Netflix's Million Dollar Beach House fails as a Selling Sunset clone: "There’s really no excuse for this show to be as flat as it is"

Variety

"The cleverness of Selling Sunset, the zeitgeist-hit Netflix reality series that might technically be termed a real-estate show, is in its application of the barest amount of genuinely informative content to a formula that resists any sort of higher purpose," says Daniel D'Addario. "Atop a show with the pulp content of Vanderpump Rules or The Hills lies information about the real estate market, a world so opaque to at least some viewers that decoding it becomes some small part of the action of the show. That the agents of Selling Sunset, for all their personal fecklessness, are so much more adept in this universe than we might ever be adds a level of juicy irony." Netflix tries to create the same kind of luxury real estate reality show in the Hamptons with Million Dollar Beach House. "The cast here, too, is something short of what makes reality sing: These folks seem to have gotten the memo that conflict is king but not the brief on what to disagree about," says D'Addario. "What results is a series in which real-estate agents disagree over little more than matters of the real estate market — who has the rights to what listing, who was rude to whose potential client. This, too, might have been compelling social anthropology, but for the fact that this series isn’t aiming for documentary realism. The fights are produced with an unsuited Hillsian pop and verve, underscoring that what we’re actually watching is a grinding battle for turf that never really ends. There’s really no excuse for this show to be as flat as it is. Real estate is inherently interesting — combining as it does the human need for shelter with matters of aesthetics, wealth, and personal vanity. Done right, this subject has it all!" ALSO: Million Dollar Beach House suffers from reflecting reality, with too many bros.