Ever since it premiered on Netflix in 2019, the appeal of Selling Sunset—and its much funnier spinoff Selling Tampa—has been well-established: massive infinity pools, silly office banter, absurd royalty-free pop music, and women effortlessly walking up steep driveways in 6-inch stilettos.
So when you sit down to watch Selling the OC—the third installment of the docusoap franchise, set in the Oppenheim Group’s new office in Newport Beach—you already know what you’re in for (with the exception of the male realtors disrupting the formerly girlbosses-only series).
And lo and behold, the same old recipe works yet again. Over the past three years, creator Adam DiVello (who also masterminded The Hills and Laguna Beach) and the series’ other producers have perfected the art of depicting low-stakes workplace drama in wildly heightened fashion, making story arcs as riveting as an HBO drama and about as goofy as a Saturday Night Live skit.
In fact, if there are any distinctions to be made between Selling the OC and its two predecessors, it’s that the new drama and group dynamics are blatantly sillier and borderline parodic of these shows’ already unbelievably petty nature.
Maybe my Selling Sunset-pilled brain has simply changed the way I consume this franchise after three-plus years of devouring it. But there’s also something to be said about a scandal regarding workplace misconduct that somehow devolves into a debate about whether it’s OK to bite a married man’s nose. Or a pair of female realtors with the same name who show up at the office and sell homes together with the ominous energy of the Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp. There’s also a running bit about insects invading the office. Suffice to say, I was laughing my way through the entire eight episodes.
On Selling Sunset, there were at least (what appeared to be) real friendships and romantic relationships on the line. On Selling Tampa, the women, who all seemed like they got their real estate licenses a day before they started filming, were truly hustling. But at the OC firm, it feels like the realtors—particularly the women, who thankfully take up more screen time than the men—are first and foremost competing in a high school popularity contest, with Alex Hall as the queen bee and Polly Brindle as that girl at school who’s admired simply for having a British accent.
Applying such an infantilizing metaphor to these grown women—some of whom, like Hall, Kayla Cardona, and Brandi Marshall, have children of their own—feels slightly wrong. But this is reality television, and the series’ juvenile energy is ultimately what saves it from being a forgettable flop in a sea of glossy streaming shows.
And it certainly had the potential to be a flop. The mansions in Orange County aren’t that pretty. No one on this show is a true fashionista, à la Christine Quinn. None of them have particularly strange or interesting backstories. Most of the cast, much like Chrishell Stause on Selling Sunset, seem invested in coming off as “real” and as grounded as possible. The only connection the cast seemingly has with Hollywood is a tall, handsome realtor named Tyler Stanaland, who’s married to actress Brittany Snow—a factoid you don’t really know what to make of whenever it’s dropped. (No offense, Brittany Snow!)
Still, you find pleasure in the way these women are willing to get dirty and shout at each other in the middle of a work event while their less fun male peers—including Jason Oppenheim, who pretends like he’s operating an actual workplace—awkwardly look on. Perhaps because its stars are so green, the show corrects a glaring issue with the last two seasons of Selling Sunset, which is that none of the realtors, besides Quinn, were willing to look like assholes on screen. Mercifully, on Selling the OC, everyone is eager to talk shit or humiliate themselves—like Cardona does right out the gate in a rather satisfying way—seemingly for the sake of gaining some notoriety on a global streaming platform.
It’s unclear how long the realtors at Oppenheim’s OC office will be able to entertain us. And it will ultimately be up to the producers who heavily script the show to sustain compelling story arcs. The women of Selling Sunset have proven that the desire to appear likable to fans can create a season-long snoozefest. Hopefully, the cutthroat women of Selling the OC (and the not-as-cutthroat men) can keep us awake for more seasons to come.
