It’s hard not to feel like a disaster is looming. Selling Sunset’s season-seven premiere, dramatically titled “The Real Estate Apocalypse,â€Â snuck up on us unexpectedly, just like the real apocalypse or Jason following Chrishell to Australia. This time, there are no cinematic slow walks introducing everyone; we just jump right into a house tour with Amanza, Bre, and Emma. The house in question is basically a $16 million staging area for Instagram photos. Though I will say I’m starting to become obsessed with how wealthy Californians do not appear to need doors or walls? The houses these women walk through so often look like parking garages to me, just completely open. I understand California has nice weather, but aren’t there bugs? Lizards? Burglars? Even people building houses in The Sims have to think about burglars. But I digress.
Chrishell, as I mentioned, is in Australia, where she followed her partner, G Flip, on their tour to get away from it all. Unfortunately, it all — meaning Jason — decided to also go to Australia, which is just insane. Look, I don’t care how wealthy you are, and I don’t care if you can afford those cool airplane seats that fold out into beds; that is a 15-hour flight! I love Chrishell as much as anyone, but 15 hours! In a plane! Just to land in a country that has spiders the size of your head! This is true madness. I hate it. Chrishell is characteristically nice about it, acting like Jason just happened to be there, adding that at the O Group, “You kind of keep it moving, and it’s not weird.†It’s incredibly weird, but the instinct to not examine, to unquestioningly power through weird interactions with your boss, is basically the mission statement of the brokerage at this point. And did I mention Jason’s young-enough-to-be-his-daughter German model girlfriend, Marie-Lou, came too? She also flew 15 hours. Babe, achtung!
Speaking of unexamined bad decisions, Nicole is back. She and Mary are checking out a 13,000-square-foot $26 million house that is just begging to be featured in a psychological thriller or a porno. There are many different kinds of stone and four “structures†at the back of the lot. This is how you know someone is truly wealthy: They have structures. It’s here, on Halvern Drive, that Mary reveals she’s stepped down from her managerial role at the O Group. This is fantastic news, since Mary’s “managerial role†was really just doing Jason’s job for less money than Jason pays himself. Besides, she needs to focus: The real-estate market is famously in a major downturn, and legislation is looming. California has rudely decided to start taxing people for simply buying homes that are bigger than my entire apartment building. Can you believe that? All someone wants to do is spend 320 years’ worth of my salary on a home that looks like a restaurant, and then here comes the greedy, evil state of California to ask for 5.5 percent of it for something useless like affordable housing for those most affected by Los Angeles’s housing crisis. The nerve!
Meanwhile, Chelsea and Emma are scoping out a space for Chelsea’s 30th-birthday party — her very first birthday party — because as she’s keen to remind us, her mother was working abroad for a lot of her youth. This made birthdays something she never cared to celebrate. This is sad, but it’s hard to feel bad for her when she immediately follows this up with a bunch of shady behavior. First, she says she likes Nicole and even attempts to defend her to Emma … before immediately betraying Nicole and telling Emma that Nicole called her a social climber. She also reveals her annoyance with people liking Bre, because I guess she wants people to bully Bre for having an open relationship with Nick Cannon? It’s all quite disappointingly petty. I was rooting for her!
I want to take a brief moment to acknowledge Romain, whom I’ve been hard on in the past, but he has since won me over by doing what more husbands should: stoic construction. Every time we see this man now, he is just quietly doing a little project! That’s what we call a green flag. And when Mary laments that it might take her a while to get pregnant because of her age, he looks plainly offended on her behalf: “Your age?? No!†Also, can this be real? Did Mary really take a pregnancy test on a TV show? For a woman who spent all of last season just wanting everyone to shut up and sell some houses, this is a striking level of intimacy. But the positive result is such a nice moment, and I’m happy for them. May their first child be a feminine child!
