as Mo) and his The Agency minions peddle exclusive Los Angeles properties for people who work for industries like influencing, tech, and genocide. Of course, the drama of selling houses barely competes with the drama of working at The Agency. Drama like: Mauricio’s stepdaughter wanting a man whose job is selling classic cars to propose; Mauricio’s regular daughter resenting that everyone thinks she only got her job because she’s Mauricio’s regular daughter even though she only got her job because she’s Mauricio’s regular daughter; a woman who is confident about singing but not about real estate; a man who came from a rich family convincing his rich family to let him sell one of the family houses; and a man who loves wine and dates a woman hotter than him threatening to go to another agency that’s not called The Agency. The most interesting person is a former backup dancer trying to start over at thirty-six, but my interest might be because I’m teetering closer to the cliff he already jumped over every day.
None of this really matters, though. What matters is that there are a bunch of houses in the town where I live that are bigger and uglier than I ever imagined, and people actually buy those houses.
These houses are built high up in the hills, where (thank God) none of us can see them. They are enormous on a staggering, offensive scale. The agents love to say how “warm” they feel as their voice echoes endlessly through a cavernous marble foyer and a sterile gas fireplace burns for no one. The houses have huge TVs in the pool and nightclubs in the basement and lots of bathrooms. So many bathrooms. Think of a number of bathrooms that would be too many. Are you thinking it? Well, let me tell you: these houses have more.
Who cleans twenty bathrooms? How big is the crew? Do they hire people who have experience in double-digit bathroom homes? How is the task divvied up? By floor? By wing? How long does it take? How often does it happen? Is there one bathroom that no one ever uses? Is there one bathroom that gets used the most? Is the cleaning crew allowed to use any of these bathrooms or are there bathrooms that are designated for them specifically? With this many bathrooms available, do you think people pee other places still, like the shower or the pool or the bushes?
Suffice it to say, none of these questions were answered in the lean first ten episodes of Buying Beverly Hills. And in that way, perhaps, this show didn’t fulfill its purpose, which is luring me into a gentle, mindless state of rest. Instead, in the midst of my already busy week, I find myself wondering about how many bathrooms are too many, how to safely install electronics next to pools, whether I could cut it as a thirty-six newbie at the Agency, what it would feel like to jump off the cliff and land in high heels, selling a mansion to a billionaire.