While Mary is rediscovering the joy in her life, I sometimes wonder if Emma has a death wish. She’s always walking on the edges of infinity pools, and in this episode, she tries to climb a massive wood pile that could have absolutely fallen on and killed her. Now, at dinner with Amanza, Chrishell, and Bre, she mentions the infamous Peter for the first time. For those of you unaware, Peter is the off-screen O Group employee both Emma and Christine were dating at one point, a disaster that set off a chain of events that would result in Chrstine’s forced exit from the show. This is the first time his name has actually been invoked on TV, which doesn’t suggest he’s as out of the picture as Chrishell would like him to be. Apparently, Emma has spent “five or six years†dating someone she admits isn’t someone you’d want someone you love to date. Dark. She also offers to try and adjudicate the conflict between Bre and Chelsea, which is like offering to try to stop a runaway locomotive by standing in front of it. There’s no conflict to mediate here beyond Chelsea just not liking Bre for who she is as a person and refusing to invite her to her birthday party. But as I said, Emma may be thrilled by the prospect of her own destruction.
Bre missing Chelsea’s birthday party is not necessarily an L, considering how much it felt like a dupe of Christine Quinn’s engagement party. One can’t help but assume, given the similarity and given that Christine was the person who brought Chelsea into this world, that Chelsea is now trying to announce herself as the show’s new villain — the mean girl who won’t invite you to her birthday party if you’re not married to and monogamous with your child’s father. Unfortunately for her, she did invite the show’s real villain, Nicole, whom Emma, of course, rushes toward like a drunk tourist jumping into the lion enclosure at the zoo. This is after looking deeply into Chelsea’s eyes and saying, “I love you; I have something to take care of,†like she’s John McClane.
Last season, Nicole seemed like a woman who was drowning, overwhelmed by Chrishell’s hold over the rest of the cast and ill-prepared to cash the checks her mouth was writing. But at this moment, Chrishell gets sloppy. Emboldened by Emma’s confrontation, she says ridiculous things to Nicole, like, “I make more than you in five minutes than you could ever make in five years!†She then mocks Nicole’s (alleged) plastic surgery, which is such a low blow on a show like this. Not a single person we’re looking at is rocking an unaltered façade! It is in this moment, where Nicole is given space to look reasonable, that she rises from villain to anti-hero. I’m almost proud of her. Dressed all in white, with a jacket that might as well be a cape, and announcing confidently: “I don’t shrink to raisins for anyone.†I’m a little worried (for Chrishell’s sake) that Nicole might actually be a fucking star.
Along for the ride in all this mess is Amanza, who seems to have taken over Mary’s position as the pained, suffering mother. She tries to mediate the argument with Nicole, but she’s far more deeply affected by these conflicts than the rest of the women. To her, these are her closest friends, her surrogate family, and to see them fight upsets her greatly. Last season, Amanza was also dealing with some very scary health issues, and while she plays a lot of things close to the vest, even her admission at dinner that she has a secret crush felt more fraught with a deep longing than giddiness. As I said, it’s hard not to feel like a disaster is looming.
Unlisted ObservationsÂ
• The dinner scene is a perfect example of why I love this show so much. At its core, this is about a group of career women who strut cinematically through restaurants in ridiculous clothes before ordering whole pounds of meat and fish and getting into heated arguments about comparative literature. Like, did you know “if you build it, they will come†is from both Field of Dreams and the Bible? Food for thought!
• Davina Watch: Davina appears! Only briefly, however, and in the crowd at Chelsea’s birthday party. We do not hear her speak, which is a shame, because I really want to hear about Burning Man!
• I keep trying to process Chelsea throwing a birthday party where the theme is “This is a sex party†and then inviting her mom? It’s her first one, though, so I’ll let it slide.
• With Heather heading out on maternity leave, Emma has been more than happy to pick up the slack when it comes to saying ridiculous things. My favorite Emma-isms:
- “She doesn’t know a real friendship if you threw it at the fucking wall.â€
- “Noah’s Ark is a movie? I thought it was a book.â€
- “I feel like you just need to be happier, and then we’d have less problems.â€
• Mary getting cake on the hands of her dress, “This is vintage Balmain!†It’s nice to see her thrive.